CatlynnStudies

//icon by @whenstudyblooms// ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 21 (i don’t really use this blog anymore)

[toastbutteregg]

[nyasarin]

[femmeidiot]

I just think people who clean public spaces should make no less than $100,000 a year

[mortallycrispygardener]

[galileosballs]

I teach a lot of undergrads these days. About 3 years ago, I started dedicating a full two hours early every semester to a lecture and discussion about the history of the concept of plagiarism, because I was so annoyed that my students were walking into my classroom with the ironclad belief that they weren't plagiarizing when they were. Sure, the university had some official plagiarism guidelines that they could hypothetically read in a code of conduct somewhere, but they didn't. All they had was a vague memory of some teacher in Grade 8 telling them 'don't copy and paste from wikipedia' and a little learning from experience afterwards.

My hypothesis (which I was delighted to find is shared by Brian Deer, the journalist who broke the Wakefield story and who was the source Illuminaughti plagiarized in the hbomberguy video) is that the rise of automatic plagiarism checkers meant that, in the minds of many students, the formerly more abstract concept of plagiarism ('passing someone else's work off as your own') became a more concrete concept operationalized by the plagiarism checker. Under this concept, a text is plagiarized if (and, implicitly, only if) it is detected as plagiarism by the plagiarism checker. I have spent many hours with students sobbing in my office after I told them that their essays were plagiarized, and they all say that they thought changing the words around was sufficient to make it not plagiarized. Maybe some of them were lying for sympathy, maybe they all were, but I see no reason to not take them at their word. They think that what they're doing is dubious (hence the shame) but they don't think it falls under what they take to be the definition of plagiarism - the thing they can face sanction from the university for. They need to have it pointed out to them that there has been plagiarism for a lot longer than there have been automatic 'plagiarism checkers' and that as their professor, I'm the only plagiarism checker they really need to be concerned about.

It's really easy for me to get frustrated about this. It's frustrating to me that the American public high school system (the source of the majority of my students) has failed to prepare them to think about information, facts, and where they come from. It's frustrating that students can't be arsed to read the university's code of conduct and that the only way I know they have is if I read it straight to their faces. It's very frustrating to see the written scholarly word, a medium to which I have dedicated no small part of my life, treated like it's not worth anything. I'm frustrated to know that most students are not in my class, or in the class of someone else prepared to teach this lesson, so they'll go through their whole lives thinking that an uncited light paraphrase is enough to be worthy of credit. I'm frustrated that people with such a lax attitude towards information are my fellow voters. I once read a real fucking academic essay that was submitted for grades that cited a long quote from Arthur Conan Doyle that, when I traced it, was actually a quote from a fucking TJLC blog. That one isn't frustrating, I guess, that's just funny. It's not all bad.

I'm glad for the hbomberguy video. I hope it will make it easier to convince my students in future. It's too bad he didn't go into the academic context, but it's not like he was short on things to talk about already.

But this is a more general problem than just the video essay context shows. If we're not careful, the very concept of plagiarism can get eroded. I'm not a linguistic prescriptivist, either! If enough people start taking this new concept as plagiarism, that will be what it becomes. I think a world in which that notion of plagiarism is the relevant one would be a worse world. Don't let people erode the idea of credit. You're going to want it later.

[galileosballs]

@venus-light I hope you don't mind me responding to you here. I have no intention of killing you! And if I went around killing people for this kind of misunderstanding, I'd have to kill a lot of my students, which I suspect my employer would not like. This is a really common problem. I'm glad the video helped, and I too hope you're not the only person it helps.

It sounds like you have a much better grasp on this now, but I want to take this opportunity to expand on the point a bit. I'm home sick from work today and not in a position to do anything but read and write, so I'm going to write a bit about plagiarism in university essays, and what I think is the best way for an undergraduate to avoid it. I've addressed it to you, because you're the one who replied, but this is really for any undergraduate who happens to be reading it.

The common pitfall that people fall into when thinking of plagiarism is thinking of it as the violation of some discrete set of rules. Thou shalt cite thy sources. Thou shalt not copy and paste. Thou shalt format thy citations according to the divine command of the Chicago Manual of Style (17th Edition). Rules like that. Trouble is, that approach can only ever be so useful. There's a lot of contextual variation when it comes to the question of how much paraphrasing is appropriate - for instance, an assignment that's just asking you to summarize a particular text will have a lot of paraphrasing from one source in it, and that's not a problem. What will serve you better than specific rules is a more general heuristic.

Let's zoom out a bit and ask a larger question: what's the point of a college humanities essay? Why do we professors make students do them? It's certainly not for our benefit - they're difficult and time-consuming to grade - and we certainly know that students don't like them. It's not because we want to be informed of facts, or even because we want to make sure you have command of facts. In-class testing is a way more effective way to establish whether or not you have command of relevant facts, and it's also a much easier method to grade. So, an essay is doing something different.

The point of a college essay is to give you an opportunity to practice joining a scholarly discussion. We don't just want to see that you've read parts of the existing discussion, we want you to try to add your own voice to it. That's why professors will often ask for a minimum number of different sources in an essay - if you have to synthesize many voices and build them into a coherent body of text, you'll probably end up offering some authorial insight of your own along the way (in a way, this is what Somerton could have been doing, had he been less lazy. There is a real skill in synthesizing and comparing disparate sources!). Your job in an essay is not merely to use sources, but to judge them. If you find two sources that conflict, you get to explain which you think is in the right (if either). If you think two seemingly different perspectives can be put into productive dialogue with each other, you get to say so. And if you think that everyone you've read is wrong, actually, you absolutely get to say so. That's how academics treat each other, and that's the point of an essay. We want you to try to be a historian or a philosopher or a literary critic for a few days (yes, a few. I know you think you can do it in one. Everyone thinks that and everyone's wrong).

Often when I tell students this they respond with a kind of deference - after all, they're not experts, but the people they're reading presumably are. Who are they to judge? And that's true! Students are definitionally not experts. We're not expecting you to be. If you miss something that anyone who's gone through grad school would know about, that's fine. We know that's going to happen. It takes years in grad school to achieve mastery of the canon. It's okay to not already have expertise when we're trying to help you achieve it! Deference to expertise makes sense in other contexts, like when you're writing for the public, but it's not what is being asked of you in a university essay. Gaining expertise requires you to practice thinking like an expert - not just learning, but judging. Reading broadly in the relevant subject is vital, of course, but it's only half the battle. The other half comes from you. The university essay is a safe space to try to figure out what the part that comes from you sounds like.

This may be a surprise to hear, but I actually still remember quite a lot of specific student papers years after I graded them. And that's because I remember what specific students brought to their papers. I got to see them learning that they could intervene in a discussion - that they could bring their own judgement to the table. That their voice could matter. This is one of the great privileges of teaching.

It may feel like we've come a long way from plagiarism, but we haven't. Because this is why plagiarism in education actually matters. In assigning you an essay, I am handing you a microphone and asking what you want to say. I'm not interested in hearing what someone else has said. If you only give me a bunch of stuff paraphrased from elsewhere, there's a real sense in which you just haven't done the assignment, because you haven't said anything. That's the same problem that the youtube plagiarists have - in their rush to talk as much as possible, they say nothing. What does Illuminaughti actually think about Wakefield? What insight does a self-proclaimed Internet Historian have about the tragic tale of Floyd Collins? Somerton mashes up a tonne of different people's writing, but the different people think different things - who does he think is right? We don't know. They said nothing, and then deceived us into watching them say nothing. What a waste of time.

That's the heuristic. That's the thing that will help you avoid plagiarism in the future. Be proud of what you have to say, and don't miss the opportunity to say it! Indicate clearly where you're drawing on other people, not just for their benefit, but for yours - so that it's absolutely clear that your words are your own. You have thoughts worth hearing about, and this is one of the few times in life where you can be sure that at least one person is going to hear about them. And if you can look at your essay and know that it says what you wanted to say, then you don't need to worry about plagiarism anymore. You'll know it's yours.

If you've read this far, thank you for indulging me in my little speech. I hope the end of the semester treats you well, and good luck with your future studies.

[bisquid]

Just adding my own thought as an academic in STEM: scientific writing is often slightly different. Because much of scientific research is generally predicated on figuring something new out, building on an established body of knowledge, rather than taking existing information and developing your own thoughts on the subject (although that happens too and is no less valuable) thorough and consistent citation is necessary for two reasons: the first, as with all writing, to properly credit the people who did the research to 'prove' the facts you are using, and the second, to establish the veracity of what you are saying. Citing your sources means that you have at least some proof that the information you are imparting is independently verifiable. There are a surprising number of 'widely known facts' that were either disproven years ago or never even accepted as true by the academics in the relevant field. By showing that the facts you're using to build your argument/research method/etc are themselves grounded in peer reviewed research, you are essentially verifying the accuracy of your own work. Obviously this is no more foolproof a method than any other (Turnitin, my beloathed) and the unscrupulous can certainly use 'citations' whose source material is irrelevant, banking on the mere presence of them to indicate Correct Sciencing, but generally this method breaks down when others attempt to use it as a basis for their own research.

Another thing I think that gets maybe lost in translation sometimes is that while simply quoting Wikipedia is...poor research, as is simply grabbing the Wikipedia references and calling it a day, Wikipedia is often an extremely valuable launch point for research! Look at those references, and then look at their references, and so on. Sometimes this will get you nowhere because the cited sources are themselves either Blatant Misinformation, broken links or otherwise unusable, but Wikipedia will at the very least give you some other related terms to explore.

One of the main ways scientific literature research tends to go is to just work your way through an ever expanding daisy chain of cited papers, and this is NOT plagiarism!

Also for all my baby researchers out there: literature metastudies are often your best friends. These are where someone has synthesized much of the available literature on a topic into one handy article. These are often born a treasure trove of sources and generally also give a reasonable picture of the Current Scientific Consensus - or Current Schools Of Opinion.

What plagiarism boils down to, in my opinion, is the theft of other people's efforts without proper credit. Using - and properly citing - a literature study that's done much of the time consuming legwork of collecting the literature on a particular topic is fine! Not using a published resource that saves you bags of time would be considered foolish by many of the people I know in academia. Using that resource and not citing it, however, is plagiarism and should be treated as such.

Especially in modern science, a researcher's primary capital is the number and 'value' of articles they publish, and articles are often rated at least partially based on the number of times they're cited. By failing to properly cite something, you're not only, you know, plagiarising, but you're also effectively sabotaging that author's career.

[grison-in-space]

I think there are also in STEM some major failures of pedagogy when it comes to writing scientific pieces in undergraduate classwork. For example, the common ban on using articles older than 5 years incorrectly sets up students to believe that citing a more recent but tertiary source is better than citing an older but primary one. That in turn actively prevents them from thinking about learning to trail citations to the source of ideas, and from thinking about their own STEM writing as participants in a scholarly conversation--which they are, no less than in humanities.

That doesn't mean I don't think review papers aren't valuable or important. In fact, I'm going to be embarking on a deep dive into effects of various aspects of metabolism on dopaminergic signaling later today, and I dearly hope some review papers give me a hand and a starting place as I dig in. Review papers often help scientists organize our thoughts about the data from primary sources and play an invaluable role in helping to create paradigms of thought that can then drive future research.

But I do think it's important to teach students that they should dig into things that they're curious about and find out how we know things they're writing about. The best work is not necessarily the newest. While those time limits help instructors limit an overwhelmingly large field for students to synthesize information within, they also create artificial blinkers and value information inaccurately while not teaching students how to actually narrow down the most relevant articles to their topics of interest.

[galileosballs]

Can I ask you a professor question? Why is it that everyone I've ever spoken to in an academic context tells me I just can't, will never be able to do a paper/essay in one day when I keep doing it (I know I know, it's a bad habit that's coming out of ADHD and I'm trying to break it) and especially when I keep getting As on those papers? It's not exclusively easy classes either, it's been several senior level classes on complex topics (I am a sophomore and some classes were modern neopaganism in America, which I wrote a 15 page research paper for in one day and got an a, and a theories of counselling psychology class which I wrote a 24 page literature review for in about 26 hours)

I'm glad you asked this, @scattereda-remade2. You really gave me pause for a second there - because all professors do say this, and yet everything you've written here could have been written by a younger version of myself. Though I never got to take a class on modern neopaganism in America and that sounds pretty sick. Sign me up.

But no, you're right. For a certain proportion of the population, essay writing comes easily enough that a one-day paper can still get an A. One of those little unfair things about the world - it does work for some of us. That doesn't mean it's a good idea. To discuss why that's the case, we need to make a distinction between two kinds of paper: papers that get As, and papers that are the best papers they can be. It is an unfortunate fact about 21st century academia that those are not even remotely the same thing.

To explain why, I'm going to have to get into the weeds a bit.

I'm going to assume for this discussion that you're in the United States. That's the academic context in which I've spent my teaching career, but not the one in which I did my undergraduate career. Coming to the US was a real culture shock for me in this respect. At my university in not-the-US, I mostly got As and A-minuses, but the threshold for getting an A was 85% of the available course points. A- was 80%. So, of course, I walk into my first TA job at my new university in the States and start grading according to that same basic structure. My students riot. This is, I learn, not how grading works in the US. In the US, the typical threshold for an A is 90%, and 80 is a B. So, for all my students who were expecting As, being marked down at all was a threat to the GPA that was, in many cases, needed to maintain their scholarships.

So what you end up with in the typical US grading system is a pinch. Students expect As, and in humanities courses your department will also expect the average to be no lower than a B+, barring unusual circumstances. But that means that about half of your class has to be graded in such a way that they get more than 90% of the available points on your rubric. Think about how constraining that is to an evaluator. You have to grade everyone the same way, of course. And that means building a rubric that won't automatically fail everyone whose grasp of English prose is a bit weak. I have no problem with giving out a lot of As. A lot of my students deserve As! This is not really the place to talk about grade inflation, and honestly, I don't think grade inflation is a huge deal once you're already in university. But rubric crunch is a big deal. How can I possibly motivate a student to improve when I can tell them they've done something wrong a maximum of 10 times per term? How can I actually make them see their mistakes when I can't fairly assign a penalty to them?

Thankfully, my university didn't actually have a rule in any of its books that established the 90%-A correlation, so I was able to just put the 85%-A scale in my syllabus and get on my way as normal. Most universities probably would not let me do this. Yours probably doesn't.

So, that's the problem. Grading in the US is an extremely blunt instrument at the high end of the range. There is almost no room for teachers to indicate to already-good students that they can do better using the numbers of the classroom. If you're getting 95% on a paper, that means you wrote a pretty ok paper. But it does not mean that you wrote the best paper the teacher thinks you can write. They just don't have a way of telling you that numerically. Keep in mind that writing is very difficult for many. As the notes of the plagiarism post indicate with horrifying clarity, many high schools completely fail to teach their students how to write. Helping students get from a C-level to a B-level occupies the majority of the pedagogical space on the rubric. But for students who are already competent academic writers, that means that the grade scale is nearly useless.

So let's now turn to the papers themselves. I believe you when you say you can churn out a pretty ok paper in a day. I know I can. But if you're at the level where you can churn out a pretty ok paper in a day, you can write a great paper in two days. The difference is not the total amount of time, it's that there's a break in the middle. You can put that break anywhere you like - between outlining and drafting, between drafting and proofreading, halfway through the draft, or (my favourite) after the draft but before writing the introduction and conclusion. But it's crucial that you at some point look over your paper with fresh eyes, instead of just riding the focus highway all the way through. Because that's how you catch the mistakes.

I grade a lot of papers that are written all in one go, and it's usually pretty obvious. They're competently written, reasonably well-researched papers that have something to say... but the points don't connect. In that rush of words pouring out onto the page, some key step in the argument was omitted. Something so obvious to you that you didn't even notice it was missing. This happens all the time. I notice it in my own work, too! I'm a fast writer, and I often do write a full draft in a day or two of deep focus. But those drafts aren't finished. They need me to step away, reflect on the points I'm making, and then re-evaluate whether or not the text I put on the page actually says the thing I mean.

Students who write like this typically get As. After all, what is an A but a stamp of approval? I do approve of these students. But it's a real shame that the way grades work means that I can't use them to show these students that they could do more. If you can write like this, you're ready for the next level. But I can't tell you that with a number.

I hope you found that peek behind the graders' curtain helpful! This is the sort of thing your professors are probably not in a position to tell you, since, well, it does deflate the value of an A a bit. But you can already see through the smokescreen, so there's no point in hiding it. I hope the effect is to help you take that next step, not to encourage you to rest on your laurels. But you can do what you want! I'm not your boss. I'm not even your professor! Just have fun with it.

[wormofmouth]

hey also. writing a paper in a day does not scale. you will hit your wall at some point. the human body can only endure so much sleep deprivation and panic, and even if you get through your undergrad skating along this way (i mostly did), you might hit your wall on the master's or the phd qualifying papers. or, like a LOT of undergrads i have advised, you hit that wall in your senior year. and that's a really bad time to discover that there is only one tool in your toolkit, and zero coping mechanisms for when it breaks.

every time to do this to yourself, you deprive yourself the opportunity to learn work/life boundaries and project management skills for projects that are bigger than 48 hours. you are putting a really hard ceiling on what you will be able to accomplish in the future.

one of the joys of being in my thirties is that i did hit my wall in grad school in my late twenties, and had to learn new ways to do projects that didn't demand 24 hours of raw panic from my body. and it means i now have the ability to take on projects that will be years long, doing bigger and cooler shit than i ever could have done when i was 22, even though i had so much energy then. i learned ways to work that age with me.

anyway please investigate pomodoros or something

[roach-works]

here's another thing ill tell you with the benefit of 15 years outside of academic institutions: bosses LOVE when a guy has a 'shift into overdrive' mode. if you respond to pressure by slamming back a redbull and pulling an all nighter, you'll get a great big pat on the ass.

and then your boss will expect you to do it again next week.

and the week after that.

and twice the week after that.

eventually your kidneys give up. you start pissing blood. you black out in traffic and crush your bumper. you make a mistake on a project and rip a finger off, or just total some expensive equipment, and your boss isn't the guy who soaks up that whoopsie, you are. you pay for it.

bosses love a guy who doesn't know how to take his time and give a project the time it needs to be done safely and well. they blow through those guys like kleenex.

respect yourself more, work to the clock, and take some fucking naps.

[dragonwolfe22]

A part of the "paper in a day" thing that I don't see talked about as much: you may have written the words in a day, but you likely didn't do the work for that paper in a day.

Thought about your topic and formulated opinions? That's work on your paper. Read resources to support your point or to argue with? Work on your paper.

Some of that CAN be done quickly, if you're writing a certain kind of paper. It's easiest with opinion-heavy pieces where your knowledge gathering was done ahead of time.

But to write long academic papers that effectively engage with a large number of sources? You can't meaningfully read 20+ academic papers for your your literature review in under a day. You'll end up doing what I did for every paper before my graduate program: cursory understanding, citing enough to show you looked at things, and moving on.

That doesn't fly well if you're defending a thesis or if you end up TALKING TO the people you cited at a conference (a terrifying and also cool experience).

It is hard, so hard, to build up the ability to go from "Good Paper in a Day" to "Paper that Represents the Heights of your Academic Understanding and Prowess." It is a difficult skill to learn when you've honed the deadline energy for years. To this day I struggle with it. I still put together academic presentations the night before or morning of, not sleeping and nailing it, but it takes a toll. On your body, your mind, the quality of your work.

I don't have any ready answers on how to get there, but trying to learn a longer and kinder approach is worth it.

[azcrowleyfell]

Also if you find that you "can't" write a paper until it's the night before it's EXTREMELY likely you have undiagnosed ADHD.

Source: Me.

[leonardcohenofficial]

hello to all of my colleagues here on tumblr dot com; currently the largest academic strike in history is happening across the university of california system with 48,000 academic workers on the picket line. if you’re interested in showing your support for this historic action, you can donate to the official hardship fund of UAW 2865, UAW 5810, and student researchers united-UAW here

[shitpostinguniverse]

[moss-wizard]

What a year this week has been.

[we-dont-matteratall]

It’s Monday.

[jacuwi]

It sure as hell is.

[actualaster]

The earlier in the day Monday you reblog the funnier this gets

[pityboy]

affirmations for when you have to send emails

[smallballz-deactivated20240713]

i hope every assignment. dies

[smallballz-deactivated20240713]

reblog to eat all of your mutuals assignments like a dog

[watermelonmountaindew]

i need to know every language immediately

[wormliness]

please, untitled document was my father, call me untitled document (1)

[pearlcaddy]

when the humanities meet the sciences

[daughter-of-sapph0]

[catlynnhighlights-studies]

screaming crying throwing up (i have to finish writing a 3-5 page essay)

[cptsdstudyblr]

How to Write an Essay

Step 1: Look at the prompt and think about it for a while. I like to read the prompt a day or two before I start writing so that I have some time to think. If the prompt is not a question, make it into a question or multiple questions.

Step 2: Write a bunch of stuff down. Write this casually, chaotically, whatever works for you.

Your answer to the prompt. Make this 1-2 sentences.

Why does your answer to the prompt matter? Why do we care? 2-3 sentences.

Why is your answer to the prompt correct? Give as many reasons as you need paragraphs (usually 3, but that may vary). Each should be around 2-3 sentences at this point.

What order do you want these answers to go in and why? This is to help you organize your paper.

What might people say is wrong with your argument (s)? Why are you correct despite what those people say? Note: This information is only necessary for some types of essays; it can be omitted depending on the assignment.

What's your main point? How did you back it up? 2-3 sentences.

Step 3: Take what you've written and put it in the correct order for your paper.

#2 will usually be first. You should generally start your paper by explaining why people should care.

#1 will usually be second, at the end of the same paragraph as #2. THIS IS YOUR THESIS!

Use your answer to #4 to put your answers to #3 in order. Each answer to #3 will generally be its own paragraph.

If you answered #5, figure out where those counterarguments and responses need to go. Sometimes you'll have a separate paragraph entirely for counterarguments, and sometimes they'll be mixed into your paper. Do what makes the most sense.

#6 is your conclusion. That will go at the end.

Step 4: Elaborate and clarify.

You wrote a bunch of information down quickly and informally. Go back into your paper and explain yourself and make your writing more academic. You should really only be editing your introduction and conclusion at this point rather than adding on, but you'll need to expand on your body paragraphs to make them closer to 8-12 sentences (that number may vary depending on the length of paper).

Don't forget to add quotes and cite sources if that's necessary!

Step 5: Edit.

Your paper should now be written. You just need to go through, proofread, edit your writing style, and perfect the paper.

This is also a good time to check to make sure you have all your sources cited properly, fact-check yourself, and revisit your assignment requirements to ensure you fully meet them.

If you haven't already done the formatting of your paper, make sure that that is correct and meets all the requirements.

If you don't already have a title, now is a good time to create one. A title should generally be a catchy summarization of your main point.

I also recommend having a speech-to-text program read your paper aloud to you at this point. It helps catch errors and other issues. You can also have someone else read over your paper to make sure it's ready to go.

[awesomehoggirl]

Stumbles out of google docs covered in blood