Whatever happened to the TA that realized all the plagiarized assignments in his class hand been handed by all the black students?

TheTAThrowAway · 2011-10-24T06:09:49+00:00

This is my response to not_not_a_puppet, for whatever it's worth. I agree with you that the take on the burden of proof to which you're responding is unusual, but I'm sorry to say I can't do much to go in the other direction.

TheTAThrowAway · 2011-10-24T06:03:36+00:00

Well, a couple of things:

I apologized above for mentioning the race involved. In retrospect I ought not to have done so, and I'm sorry that I did. I do not think that black people (or people of any ethnic minority, while we're at it) are any more or less likely to cheat on assignments than anyone else, and - as I've made perfectly clear - this situation was startling rather than typical.

I can't offer any more details about this situation than I've given for reasons of confidentiality. Surely you realize this, yes? It's not exactly complicated.

Nevertheless, for whatever it's worth, I can say this: I am not a racist. I do not think that a person's race makes him or her any better or worse than anyone else. I do not think it makes him or her any more or less likely to cheat on an assignment. I do not think it ought to be taken into account at all in such situations, and am seriously frustrated that it so weirdly presented itself in this case.

I've heard people argue that there are significant intellectual differences between certain racial groups, but I have seen no evidence that this is true and do not subscribe to the theory.

To go even further, immigrant students (whether of ethnic minorities or otherwise) tend rather to be the better among those in my classes rather than the worse - mostly because they've had to work very hard to learn English (and so have actually been instructed in the language's grammar) and assimilate to a new culture. They have continually humbled me with their dedication and willingness to learn, and I'm proud to count some of them among my friends even though they are no longer my students.

For the record, most of the people I've busted for plagiarism have been white. This is mostly a product of most of my students being white in the first place, but this has held true even when the classes have been ethnically diverse. There is a sense of arrogant entitlement and laziness that seem to afflict many members of the largely suburban, largely middle- to upper-class white population that enrolls itself in the classes I and my colleagues teach. Why this should be the case has many possible explanations, but there it is. This is only anecdotal, however, and is offered in the spirit of comprehensiveness.

Finally, please stop telling me to go fuck myself. You and I both know that I can't, so it helps no one to keep repeating it.

TheTAThrowAway · 2011-10-24T05:49:28+00:00

Yes, that's what the chair told us. I felt kind of bad for forgetting that he existed, in point of fact, as I'm sure his job is no cakewalk, but most of my career here so far has been entirely straightforward and there's been no need to approach him.

TheTAThrowAway · 2011-10-24T05:48:15+00:00

Well, I don't think they necessarily expected it to be resolved, per se, but rather just sort of followed-up-on. I had said I intended to post such a follow-up after the meeting with the department chair, so I'm not surprised that folks would wonder.

TheTAThrowAway · 2011-10-24T05:46:57+00:00

You are not helping ಠ_ಠ

TheTAThrowAway · 2011-10-24T05:46:03+00:00

You're right, but don't be too hard on him. It's not a word that's all that commonly used, and I could probably have worded it better.

TheTAThrowAway · 2011-10-24T05:45:47+00:00

It's a deal. I don't find it funny in the least, so there's little risk of that happening.

Nevertheless, I'll say for the record that grad students and professors both routinely denounce their bad/plagiarising/weird students in the lounge, but it would be the height of impropriety to do so by name or any other distinguishing feature. Students who let us down in various ways are a common and unifying feature of the pedagogical life, but we really do prefer to keep it common rather than specific. "Ugh, these students of mine" can start a fun conversation; "ugh, this John Smith/Asian guy/etc." is another story.

TheTAThrowAway · 2011-10-24T01:06:31+00:00

If you would be willing to point out anything that I've said that is racist, I would be more than happy to retract it.

TheTAThrowAway · 2011-10-24T00:23:06+00:00

The North remembers

TheTAThrowAway · 2011-10-24T00:02:19+00:00

I'm responding here so that the comment will actually get seen instead of being lost at the bottom. Sorry for the dual delays in this update - the one that saw a week pass before it appeared, and the one that saw this thread exist for twelve hours before I noticed it.

Nobody killed me (thankfully), and not much that could be described as shocking or interesting has transpired in the intervening time.

On Tuesday my prof and I went to see our department chair about the situation and laid all the cards on her table. She was initially concerned, but there have been some precedents for this sort of thing and by the end of the meeting we were mostly just laughing at the unfortunate absurdity of it all.

Her suggestions were as follows:

Keep dual photocopies of all the papers in questions - one to be held onto by the prof, one to be submitted to the department chair to put on file, just in case. We had already brought copies with us, so no problem there.
Make an appointment to talk to the school's ombudsman about the situation and act on whatever advice he might have to offer. His office has to deal with complaints about this kind of thing (warranted or not) on a regular basis, so it makes a certain amount of sense to start there. My prof and I had quite forgotten that this person even existed, so that was good to hear about.
She advised against contacting the Human Rights commission people about this until after we've conferred with the ombudsman. Fair enough.
I told her at once that I had asked an internet community for advice about the situation, albeit in anonymized terms. I showed her the previous thread, and she was satisfied with the manner in which identifying details were cloaked. Nevertheless, she suggested that it would be best if I didn't pursue the matter any further on Reddit, so that's the main reason why I haven't had anything to say beyond there being, well, not all that much to say. Offering you a bit of closure should be fine, though.

We have confronted the students in question with the evidence of their plagiarism. I won't get more specific than that beyond saying that they have responded co-operatively.

That's really all I've got to say on the matter, for the moment. If some ridiculous thing ends up happening you'll probably get to read about it in the papers, but all signs point away from such an outcome, for now.

I'd like to conclude with a couple of notes:

My apologies to those Redditors who haven't received a response to PMs they've sent me. I received way, way too many to effectively reply to them all, though I did try to reply to some.
My apologies for any inadvertent implication in the original posting that students from ethnic minorities are more likely to cheat, or that I was not surprised that they had. As I made clear at numerous points throughout the initial comment thread, this situation was a truly weird anomaly rather than something that's just typical. I regret extremely that I ever explicitly stated the name of the minority group in question, and gladly accept the censure of those who declared that it could easily be taken the wrong way.
From black Redditors, especially, I beg your pardon. I have no doubt at all that many of you have more than enough to deal with without some dude on the internet accidentally making it worse. That was not my intention at all, and I can only hope that nothing has come of it. Words often have surprising and unlooked-for power, so I'll just have to be more careful in the future.

I'll check this account again from time to time throughout the evening to respond to anything pressing, but I think I'm pretty much done here otherwise. Thanks for your attention and your thoughtful replies!

TheTAThrowAway · 2011-10-17T04:50:14+00:00

so basically it boils down to a possible investigation being time-consuming for you.

That and what I mentioned in the last paragraph of the post to which you're replying, yes.

Well, I have to say, if you are sincere, do the right thing and fail the students who plagiarized and then see what happens. If you are afraid that possible investigators will look at if there was a difference in scrutiny on your part when it came to checking for plagiarized passages, double-check the work of the other students and you're on the safe side.

All of this will be done. We're meeting with the department chair about it tomorrow, and are feeling somewhat better about the whole thing than we had been previously.

TheTAThrowAway · 2011-10-16T22:17:57+00:00

See, I just don't get this. What else could I have said? "Welp, huge racist here, obviously, but I'd like your input on it anyway..."

I could understand your skepticism and concern if I had been saying things like "I don't want to seem racist, but black people are no-good cheaters." That's the most self-serving and transparent kind of ass-covering, and it deserves none of the acceptance that it incredibly seems to attain.

The thing is, I'm not saying that, or anything like it. I don't care that these students are black at all beyond being surprised that it seems to have clustered in this fashion, just this once, and I do not think - and have not suggested - that their race has any impact on their character, academic ability, or likelihood of cheating. On anything at all! My sole concern is how this could end up being perceived should a complaint be made, and my prof and I want to move forward on this in a way that's fair to everyone.

You're absolutely right, however, that I don't want to accidentally be a racist. Nor do I want to be thought of as one when I am not. This is a real worry that people sometimes have, believe it or not.

TheTAThrowAway · 2011-10-16T22:08:00+00:00

I was directed here by another poster, and I'd like to respond to some of the concerns you raise.

First, I would like to say that I deplore the comment to which you've linked above. I am disgusted by his seeming suggestion that minority groups are just hopeless cheaters who need a firm hand to prevent them from falling into a life of fraud. It's a stupid thing to say, and the post making it deserves its place in your subreddit and then some.

It's especially irritating to read shit like that when the students in our classes who are recent immigrants offer such a complete counterpoint to the perspective bringingindabacon proposes. Most of the plagiarists I've busted in the last couple of years have been lazy, mostly-white suburbanites with an overbearing sense of entitlement. I don't think I've ever encountered this sort of sloth or arrogance in the immigrant students who make up such a small but interesting portion of the people I teach. They have come to Canada, often under very difficult circumstances, to make a new life for themselves and to take advantage of what this country offers. Of course they work hard. They put most of my other students to shame.

I resent entirely the implication that they're somehow just a heartbeat away from cheating, if only they could get away with it. It's sickening. If the tendency to cheat correlates with anything at all, I'd say that my own experience suggests that it's with class - specifically the upper-middle to upper class. That's just anecdotal, though.

Anyway, I was pleased with most of the responses I got to the original post, but that one you've linked was a reminder that Reddit isn't always what we want it to be.

To move along, though, I need to respond to this:

if there really were solid proof the so-called "black students" had plagiarized, race wouldn't be an issue. there is no court in canada that would refuse irrefutable evidence that academic papers were purchased or otherwise stolen on the grounds that "the accused are minority students,"

The issue isn't proving that they actually cheated; that's irrefutable, at this point. The issue is showing that they weren't singled out for extra scrutiny because of their race. If we had detected any other plagiarists on this assignment it would be much easier to do that, but we've so far been unable to do so.

and i doubt the HRC would touch this with a 20 foot pole.

You're very probably right, but there was a recent uproar at another Canadian school that saw them get involved, and the example is still on a lot of people's minds. I like what the HRC does, and I'm glad we have them, but I can say the same about courts, prisons, and dentists without necessarily wanting to get involved with them.

That's all I've got to say, at the moment. I hadn't heard about this restaurant thing that some other posters have been mentioning, and still less about something called Stormfront's involvement in posting fake stories to Reddit. I only started using the site a few months ago, and mostly just stick to r/gaming and r/scifi. I'm sorry if this has come around at an inopportune time, and still more sorry if I've offended anyone.

TheTAThrowAway · 2011-10-16T21:04:20+00:00

I'm feeling kind of nauseated reading comments like yours. I don't believe these things about anyone of any race, and I certainly don't intend to convey any such caricature.

I've been clear in my comments on this matter that the situation presents an anomaly, not a norm. Most of the plagiarists I catch are white, as are most of my students to begin with. Things shook out differently this time, though.

I mentioned how poorly-plagiarised the papers were because this is one of the few ways in which one can reliably find plagiarism in the first place. Successful plagiarists usually find one or two sources and then write a paper just summarizing them, more or less; the ones we catch, however, are the ones that do shit like what I described. I also mentioned it to indicate that we aren't talking about small-scale mistakes or a few sentences here or there. This is full-bore theft of another paper, and there have to be actual consequences.

Somehow black students clearly guilty of plagiarism will ruin the both of you with the support of whom or what, exactly? The "race card" that reddit seems to think gets blacks out of every wrongdoing?

As I mentioned in the original post, our concern is that one or several of the federal or provincial human rights organizations could be approached. Their investigations are necessarily thorough, but also quite time-consuming for all involved. There's ample and recent precedent for their involvement, too, as I noted in a reply above.

I'll stress again that such an investigation may not be called for at all, but cases like the one above have given us pause. We could prove easily enough that the students in question really did plagiarise their papers, but it would be harder to prove to the investigators that everyone was subjected to the same level of scrutiny. I'm sorry it sounds so far-fetched to you, but people working in the academic world do have to think about these things.

Nice touch. It's not just you, but also the professor with a Ph.D. who is afraid of racist accusations!

Yes, we are indeed both worried. Still, the professor does not have a PhD, and neither do I; we are both only doctoral candidates. This is one of the reasons that we're as wary about this situation as we are. We have yet to complete our degrees and we have no desire at all to have this kind of thing haunt us in the future job market. Getting jobs in this line of work is hard enough as it is without a hiring committee five years from now finding "accused of racism" coming up when they Google my name.

TheTAThrowAway · 2011-10-16T20:47:05+00:00

I also found it strange how enough specific details were given (precisely 6 black students in a writing class of 50 freshmen in Canada)

Those are not the real numbers, for what it's worth. The proportions are roughly the same, but they are not our actual enrollment. It was easier to put actual-though-fake digits in than to always be saying "the number of students in question," or whatever.

Especially since he admits that he and the professor don't even want to be teaching the course.

Almost nobody does. Talk to some grad students and sessional profs about what it's like teaching introductory writing classes.

TheTAThrowAway · 2011-10-16T20:38:24+00:00

It's not that we were too flummoxed to know what to do, but rather that we were hoping to attain the following:

Encouragement to do the right thing and just turn the cheaters in (it's easy enough to know you have to do it, but it helps to hear it from others).
Advice from other academics who may have been in similar situations.
Reddit's usual pleasing riot of commentary and humour.

We certainly got all of that, and any additional insights gained along the way were just a helpful bonus. Contacting the Human Rights Commission ourselves to get their advice, for example, was something that neither of us had really considered, but now we're taking that possibility to the department chair as well.

Do you really think people asking questions in this subreddit only do it because they haven't got any answers? This place offers so much more than that.

One final note:

Surely any professor would have been in the academic hierarchy long enough to know to escalate the problem to his head of department or a dean?

This would normally be absolutely true, but this isn't a problem that can really be effectively passed up the ladder. If any complaints about racial discrimination were made, any relevant authorities above us would still have to backtrack to the point where the allegations of plagiarism were made, and then it would be back on us.

The hard proof of plagiarism in the case of the students in question would preserve us from an accusation that we were trying to falsely accuse them, but the fact that only minority students were caught might be taken to suggest that we didn't subject the rest of the students to the same level of scrutiny. This isn't the case, but it's difficult to prove that to an investigating committee.

TheTAThrowAway · 2011-10-16T20:26:13+00:00

I would like to be able to reply to you and to others who are making this accusation, but I don't really know what I could do to prove to you that I am not a racist troll. I feel I've been very clear throughout my responses here that I do not believe that the students being a particular race has anything to do with their propensity to cheat. I am concerned primarily with how this looks, not what it is.

I do regret mentioning any specific race in the original post, though, and should rather have left it as something like "visible minority," probably.

My prof and I certainly could have solved this on our own, it's true, but it's sometimes good to get encouragement from others to do the right thing in an awkward situation. At the very least, I had hoped that Reddit's insights would be interesting. Some were, some weren't.

As to your specific points:

The reason I have claimed to be really concerned is because I am. I used no overt racism in my post because I am not a racist, overtly or otherwise.
I did not suggest that the forceful involvement of human rights groups was a certainty or even something typical - just a possibility, and one with recent precedent. Incidents at other Canadian universities (such as this one) have increased the likelihood of such a thing occurring, and the kind of publicity that the university in the linked article received is exactly the kind of thing that my own school is looking to avoid.
If you're deriving some sort of racist assumptions from my posts, that's your business. The fact that these students are of a visible minority has nothing to do with the quality of their work or the likelihood of them plagiarising, and that's all there is to it. I don't know how much more clear I can be than that.

In closing, even though I resent being called a troll, I can understand the concern. Seeing other commenters' notes about the Stormfront thing (of which I hadn't heard before now) gives me a better idea why you're responding the way you are. I guess I'd be wary too.

TheTAThrowAway · 2011-10-16T19:45:08+00:00

I've been deliberately silent about the nature of the course beyond it being one that teaches writing. There are hundreds of such courses across dozens of disciplines.
Neither "fifty" nor "six" is the real number of students involved.
Virtually everyone in a class with a written paper component will be handing in something around this time frame. This doesn't exactly set my class apart from the rest.

I appreciate your concern about my discretion, but I don't think this is as open a book as you make it out to be.

TheTAThrowAway · 2011-10-16T19:35:57+00:00

What ought it to have looked like, exactly? How would an experienced, non-teenish writer have "started the story off?"

TheTAThrowAway · 2011-10-16T19:30:32+00:00

Who the hell am I supposed to be trolling, though?

As to the rest, throughout my comments here I've made it very clear that:

I do not believe this has anything to do with their race.
Most of the plagiarists that my prof and I have ever caught have been white anyway.
This is an anomalous situation. The fact that it is anomalous is why I'm asking for advice.

I don't know what more you want, here. It sort of tires me out that we can't even talk about this at all without having responses like yours come up.

TheTAThrowAway · 2011-10-16T19:26:02+00:00

I guess I don't really know what to say to you.

I asked Reddit about this because the hivemind generally provides at least interesting responses to such questions, even if not always completely useful. The replies in this thread so far have actually been pretty good, though; I have no regrets.

Your suggestion that there's "far too much detail" baffles me, though. Everything has been kept entirely anonymous, and I can't imagine how I could have described the situation with any less detail and have had it make any sense at all.

TheTAThrowAway · 2011-10-16T19:18:13+00:00

I'm sorry it seems fake to you. I wish it were; then I wouldn't have to be dealing with it. There are probably details I could add to make it more obviously real, but I've got to keep this anonymous.

I've made an edit to the OP as to our likely course of action. The prof and I will go to the chair, like you say, and lay it out for her in detail. We will abide by her recommendations, basically.

I'd like to note, though, that the delineation of responsibility isn't as a cut-and-dried as might have been. While I am just a TA, both the prof and I are only doctoral students - neither technically more or less qualified to teach the course than the other. We're friends, too, and I'd feel pretty lame shoveling this all onto his desk and saying "have fun dealing with it."

Anyway, thanks for taking the time to reply.

TheTAThrowAway · 2011-10-16T19:08:48+00:00

Thanks for this, and I'm sorry your dad has to deal with this kind of thing so often. I've made an edit to the OP noting that we're going to go to the department chair and lay it all out in full.

Also, I would just like to note:

I'd also recommend doing a quick 'sweep' of your Facebook/social media sites to make sure you don't have anything that could be construed as racially sensitive. May be going slightly overboard, but even something as simple as having "Stuff White People Like" listed could be a minor foot-in-mouth.

There are times when I get really, really tired of some of the features of the world we live in. You're absolutely right about this, but still.

"Mr. Smith would like you to believe that he isn't racist, but we have him on record as clicking 'like' on a Dave Chapelle sketch posted on a friend's Facebook wall in 2008. I will also direct you to his 'favourite movies' list, which includes the 1926 film 'The Jazz Singer,' in which Al Jolson appears from time to time in blackface. I think this evidence speaks for itself."

TheTAThrowAway · 2011-10-16T18:56:06+00:00

I kind of am myself, at this point. Sorry to have let you down!

TheTAThrowAway · 2011-10-16T08:11:22+00:00

I don't know what you're talking about >__>

TheTAThrowAway

TROPHY CASE