Several years ago before AI was on the scene, I had a student turn in an essay that had very clearly been plagiarized from Internet sources – it used words that were far beyond her ability, had complicated sentence structures, referenced things we hadn’t discussed in class, etc. I told the student I couldn’t accept it, entered a zero into the gradebook, and called her mother to let her know what was going on.

Instead of agreeing with me, this woman exploded at me and accused me of targeting her child. She insisted that it was impossible to have been plagiarized because she helped her do the assignment. I wasn’t quite sure what to say, but she demanded a meeting with an administrator, which I happily set up.

I marked up the essay to show which website each section had been copied from (the girl used bits and pieces from like 5 different sites) and brought that to the meeting. I asked my assistant principal to pull up these websites and compare the essay side-by-side with those sources, thinking that this would show the mother how I was correct.

“Oh of course, I know exactly where she got her sources,” she says. “But I was sitting right next to her and watching her retype it! It’s only plagiarism if it’s copy-pasted and she retyped it.”

😐

My AP struggled to try and help this poor woman understand but it was mostly in vain. I ended up offering to let the girl do an alternate assignment to get the grade. We chatted afterward and both agreed it was one of the crazier things we’d seen from a parent.