December/January is the end of the Chinese university semester, so most days Dre has a lot of free time to spend with us, in between private lessons and exams. This year he's taught his third year students to write research essays in English and which leaves him with 160+ papers to mark before the final exam on December 8th. Pierre and I are recruited for a few days to help out with some of the easier aspects of marking, such as format (proper margins? proper font and bibliography style?) and plagiarism patrol.
Every year in school, Canadian professors warn students that it's incredibly easy to spot plagiarism. I sometimes get the impression that the faculty find plagiarism not so much unfair as insulting. The general consensus among profs and TAs seems to be "Really, do they think we're that stupid?" Now I better understand what they mean. When you go from "Dickens is many years ago all fame writer..." to "Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches..." - well, you've got plagiarism. Sometimes it's really that simple and obvious. (PS. That's an actual sentence "borrowed" by a student, courtesy of John Steinbeck.)
Since the students are new to APA style referencing, the plagiarism in this semester's papers has to be judged on a curve. Andre's general rule is this:
- if the text in question is not set off by quotations or indentation, but the text borrowed is listed in the bibliography and/or noted in brackets at the end of the quote, that isn't considered plagiarism on this assignment.
Otherwise, it's plagiarism.
A lot of the students have referenced their quotes with indenting, etc, so those essays are quickly added to the "to be marked" pile. The ones with obvious or suspected plagiarism are put in the "to be Googled" pile. By the tenth time we have to head over to the computer to Google phrases, we start to get pretty annoyed.
The signs of plagiarism are usually pretty obvious - drastic shift in the quality of writing, turns of phrases that Normal Mailer would be proud of, and so on - and with ESL students, the signs are even more clear. Especially clear are any cultural references that aren't within the experience of your typical, atheist/Buddhist, never-been-abroad student. A flawless paragraph of text that includes the phrase "As Allah has taught us..."? Plagiarized. References to lesser cultural institutions such as the 4-H club within a well-crafted sentence? Plagiariffic.
We find ourselves start saying thing like "You guys aren't going to like this one - proper use of the semi-colon."
Plagiarists aside, we're all impressed with what these students have written and it's an interesting introduction into Chinese culture and thought, siphoned through the minds of Chinese university students. Their writing includes a lot of interesting idioms - we learn things like: the Chinese equivalent of "bad apple" (as in "one bad apple spoils the bunch") is "the dung of a mouse" (as in ""the dung of mouse can destroy a pot of soup").
We also come across a saying about choosing your friends wisely: "Friends always will have an immeasurable impact on people. Just as the saying goes, who keeps company with the wolf will learn to howl."
Original thought and any effort to craft an original sentence get points for the students, even if their sentence results in an unfortunate punchline. In the case of a female literary figure whose downfall is caused by premarital sex, we have the memorable: "...it was her honesty, care, braveness, and penetration that led to her tragedy."
Some skip the dictionary and work with what they know, such as:
Exhibit A: "she refused to be babied"
Translation via context: She didn't want to get pregnant
Exhibit B: "Female are really made of water."
Translation via context: Girls cry a lot.
Some sentences prove that electronic translators, like Babelfish, are not always so useful: this sentence, regarding some Australian holiday ritual, is mystifying in a way that only an electronic translator can be: "At holiday evenings people take the drinks to the forest to hold a picnic which called 'Pakistan do not occupy.' "
Babelfish does have its poetic moments, such as one student's discussion of the benefits that newly graduated teachers brought to the rural villages where they had taught: "Once section of time, they had woven riot color dream for the village children." Not English, exactly, but beautiful - I love the idea of weaving a "riot color dream" for someone.
A lot of the essays make us laugh, but in a respectful (though drink-spraying) kind of way. Myself, I find English blunderers charming. These are my people. I fully realize that they make the same caliber of mistakes that fumble out of my mouth when I speak other languages.
At one point, while we're trying to riddle our way through a few sentences, I say to the guys "You know, some of these papers are thrown together and full of plagiarism, but they're still probably a lot better than some papers that North American profs have to mark. It must be so depressing to get this kind of paper from a native English university student." What a sobering thought - the three of us share a moment of silence for those profs and TAs as we continue to mark.
Several of the students are very eloquent and, in addition to the funny bits, we read out some of the more impressive ones, like this mini-rant from Wayne regarding the study pressures on Chinese kids (title: "Crisis of Adolescents' Values Education"):
"In any era, children should be the people who are light-hearted and spend most of their time playing with friends. However, children are the busiest, saddest and thorniest people. What education gave children are: exams but not dreams, reciting but not singing, homework but not hankering, marks but not hopes, get up early and sleep late."
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