Please See Me

My culture students have no doubt come to hate those three little words.

Written across the top of their homework, “please see me” means that I’ve caught them copying – copying from the textbook, the Internet or another student. It doesn’t matter.

Copying is not such a straight-forward issue as it is as home. To be caught plagiarizing at home is the height of academic dishonesty. But in China? This is the land of knock-off everything. There isn’t an idea or product immune to being copied. Long before I came to China, I sat in business classes where the trade-off between China’s huge market and the risk of intellectual property infringement was discussed.

As a teacher, I made it clear at the beginning of the term that in my classes, you don’t copy. If I catch you copying, you either re-write it or don’t get credit for the assignment. Perhaps this is a quirky foreign teacher thing that they don’t have to contend with in any other classes. Frankly, I don’t care. I’ve told them I’d rather see a lot of mistakes than perfect essays that I know they didn’t write themselves. You can learn from mistakes. I try to establish proof of copying before accusing them of it, as I feel that’s a pretty serious accusation to make (or at least it would be at home). This usually isn’t difficult as they make almost no effort to cover their tracks. Sentences are copied word-for-word from the book. They apparently think I’ll believe they know a word like “superfluity”; I’ll get essays that some native speakers couldn’t write. Often, I can take sentences directly from their essays, type them into Google and voila – a Chinese website that supplies English essays!

I did this just last week and attached the print-out of the webpage to the student’s homework when I handed it back to stress how blatant the copying was. She came up to me at the break and started to cry, saying she’d been preparing for a big exam and had run out of time to write it herself. I’m fair – I don’t get mad at copiers, especially given the broad acceptance of it here. I always give them a second chance and say that I’m much more interested in their own ideas than in what a book or website says.

As the semester has worn on, I've made in-roads in the battle against copying. I’ll usually still catch 3 to 5 students (out of 40), but that is down from the 10 to 15 I had at the beginning of the term. An even bigger achievement? – the noticeable difference in both the quality and creativity of their essays, especially in the last round I corrected. I make an effort to assign essay questions that require original thought – questions to which there is no right or wrong answer. This differs completely from the rote memorization they’re used to. For instance, we’ve been studying Australia the last few weeks, and my latest homework assignment (and the last for the term) asked them to imagine that it’s the early 1800s and they are prisoners in the Australian penal colony. They were simply told to write a letter to their family at home, describing life in their new home. I haven’t corrected the papers yet, but I’m anticipating some interesting responses. Based on what I've seen in skits and presentations, I suspect some of these kids are very creative - they've just had it squashed out of them by a system that only cares about memorization and test-taking ability. And that saddens me.