Finals... FINALLY!

Fittingly, and with the painful sting of irony, I'll start this post with a properly cited quote.

            "But there is one thing that Free-thought can never be by any possibility – Free-thought can never be progressive.  It can never be progressive because it will accept nothing from the past; it begins every time again from the beginning; and it goes every time in a different direction.  All the rational philosophers have gone along different roads, so it is impossible to say which has gone the farthest."

-G. K. Chesterton… The Ball and the Cross

 

One of my students plagiarized his final.  Well actually, 5 of my students did.  Fortunately, my 250 freshmen students all had 1-on-1 interviews, so excepting the possibility that an identical twin showed up to take his/her twin's exam, all my freshmen honestly passed their finals.  I gave my sophomores more freedom in the completion of their final exams, and as we all know, with great freedom comes great abuse of the rules. 

 

*Before continuing, it's necessary to give some cultural background here.  China is a country of teamwork and community.  In America, the community is often subsumed by the individual, whereas in China, the individual is commonly subsumed by the community.  No task, however small is ever really undertaken alone.  This is why, in the school system, plagiarism and cheating are not understood in the same way as in the west.  Where Turnbull takes "free-thought" to the extreme in The Ball and the Cross and uses nothing from others, Chinese students regularly choose the other extreme, effectively eradicating any possibility of doing that which has not already been done.

 

With this in mind, I designed my final so that the assignment could not be successfully completed while plagiarizing.  For their final, each student was supposed to choose one core belief that they held and isolate one experience from their own past which either inspired that belief or evidenced it.  I was surprised to find some of my worst students turning in well-written accounts of what they learned during the opium wars, their personal struggle with Asperger syndrome, and their opinion of the asceticism exemplified by modern Chinese architecture.  Needless to say (not really), it was pretty to easy to distinguish whether or not a final was plagiarized. 

I only gave one of these students a second chance.  In fact, the student who took Chinese asceticism too close to heart and didn't indulge himself in the process of doing his own work had not fully plagiarized his paper.  He had only misled another teacher into proofreading his paper which he failed to mention was a final for another class.  Shockingly, and I mean shockingly, he turned in a FULLY plagiarized paper one week later!  After quickly pulling up his life's story on the internet and complimenting him on being a published author, I wrote a zero on his paper and showed him to the door while I gathered my thoughts.  I gave my student a second chance, and he still didn't do his own work.  In fact he did even LESS of his own work the second time.  As other students filed in to present their finals, I transferred the zero to my grade book, and together, the five lonely 0's stood out from all the other grades like bull's eyes denoting those students who I thought would never understand what self-reliance really meant.  (Even if they did understand 'ascetic')

            Six hours later, after all my other students had finished presenting their final essays to each other, my spirit was lifted by the stories of students whose mistakes were grammatical and not fundamental.  Just before leaving for the day, in walks the ascetic himself, out of breath and clutching what seemed to be a third draft of his final.  Preparing to hear a well-rehearsed plea for a third chance, I preemptively told this student that I would not change his grade.  Shockingly, and I mean shockingly, he did not protest, but instead said only that he understood my decision.  He only wanted me to read his final final and give him my corrections. 

Though he didn't use the word 'self-reliance' in his final final, I actually believe that he came to understand what it really meant.  The belief that he identified for his final was that one should rely on oneself, and the experience he isolated to justify this belief was the experience with this final exam.  He used what simple English he possessed to describe why using the work of others impedes one's own development.  I hope that the other four students can learn in the next two years what their classmate did on his journey from ascetic to aesthete in just one day.