Plagiarism

I was grading papers over the weekend and came across one of my absolute least favorite things to deal with in the history of things to deal with in the classroom. A student of mine plagiarized a paper. As with pretty much all schools in the country, that equals an automatic zero on the paper, and I think there are probably a few other things that will happen as well.

I just can't wrap my head around the concept of actually going and plagiarizing something. I thought about it one time in college, but realized that the time it would have taken in order to make the paper look like it wasn't plagiarized was roughly equivalent, if not more involving, than actually taking the time to do the paper itself. But, then again, I've always been a good student and never really needed too much motivation to do my school work. When did students become so lazy?

How do I know this was plagiarized? Pretty simple. It was really only about half of the paper that was obviously plagiarized. Reading the first half sounded exactly like her, kind of scattered, shorter words, mistakes in grammar. Then, suddenly, things began getting strangely well written. I took the first sentence of the very well written part and just put it into my google engine, and guess what came up? Word for word, the exact same thing from sparknotes. Right down to the typos.

I remember one I had last year, another plagiarist, whose mother said the most interesting thing to me. I called to inform her that her daughter had been caught plagiarizing, copying and pasting from the internet. I am not even kidding about this next part. Her response was, "You mean she can't do that? I don't understand how she's supposed to write 5 pages in her own words!" It makes no sense to me. How do other people deal with plagiarism in your schools or your classrooms? And what do you do when you come across a parent who literally doesn't understand that plagiarism is wrong?