What horrible thing did I do in a past life to deserve being inflicted with so many group projects in this one?
So, another semester, another class, another group project (you can tell from the long blog posts that I'm supposed to be working on something), another groupmate who submits "work" copy/pasted off the internet. Seriously, UNLV, where do you find these people?
At least this time it probably wasn't a deliberate act of plagiarism.
The plan was for everyone to find different credible sources and take research notes, which we would then combine and organize by topic. Then everyone would take a couple topics and synthesize the notes into sections of our rough draft. I thought that this was a fairly straightforward plan and that everyone understood what was expected of them.
Apparently not. Not only did one of our group members miss the day the professor explicitly forbade the class to use Wikipedia as a source, but he thought that copy/pasting a Wikipedia article was sufficient "research" and turned it in as the entirety of his "notes".
He did clearly cite at the top that Wikipedia was the source of the information, and he characterized it as just "notes", not a draft, so in my judgment it was not a deliberate act of plagiarism nor an attempt to deceive us about the amount of work he did. My impression from talking with the guy is that he has never worked on a research paper before and genuinely doesn't understand what's expected of him.
I don't know how he got into this class without knowing this, because the main topic of the prerequisite class is how to write a research paper. (Plus, you know, some of us learned how to do this back in the 8th grade... but he's a foreign student so who knows what the curriculum was in his home country. He was probably busy learning how to kick Americans' asses in math instead.) He *is* in the class now, and in my group, and I have to deal with it.
I am already overwhelmed by the workload of the class (let me serve as a cautionary tale: do NOT take a writing class during a shortened summer session) and I really don't have time to personally sit down with him and coach him through how to find, evaluate, and take notes from online and other sources. This guy desperately needs to learn some basic English 102 research skills from somewhere, though, if he's going to be useful in our group (or survive the rest of his college career).
So, a bleg: Can anyone please recommend a quick, clear, simple, very easy-to-read and understand online tutorial about how to find, evaluate, and take notes from online and other sources? Something really short and easy. (He's not dumb, but he's ESL, and I don't want him to not read it because it wasn't assigned by the professor and appears too long or complicated to bother with.)
While I'm at it, a related bleg: I am looking for people who have recently lived in or spent time in New Delhi, India, whom my group could interview for our class project. Background: The project is for my business writing class, and the premise is that we are consultants hired by the human resources department of a multinational corporation to advise them about how to prepare their American employees for transfer to their New Delhi office. We are supposed to interview "primary sources" as part of our research and haven't connected with any yet. My understanding is that India is a very diverse and rapidly changing place so I think it's probably important that we find someone with *recent* experience in India and specifically in New Delhi. Yes, I am being that dork who wants to get it right and not just good enough to fool the professor -- my motivation in this class is skillz not credits.
...
Sigh. The more group projects I work on, the more I understand why certain professors are always bitching so much. :)
Update: I chatted with him about it and he sent me some real notes a couple hours later. YAY! I can tell it was all his own work, too, because of the errors. :)
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