Conflict two: deja vu by GJ

The scene was Jacksonville (FL) University in 1992, about 17 years later. The class was Rhetoric 101, a composition class for freshmen.

To my surprise, one term paper for the course really deserved an F. I tried to re-evaluate, wondering if I could have made a mistake. I put the paper aside for a day or two and read it again. No, there was no mistake. It just “didn’t cut it.” I asked the student to see me during office hours.

The student was a young man, perhaps a couple of years older than most, and who was a citizen of a foreign country. His grasp of English was adequate, but some finer points were a struggle for him. He had not come in for extra help as much as I had hoped…and had suggested.

When the student did come in for the appointment, I handed him his paper and told him I was sorry, but it missed the mark by quite a bit. He acted shocked. Like the high school girl in my last post, he wanted to argue the paper’s merits. I finally had to show him that parts of the paper were not his work, and that the main problem was that he had failed to put quotation marks around those parts that weren’t his own words.

The boy protested more. I assured him that I was familiar enough with his work to tell which was his and which wasn’t. He began to plead, then, that to fail the course (passing the term paper was a requirement for credit) would be to jeopardize his scholarship.

I offered, again, to give him an “incomplete” and six weeks to submit a new paper. He left my office angrily but discreetly. Later, I was asked by the dean of the department to drop in. I did so. The woman confided in me that the boy had been in to appeal my decision, but that she gave him very little hope. Knowing why she had summoned me, I took along the boy’s file complete with some marked passages to show her my rationale. She declined to look at it, saying that she didn’t question my judgment for a minute. She then informed me that the boy had withdrawn from the university, because his grades overall were inadequate to support his grant.

Two very similar experiences; years and miles and schools apart.