Quandary

Our students copy each other's answers. We don't have a problem with this. We're not talking about paragraphs, essays, or other long-form pieces of writing. We refer instead to workbook-type exercises. Indeed, we encourage students to work together on these assignments--they can talk over any problems they have, and it also reinforces the idea that writing is a collaborative endeavour. Our problems arise, however, when they copy each other's incorrect answers--specifically, when these are not mere multiple-choice answers.

Today, for example, the class handed in a homework assignment dealing with concluding sentences for a paragraph.

(Digression: Personally, we've always had a problem with the concluding sentence. After all, if you've done your job as a writer, you probably don't need a formal conclusion: You reach the end of your paragraph having said what you want to say and have no need of a forced formulaic statement to tell your readers that you are, in fact, finished. Still, students must learn the rules before they can break them. EOD)

In this assignment, students read a perfectly adequate freshman-comp level paragraph about the joys of returning home from college. The paragraph features a topic sentence and three specific examples to illustrate why home is better than college (you have your own room, the house is clean, the food is free and tasty). Students are then asked to write two possible concluding sentences for the paragraph.

One student wrote something to the effect of, "Being home is great because I have my own room" for one and "Being home is great because the house is clean" for the other. We pointed out that, while these sentences refer to ideas mentioned in the paragraph, they don't really work as concluding sentences; they each focus on only one major supporting detail rather than either summing up the paragraph as a whole or answering the "So what?" question: Now that you've told us all this stuff, what should we do with this information.

We felt we had done a good job of explaining our concerns. Then, we read the next student's homework. Her suggested concluding sentences? "Being home is great because I have my own room." And, "Being home is great because the house is clean."

As mentioned above, we had no moral objection to this. Our concerns were more selfish. Were we ethically obliged to rewrite the entire comment that we had just written to Student A? Could we simply say to Student B, "See comment on Student A's homework"? Would it matter who had copied off of whom, or if they had simply worked together at a table? What if this were a highly-unlikely but still plausible case where two students simply had the same slightly imperfect idea?

In the end, we gave Student B a slightly shorter version of the comment on Student A's paper. If nothing else, we proved to ourselves that with revision comes concision.