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[SimonM]

Ok so who can top this?

A fourth year student asks me to proofread her essay for her. I say that I will and she tries to hand me a bundle of papers and walk off. I say: "not so fast" if I proof read this for you we are going to get together and you are going to be right there when I do it so that we can talk about your essay."

"oh... ok"

So the student arrives half an hour later than the time we agreed to meet and discuss the paper. She hands me six loose sheets of paper and an orange bound booklet. I open the booklet and she tells me it is someone else's essay from a previous year. I say "well I won't look at that than" and set it aside. Onto the six loose sheets of paper. She starts with two quotes. Both are from chinese sources. The first is poorly translated but it is translated into English. With a bit of re-structuring we are able to reorganize the quote into something resembling proper grammar. The second quote is by Confucius. It's not even fully translated. Some of the words have been left in pinyin. I ask her to explain what the quote means and she can not. I cross the quote out and go on into the body of HER work.

Well one paragraph later I am suspecting that she wrote the essay in Chinese and then translated it with babblefish or some similar translation suite. There is no semblance of english grammar and the haphazard words forming here sentence are so scrambled that it is literally impossible to extract any meaning from them. I tell her my suspitions and she confirms that she in fact did do this. She then says "but what about this part, I wrote this myself".

So I read the part she is pointing to. It's obviously an un-cited quote. I mean the only mistakes are missing capitals and punctuation that is put in the right place but with a space before commas and periods. So it was clear to me that she had typed that stuff herself... from another source. I tell her this and after an initial objection she fesses up to this. But it's OK because in China you don't have to reference every quote.

By this point I'm not exactly pleased with this student. It was clear she wanted me to ghostwrite her final essay for her. That wasn't about to happen. So I tell her that if she wants MY help she had to adhere to MY standard. That means that she must properly cite all her quotes. That means that she must produce a bibliography of references. That means that she must write the essay in english to begin with so that the grammar, even if imperfect, is still something that can be corrected.

She appologized profusely and promised to do the changes I told her to. I don't know if I will hear from her again.

Can anyone top that? :p

[7969]

i know what you're talking about. have seen some of these "translations" myself. actually, when discussing worst essays/research papers, i was thinking of one of my own that i wrote many years ago for a first year geography course..... i saved all that stuff in a box back home and once in awhile i go back and reread what i wrote..... my writing style at that time was awful. it made sense, but the prof was very generous in giving me a C for that effort.

7969