What is going on with these students?

[Hegemony]

I am teaching an online course right now. It is asynchronous, meaning there is no face-to-face interaction with the students. There's a lot of written interaction, but I never see their faces.

I have two students from China, and although they are students at our (American) university, both of them are back home in China right now for the summer. I'll make up pseudonyms for them; let's call one Wi Wi and the other Zhangwei Chen. The first one is confusing to me, because hu said that hu's name was Wi Wi, but hu sometimes signs huself Wi and sometimes Wiwi. I should mention that they are asked to sign all their posts.

I've noticed that Wi Wi and Zhangwei Chen seem to make their posts at nearly the same time. They also submit their assignments at the same time.

Now one of the posts from Wi Wi (as Canvas identifies hu) is signed "Zhangwei."  Slip of the keyboard?

So it looks to me as if one student is doing the course for two people.

Now what?

I'll add that reading their writing is peculiar, because their English is not great, but they obviously take little phrases from written English. They can't cheat on the assignments because they're on topics no one has written about, so plagiarism isn't an option. But their paragraphs will look something like this:

"The problem of peasant in England very difficult. Peasant not able to vote and not affect laws. As a consequence, the Parliament make laws that disadvantage landholders. In the case in question, a peasant name John Harley can not find work. John is going to make riot. To make riot is way to initiate change in the political system, but magistrate Fletcher endeavor to use the power of troops to quell the unrest...."

A peculiar and somewhat hilarious effect!

[spork]

You need to set up different assignments for these "two" students to see what happens -- two different prompts or whatever. Canvas has the ability to restrict assignments to particular students, not sure about other LMS platforms.

My guess is that it's the same person, or two people sitting side by side and one is copying the other. If you do not have plagiarism detection software like Turnitin activated, you should, and start grading whichever piece of writing arrives after the other as zero if they are close to identical.

[theblackbox]

I would be very concerned that there is either collusion between the two or a single hired person to do the course hired on their behalf. I don't teach asynchronously, but I'd have all students meet with me in small groups at least once or twice for the semester to do a check in, give feedback, ask about their projects, etc. I'd recommend doing this and having both Wiwi and Zhangwei assigned to the same small group. Naturally, this assumes it's not a 100 person course.

Pedagogically, I count off for grammar and spelling, even with international students when it is this egregious, and suggest they work with our campus writing center for repeated errors. Few if any employers would accept this writing. Missing verbs or subject/verb agreement issues need to be addressed or they'd be at risk for a poor grade in the class regardless of cheating or not.

Sorry you're stuck trying to decipher who is taking your class!

[spork]

[. . .]

a single hired person to do the course hired on their behalf.

[. . .]

My wife encountered this with two U.S. students. They claimed to have the same "tutor" that they had used since high school. So basically they or their parents had been paying the same person to write essays for years and the guy was lazy.

[Hegemony]

The assignments, I mean the things that they turn in, are actually not at all similar. So even if only one person is doing both assignments, that person is doing twice as much work.

As for their English — our university has discovered a way to attract wealthy Chinese students even when every other American university is competing for them. Have a lower required English as a Foreign Language score than all the other universities!  A score that practically any applicant could get just by choosing random answers!  Yes, that's the secret formula.

We have great numbers of Chinese students, the majority of them with English like that. If I found that level of English unacceptable, I'd be failing every single one of the Chinese students. And it's not as if we offer the resources for them to upgrade their English. Instead, I read "through" the poor English and look for the ideas. I will say that the majority of our Chinese students are hard-working and earnest, which is more than I can say of many of our native speakers. As for these two, I dunno.

[Parasaurolophus]

We have great numbers of Chinese students, the majority of them with English like that. If I found that level of English unacceptable, I'd be failing every single one of the Chinese students. And it's not as if we offer the resources for them to upgrade their English. Instead, I read "through" the poor English and look for the ideas.

I'm sorry I have nothing more to contribute, but I sympathise entirely on this front. It sounds like an exaggeration, but I kid you not, that's what about 85%-90% of student work looks like in my classes (they're international, but not from China). (And, like you said, they're not to blame: it's the recruitment strategy you identified, which we use, too.)

[mamselle]

They may also be using translation software or those hand-held "translators" which produce as much mangled text as anything.

M.

[polly_mer]

They may also be using translation software or those hand-held "translators" which produce as much mangled text as anything.

M.

I doubt it based on spending a lot of time with Chinese engineering students and professors.  I review professional papers with that kind of syntax and routinely recommend a copy editor help when the science is good enough.

[kaysixteen]

I am generally aware that East Asian college pedagogy emphasizes regurgitation and memorization, but it is not my impression that overt plagiarism/ cheating is acceptable there.  Or am I in error?

[spork]

I am generally aware that East Asian college pedagogy emphasizes regurgitation and memorization, but it is not my impression that overt plagiarism/ cheating is acceptable there.  Or am I in error?

I'd say it's just as common in China as it is in the USA, and it is rampant in the USA.

[polly_mer]

Agreed with Spork.  Overt plagiarism/cheating is supposedly not acceptable here and yet it happens, sometimes spectacularly.

When I was director of online education, I investigated an oddity case where a student had a consistent voice in any one course, but had no consistency in voice between courses.  I had access to the IP logs and this name was logging in from a variety of geographic locales.  The locales were all within the continental United States and I didn't find a smoking gun (e.g., 9 AM log in from Denver for course A, 10 AM log in from Anchorage for course B), but it was really weird.  We wanted to believe being a truck driver or a frequent business traveler, but the getting-to-know-you posts didn't indicate that kind of background.

As it happens, this particular student had been admitted before I was director and the filing system had no transcripts from previous institutions attended (this person was not the only individual in that situation; record keeping had not been a core value immediately prior to my time).  I was also wearing the hat that required me to interact with the National Student Clearinghouse, so I could see that the student in question had attended previous institutions. 

I emailed the student asking for official transcripts from previous institutions attended with the warning that the student would not be allowed to enroll in future terms until those transcripts were received.  The email responses were in yet another voice, promising to send the transcripts.  Near the start of the next term, I emailed again pointing out we still didn't have the transcripts and the student was not currently enrolled in any courses.  I never heard from that student again.

[arcturus]

This sounds like a potential case of academic misconduct. At my institution, the first step is to have a face-to-face meeting (now through zoom) for suspected cases of misconduct. While the timezone differences may make this more challenging, it should be straightforward to ask (individually) "what happened in discussion X?" Leave it open ended (don't accuse) and let them explain themselves. If they admit to doing the other person's work, or having someone do their work, then you file the appropriate documents. If not, grade the work as you would normally (at my institution, we cannot apply a sanction (0 for the assignment, for example) without having the discussion and filing the appropriate documents).

I will say that I have found (and filed) cases of academic misconduct simply because the other person put their own name on the document submitted. In one case, I asked the student how the other person had access to the student's Canvas account, given that we have two-factor authentication now. Her response was that she stayed logged into Canvas on her home computer, so he just uploaded the file when he had completed the assignment for her.

[the_geneticist]

I'd say it's suspicious enough to do a bit of investigating.  Too many coincidences to make me think that someone accidentally happened to sign their classmate's name on their own work.  I suppose it's plausible if the students are roommates, have to share one computer, and one student didn't realize that the other student was still logged in to Canvas.  But that's still a lot of "ifs".  And they would have to explain how they were both able to complete the assignment despite the mix up (Student A accidentally turns in work for student B, student B says it's OK to trade assignments?).

[mamselle]

Re: norms in other cultures, not only was absorption of classically revered sources and their uncited re-use common in Chinese scholarly circles that I knew of in the 20th c. (when I worked for an international academic institute in the sciences), but it was a sign of scholarly excellence to be able to recognize the streams of thought attributed to the primary scholars in a field, and NOT to have to rely on quotations, footnotes, or other extravocal signaling mechanisms.

If you were a well-trained scholar, you didn't cite those scholarly contributions because all other well-trained scholars would see them, know where they came from, and find a footnote insulting.

Students brought up in that system had a very hard time coming to US schools and being required to compartmentalize the voices of experts by direct attribution. To them it disrupted the narrative flow of the text, and was aesthetically wrong, as well as ethically unnecessary.

I don't know how or if those norms have shifted in the decades since I worked there (and had to edit/find citations for such pieces for our journal), but I was assured that it was a cultural difference with deep roots that meant the Western approach--so patently obvious to those of us raised in it--seemed clunky and inelegant to people whose standards for academic language were based on the incorporation of textual signs directly into their statements without external referencing.

So, there may be something like that still operant as well.

(There was a long discussion of this on the old forum, too, as I recall, a few years back).

M.

[Hegemony]

The situation gets weirder. It turns out that Wi Wi's email is "Zhangwei@[ouruniversity]."

Plus when I look up their transcripts, they have taken identical courses for their entire university career. The exact same courses as each other, every term for several years. But they do not have the same grades.

Maybe they are conjoined twins.