Red Handed

It's bad enough catching a student plagiarizing. The awkward and potentially dramatic confrontation is about as bad as it gets. Unless a student is caught plagiarizing during a peer evaluation. My other students outed the plagiarizer in class! Holy crap! I had no idea what to do. We were group workshoping the piece and I had given it to the entire class without a name (and without noticing that half the paragraph came directly from the introduction). There were two options: 1) give them an impromptu lecture on the sins of plagiarizing and hope the student was roasting anonymously in his seat or 2) pretend it was a case of mistaken lifting but give a patronizing sermon about how that will be a major problem in a final draft. I opted for the second form of pontification and the student dutifully came to office hours later so could talk it through. The worst part was that I hadn't caught it in the first place and then was floored during class. Maybe my students should be grading the essays too. If only.