Armchair Psychologist with Dr. Me: What's Your Motivation?

Although I am a doctor (not that kind of doctor), I am not a practicing therapist of any sort (though try telling that to the students who unload WTFTMI in their emails where all they really want is an extension). So the following attempts to plumb the depths of the student psyche are a mixture of anecdotal evidence, cursory research on the internet (thanks to the retro-fabulous academic dishonesty 1997-style HTML site at Old Dominion University), and my personal favorite, rampant unchecked speculation.

I think the latter quality is actually an excellent skill for early draft-writing in academic work, and definitely provided me with all of my weirdest ideas (some of which, funnily enough, are after extensive revision and despeculifying, being committed to scholarly-journal print as I type this!), but it often gets me into trouble at home ("I think I know why our neighbor plays his video games so loudly! It's because he's ENORMOUS, so because he's so Shaq-uesque, he must do everything loudly!"). Actual recent conversation.

Ahem. Anyway, rampant speculation is a "skill" I've had since I learned to talk: my earliest preschool teachers explained to my parents that, at 2.5, I already had "an explanation for everything." 31.85 years later, this holds true, and so now I am going to try to explain why, to the best of my untrained ability, students turn in work they didn't do and claim it as their own. Then, because this is Paper Intervention and not Paper Shame on You Plagiarists, I'll suggest viable, easy alternatives that appeal to exactly this kind of motivation/personality type.

TYPE 1. "I am a college 'customer,' here to pay to get a piece of paper that will get me a job." This is the #1 plagiarism cause on Old Dominion's site for a reason--with the current wisdom being that all good jobs need a college degree, and thus all high-school graduates need to have a college degree, even (and especially) if they hate (or think they hate) learning more than anything in the world. This is actually the reasoning my ex-husband used to justify embezzling money from his college engineering club, so it "excuses" all sorts of fraud, not just the academic kind. I can't believe I'm not married anymore, right? 

Anyway, it makes a lot of sense in today's overconsumerized environs that if a college education is just something you pay for like a triple-decaf mocha-coconut Frappucino with extra whip (BUT SKIM MILK, I'm watching my weight, obvz!), and you think of your prof like a barista whose job it is to take your money and turn it into a Frappucino while you text your friends ("Frappucino" here meaning "piece of paper claiming you are now the owner of a certain and specific body of knowledge"), then obviously asking you to get behind the counter and put all that crap into the blender yourself is going to make you all like wtf? So it's almost like you paid to turn in the paper, and it doesn't matter how you got it, right? I feel you, as nobody says anymore, and I'm not here to try to change your mind about how you feel about college. However:

• REBUTTAL. A potential one, at least. So, back to the Starbucks analogy. When you pay $7 for that glorified milkshake, you are entering into a miniature contract with the barista and with Starbucks as an institution: you are paying for a certain mixture of ingredients (or, as RHONJ Teresa would say, "ingrediences") to be added to their proprietary SuperBlender with ice, etc etc. If they took your money and then served you a festering pile of dog doo instead, you'd be all like, DOUBLE WTF? This isn't what I paid for. And that's what you might want to remember in college. Just like it's not Starbucks' purview to serve festering piles of dog doo, it is not our purview to "sell degrees." If we "sell" you a degree, that degree becomes nothing more than a faceless coin masquerading as professional "currency" (that's a reference to NIETZSCHE, bitches, "On Truth and Lying in an Extramoral Sense," various editions, I use the GERMAN six-volume Werke, so booya). If we can give you anything--a festering pile of dog doo, for example--and call it a "degree," then, just like at Starbucks, you are not getting your money's worth.
• EASY SOLUTION. Instead of wasting your money on a paper you didn't write that will thus garner you a degree that is worth as much as a festering pile of dog doo, spend that money on more coffee and an industrial-strength pair of earplugs or noise-canceling headphones. Then put those babies on and promise yourself to devote 15 minutes more a day to studying than you now do--then once you've done 15, do 30, 45, and an hour (incrementally). Each time you do, think about it this way: "I owe it to myself to get my money's worth out of my college education. I owe it to myself to be the person that diploma says I will be. I am WORTH working on, to get smarter and better." All right, I have to stop before I barf.

TYPE 2. "This class isn't in my major, and therefore it is a serious grade-A waste of my time." This is, more or less, a variation on Type 1, with the difference that while Type-1 students believe ALL college is a waste of their time, Type-2 students believe anything outside their course of study is a waste of time. After all, if you are going to college to study Animal Husbandry and they're forcing you to take a year of French, it's almost like they deserve to get a year's worth of bad Google translations for making you do something so stupid.

• REBUTTAL: Remember that unless you go to one of those loosey-goosey colleges with no requirements (in which case: enjoy Hampshire and please don't drop out), when your college or university plans courses of study, they spend just as much time planning what to require EVERYONE to take, or what to require certain majors to take as breadth requirements. They are not making you take French because they want to keep the French department in business (in fact, universities seem to enjoy closing foreign-language departments these days), and enjoy torturing you. They are making you take French (or any foreign language) because they know that knowing more than one language does the following: 1) makes you better at English and thus a better communicator 2) makes you more competitive on the global marketplace, which, guess what, is THE marketplace now, 3) makes your brain better at learning all sorts of stuff (there have been studies). The same can be said for "forcing" foreign-language majors to take math (I wish they'd made me take more math in retrospect!), "forcing" business majors to take literature (EGAD, being well-read and great at formulating arguments will never make you a better business negotiator!!!), etc. 
• SOLUTION. One day when you're bored, Google all the people in the world who got their bazillion-dollar idea or life's passion or met their spouse in a class they didn't think they "had" to take. Then throw yourself into yours and think about how making yourself a dynamic, multifaceted person can allow you to put "dynamic, multifaceted person" on your future resume--and start scouring your classroom for hotties. Nobody says "hottie" anymore, do they? Well, that's 90s slang for "attractive person," so do that.

TYPE 3. "I'm overworked/desperate/prone to mental blocks and I waited until the last minute and NOW IT'S TOO LATE and I HAVE TO." This is by far the most common reason students commit fraud (buying a "custom essay") or plagiarism. As someone who unsuccessfully employed the "I'll wake up early before class and do the reading" ruse 900 times in college (THAT NEVER WORKS, does it? I never learned!), I am a bona fide expert on this. And yet, all anyone ever seems to do to "remedy" this situation is tell you to start earlier next time. That causes despondency and a vicious cycle of more dishonesty in my experience. What I wish more profs or teachers would tell their desperate students instead is:

• "Yes, you may have an extension...for a slight deduction that will not, I repeat, will not, be a big deal in the long run."
• "Just scrawl something out and turn it in--it will probably be better than 60% of what I get anyway." Sad, but true.
• "You're an undergraduate for crying out loud--nobody expects Harold Bloom. And, actually, nobody even likes Harold Bloom." 

• "You would actually be better off not turning in anything than turning in something you didn't write yourself." This one is super-true. A no-show may get you a zero, but it will never get you expelled.

Of course, my "easy solutions" to Type-3 appear on this very blog as all the Interventions I've done so far (go to the link bar on your right and take your pick based on how desperate you are!).

Well, I hope you've enjoyed your time on the couch and I'm sorry you can't get extra credit for doing all this reading that isn't even for your major. I mean, you're overscheduled and paying my salary, so it's the least I can do for you, right?