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To be clear, the beyond a jerk move part is doing this in front of the class with such flimsy evidence. I have see this before. It happened to a black woman friend. In this case the professor's flimsy evidence was a shift in tone which happens in editing all the time.
That said, hence is an adverb and not a conjunction. Hence there is no comma after hence. BTW, this punctuation mistake argues strongly against plagiarism.
We (as outsider observers) lack the evidence to judge this story objectively. It sucks to be unfairly accused of plagiarism (it happened to me once in high school). However, we don't know why the professor came to the conclusion that she plagiarised. Maybe they jumped to conclusions on limited evidence, or maybe this paper was written with vocabulary and sentence structure which was inconsistent with the student's ea…
I'd say the professor was wrong in this situation no matter what happened for publicly humiliating a student and also thinking one suspicious word warrants an accusation of plagiarism. However there is nothing in the article that indicates that the professor was specifically targeting her for her race, other than 'I deal with racism every day'. Without knowing more about the situation it's hard to say more. Despite this, there's quite a few comments in this thread already that seem emotionally loaded.
Think about it this way: A while ago an article was posted about discrimination against conservative Christians in academia, and some of the discussion here was appallingly hypocritical; the same kinds of people advocating diversity in race, culture, and thought were openly admitting that they don't think Christians, as a group, should be allowed in decision-making processes, because they're obviously all gullible idiots. Does that mean when I go for my PhD I would be justified in writing my own teary blog post should someone act condescending and rude to me? Would I be justified regardless of whether the discrimination was real or perceived? Would such a post be received with positive feedback? Would I be allowed to call academia 'completely broken'?
We (as outsider observers) lack the evidence to judge this story objectively. It sucks to be unfairly accused of plagiarism (it happened to me once in high school). However, we don't know why the professor came to the conclusion that she plagiarised. Maybe they jumped to conclusions on limited evidence, or maybe this paper was written with vocabulary and sentence structure which was inconsistent with the student's ea…
The fact that you're being down voted means you're absolutely correct about two things: that 1) this is a very emotionally charged story and emotionally charged pieces are hard to discuss civilly, and 2) we as commenter cannot truly judge the situation, especially with only one side speaking out. The rest I don't know about - it seems definitely possible that the professor could be a racist, I don't know why you woul…
It seemed pretty clear that the author is drawing an inference that "not your language" means "you don't speak English well enough to use this word or write like this," and therefore, that the author was cheating. I think that is a reasonable inference given the context provided, assuming it's all truthful.
It looks like the professor pulled a jerk move, jumping to conclusions based on scant evidence. Yet the writer seems to conclude that happened because of her ethnicity, without offering any evidence to support that. Maybe the professor is just a presumptuous jerk who pulls that with students regardless of their race, sex or ethnicity. I'm not saying that's the case, because I have no evidence either way.
"Hence" is fairly common in modern English, but is it common in the writings of this student?
One such example of this is that one of my students used a "while not in" loop which they had never done before. I looked at it puzzled for a second and then went "wait a minute, one of my other students used this in every lab since we introduced the while statement". I pull up the code, compare it, and BAM! I've got a match.
Just because something is possible/correct in a language and that the person wiring the piece has every bit of ability to use the complex structure at had it doesn't mean they would normally do so. Sure it's not accurate, and sure you may not be right with every call (hasn't happened to me yet but other TAs have called people out and have turned out to be wrong), but it's something that I'd call a "clue" that something is different.
Either the student put more time into the work and found a better/alternate way of approaching the problem, the student asked a friend to help with describing the structure (or in this case what wording to use), or in the only case that presents malice: they copied it.
The only way you can find out is by going to the student and confidently saying something to the effect of "I know you've engaged in some questionalbe academic behavior, this is your time to explain yourself before I contact my boss and have them run a more though investigation". Cheaters usually crack instantly. (pro-tip for anyone on the outside who is cheating: just lie to us, we're probably not going to follow up unless it's extremely obvious if you've got a 1/4 way decent explanation).
I see nothing wrong with this. Just talk to the professors boss and they'll sort it out. This is especially true for cases where you actually did write the work.
Also, I highly doubt anyone questions the intellect of the writer. They are obviously a gifted person.
We (as outsider observers) lack the evidence to judge this story objectively. It sucks to be unfairly accused of plagiarism (it happened to me once in high school). However, we don't know why the professor came to the conclusion that she plagiarised. Maybe they jumped to conclusions on limited evidence, or maybe this paper was written with vocabulary and sentence structure which was inconsistent with the student's ea…
When I read this piece, I immediately flashed back to my first week of college, decades ago.
Apparently on the basis of my entrance essay, the school decided I should skip English 101 and placed me in ENGL102 the first semester. When we received the first assignment (a criticism and synopsis of some article I don't remember) back from the professor, held back the two he thought were the best to ask those students to read them to the class as examples of what he wanted to see.
It was too early for him to know our names so he called the first name and gave that student his paper to read. Then he called my name and I raised my hand. I'm black. He did an obvious double-take, looked down at the paper to verify that he had picked up the right one, then looked up, raised his eyebrows slightly and brought it to me. It was impossible to miss the subtext and I just stared at him for a few seconds, then shrugged internally and read the damn thing.
You don't always have the benefit of knowing all sides to a story, but often, even knowing only one side, conclusions can be drawn fairly accurately.
I've had professors do this to me. I don't understand what's wrong with this. This is a common thing I even do when grading programming assignments. When I notice a stylistic choice that is outside of the norm for the students I can usually tell exactly who the work came from. Every semester I catch at least one group of cheaters (This semester I caught two!) and they admit to it after I confront them with it. "Hence…
The professor did the first and evidently only the first.
I am amazed that a professor would be so surprised by a student using the word "hence". Most professors I've had would probably have taken off points for using it over a simpler alternative like "therefore" or just a different sentence structure that incorporated the two sentences without needing an adverb to tie them together.