I honestly do not have a problem with formulaic essays as in my experience there is a lot to be learned through copying good structures. In English writing classes in the US (I was a high school English teacher before), we teach a very formulaic 5 paragraph essay. It is not a fill-in-the-blank structure, but it has enough of a strict format and plenty of stock phrases that make it more like putting a puzzle together than painting a picture. The point of a 5 paragraph essay and perhaps these stock essays that the Chinese use is to communicate one’s point in a short period of time for testing purposes. This standard structure makes the essays easier to grade.

The issue is that some students mistake these stock essays-for-the-purposes-of-tests-and-other-large-group-assessments for real writing which seeks to express a point through the most appropriate format and convey a feeling through the most carefully chosen words and sentences. In my classes, I teach the American essay format as a part of our writing course. I then differentiate that kind of essay writing from more creative essay writing. But of course, if the student does not have anything he/she cares about saying then there is nothing a teacher can do to prevent him/her from using stock essays and copying other people’s writing. I also only teach writing as a process and require my students to show me all stages of writing. This makes copying much harder.

Anyway, my two cents or my two cent as my homies like to say.

Which is why so many chinese do it, why waste time and energy being creative.

Only now I know why a Chinese girl gave me her Essay and told me she was afraid someone on the internet had stolen it and got me to check, she was doing a degree coarse in Business here in Ireland and must have wanted to check if I could find the source of her hard work. She passed also.

On the other hand, who besides the unlucky graders cares if people write lame, pointless essays on standardized language exams? In fact it seems like the ideal context for them. I just wish the influence of the tests on the classroom were less, so I didn’t have to resort to threats, punishment and cunningly designed assignments to keep the mad-libs out.

Surely, hopefully, students are not being taught to write such empty nonsense when they’re doing their real writing, in their native language…but that’s out of my 外教 hands.

(We need to name that screen. Microsoft Windows had the Blue Screen of Death — maybe Google Chrome has the “Big Red Panic Screen”?)

To drive home my ‘rage’, I picked out one student and totally ripped into her, quoting the company website where her essay was copied from. After about 15 minutes of moralising about the ethics of cheating, she asked me to click the ‘About Us’ section and pointed to her own picture on the webpage. Turns out she was the owner of the company. Crap!