doing the grading is making me want to gouge out my own eyes with a fork

Okay, not really. But what is it about 19-year-old boys that makes them selectively deaf to instructions of any sort? I said, when handing back the first batch of papers, I told them, I did, I said: where most of you went wrong was that you selected random sentences from the two books you were supposed to be comparing, ran them through a word processor's thesaurus function to avoid plagiarism, and dumped them on the pages until you had enough words. Don't do that!

So why did all the 19-year-old boys in my class who did that the first time do it again? The girls who did that on the first paper did not do it on this second paper. But the boys did exactly what they did before, but more so. If I told those boys not to chew glass, would they go chew glass? If so, do you think I should tell them not to chew glass?

I actually wrote this on one student's paper: Do not paraphrase. You do not understand what you are reading well enough to paraphrase it. Which is not very kind of me, but it's true and I'm tenured.