General Discussion

But students face a similar disparate level of scrutiny. It is often the weaker students, who are often minorities or 1st generation college students who face heightened scrutiny.

Plagiarism doesn't stick out like a sore thumb - you have to actively check for it. That is tedious work that most faculty don't have time to do - so checking is spotty. There is far less scrutiny applied to the law review editor (especially a white male one) than the student at the bottom of the class who turns in a better-than-expected paper (especially a minority one).

I am guilty of the same kind of bias. One of the classes I teach requires two kinds of essay writing. I grade blind, but when I enter the grades I notice whether the grade is consistent with other grades the students have earned. I started to notice a few students who could barely form complete sentences or perform legal analysis on the first type of essay (the easier kind), but who were writing at the top of the class on the second (more difficult kind). I started actively searching for where they copied the essays from and came up blank. After confirming that they weren't plagiarizing, I talked to them about what I was seeing. It turns out that these students - universally - had on-the-job experience in writing the second kind of essay under the same kind of time restraints imposed in class.

But I was barely keeping up with grading despite putting in 80-100 hours a week. So the plagiarism I checked for was only that which stuck out like a sore thumb: metadata that showed up from one paper to another, phrases that turned up repeatedly in multiple papers that didn't come from the source documents, or dramatic changes in writing ability within a student. Out of 1700 essays a semester, no more than 10 were obvious enough that I did any serious checking for plagiarism. (I graded far more essays than most faculty - most 1st year faculty graded 4-800 essays a year, mostly on exams where plagiarism is less likely; writing faculty graded 150-200 longer papers). So students being held to higher standards is also illusory. They are held to higher standards if their plagiarism is so obvious it stands out.