Graduation and plagiarism

I just got back from walking in our graduation ceremony. I'm still not used to participating as a faculty member; it feels wrong to not be in the student row. But instead of walking across the stage, I got to sit there with my pretty colored hood on, look official, and chat with the local chemists about the various students we knew who were graduating.

While I still have an incredibly large stack of papers that need to be graded (I just gave my final exam today, and still have other papers to grade as well), instead of grading I've been spending most of my time writing academic dishonesty reports for the dean. So far I've found four five plagiarized papers; for each paper I have to confront the student, and then type up a multi-page report detailing both the plagiarism and the student's response. This is not the way I'd hoped to spend the evening, but given how the past few semesters have gone, I shouldn't be surprised.

[Update May 27, 7:30pm: Found another plagiarized paper today, and managed to get all the reports in to the dean. But my pile of grading is still far too high.]