It’s not so much a “pass” as ascribing the correct behavior and applying the correct consequence.
Academic dishonesty often carries with it consequences like automatic failure, invalidation of all other coursework, and expulsion.
Academic incompetence, on the other hand, may carry temporary failure, but also the chance for the student to redeem him or herself through other previous or subsequent coursework, tutoring, and other forms of intervention.
No one’s saying give her an “A,” in fact, failing the paper might be the appropriate course of action. But if the student just doesn’t know, perhaps they can learn.
I emailed the student earlier today and told her that her paper, as it stands now, is borderline plagiarism and that I was tempted to fail her on the spot. However, I gave her until Monday’s class to turn in a new paper.
Whereas the first student paid someone to do her paper, and it was word for word a copy from the Internet, this student at least took the time to fiddle with the words she was stealing - still not kosher in my book, but will give the benefit of the doubt and offer a way out for her.
I have lots of papers to grade this weekend and dread finding another few tidbits like this example. If I do, I will report back.
Thank you all for your comments! Your insights were very helpful in making my decision.
At my university, the rule would be that I turn this in to the university judicial committee and let them sort it out. By our rules, “plagiarism” covers unintentional as well as deliberate plagiarism.
I’m at a community college, but the policy is similar. I believe it’s based on the idea that the professor would have already covered plagiarism, citing, and so on in class; and that after receiving such information, the students should have at least an idea of what not to do.
I make sure to pound it into their heads the very first week. That doesn’t guarantee that they’ll never try it, but at least they won’t be able to say that they weren’t warned or that I never covered it.
Luckily my university gives the professor some discretion. It is up to him or her to report the case, or he or she can deal with it “in house,” with penalties ranging from an F to a rewrite. Of course the student can complain if they feel the punishment is too harsh… but nobody’s that stupid.
The school’s judicial process is fairly open ended. We have a lot of discretion in deciding sanctions against students. We’re not legally bound by precedent because our process is not a legal one. Nevertheless, there is a concern that some consistency should be applied across the board. In my experience, our students have sacrificed and worked diligently to get to this point in their academic career. I can recall only one case over several years where I, and members of the committee felt that the student basically copied someone’s work with malice.
It is almost always the gray areas, and many times, the type of conversation that DMark had with the student, along with a failing grade or rewrite for reduced credit option, is sufficient to educate and sanction the student. The outcomes for students in the judicial process are either toothless (reprimand, notation on a student’s record for a period of time) or far too draconian (expulsion, suspension). We don’t have the advantage of observing the student over a semester and knowing them in a context outside of their plagiarism. And often professors come to members of the committee expressing shock over the sanctions the students receive. That’s why I recommend that professors take control of the sanctioning, unless it is a clear cut case of malicious, wanton, brazen disregard of academic honesty policies.
My school is the number one graduate school in my discipline. Yet I cannot state with confidence that students clearly understand the policies on academic honesty. That’s partly their fault, but also the fault of the faculty who give unclear instructions, or allow students to collaborate and report them for having similar responses. Furthermore I do not believe that students are getting strong instruction on academic honesty in high school or in undergrad.
And like it or not, it is a different world. When I was in high school and first in undergrad, the internet was a useless resource for research. There was nothing on it! Nobody used Lexis-Nexis or ERIC or JSTOR (if they even existed). Plagiarism required you finding a book/article/magazine and copying by hand. I don’t doubt for a second that students entering grad school now have been using the web for sources from high school on. Most teachers are great at warning students about plagiarism, but won’t take the time to discuss what is appropriate, and what is iffy. More importantly, making it clear that if students are unclear, they should err on the side of caution and ask first. As I tell students in my section, “If it feels like it’s dodgy, it is.”
Nobody wants to spend class time discussing plagiarism instead of course content. But I get the feeling that’s been happening in all of the places that students should have these discussions, from middle school onward…
Funny. When my mom still taught junior high, my dad’s favorite unit was the poetry unit. At the end of the unit, each student had to write an original poem. Didn’t have to rhyme, meter was optional, etc. And yet some students plagiarized.
So mom would collect the poems, bring them home, and dad would spend the weekend on the internet trying to see if anyone had plagiarized.
Mom, on the other hand, was the one who had to sit through the parent-teacher conferences, while the kid’s mom explained why it wasn’t really plagiarism, or if it was, it was mom’s fault for assigning such hard work!!
DMark, I think you picked the most noble reaction. Hopefully, this is the last of it.
Beyond a requirement to include a bibliography (maybe) in our paper in addition to being told “not to cheat”, there wasn’t much discussion about academic honesty. In my first college comp class we discussed proper ways to cite a source, in MLA, but we didn’t spend much time on how to avoid plaigarism.
In comp 2, we spent a lot more time going over how to properly cite sources and how to avoid plaigarism. The instructor gave us a few papers written by past students who plagiarized (names removed of course) in addition to giving us several exercises to practice correct citations of sources. Despite his efforts, there were two people in the class who got busted for plagiarism and received zeroes on their papers. One of the students was in trouble for just a few sentences he copied and the other for copying whole paragraphs.
In Advanced Comp. the instructor was adamant about teaching students how to properly cite and how to avoid plagiarism. It was a lot like Comp 2 except there was no literature component and they graded grammar a lot harsher. Yes, I can write in a grammatically correct manner, but choose not to when I post because I’m exclectic and charming. Ok, I’m lazy.
I had a history teacher who told us to write a paper but not to bother with cites. I felt like I was cheating the entire time I wrote the paper.
I find this rather disturbing, when I was at Uni in the late 1970s our tutors wanted us to do well.
One vivid memory is when a very smart guy copied an essay written by a friend of his who had been in the year above at school. The original mark was an Alpha, my contemporary got a Beta+. He immediately said that he had copied it verbatim and the tutor said: ‘I mark on ability - not the work’
I am still not sure how to evaluate that, but it made us sit back and think.
In another case a guy transferred to our course and plagiarized my essays (yet again politics) he had problems removing my sarcastic asides and jokes, in some ways that might have been beneficial - we later found that this particular tutor kept a separate reading list so our rather heavy workload was a diversion from his alternative and citeable version.
In this case it is poor citation, not plagiarism.
In some ways the student could be criticized for not being sneaky enough, one can cite something that is difficult to track down - and is totally invented.
In a roundabout way, what I am trying to say is that the student is the product, not some A4 scribblings. You are teaching them how to learn, and in the real world devious and underhand methods are often more useful than conventional methods.
I suggest an Ethics class subject: when is cheating the least obnoxious option ?
Your students are not the end product, what matters is what they do later.
I’m going to swallow all my initial knee-jerk reactions about how cheating is immoral.
I just have one question for you: How does learning which source to regurgitate actually do anything to further the student’s own knowledge or understanding of the topic at hand? I don’t see how the normal student actually learns anything aside from how to hone one’s ability to steal someone else’s work by the kind of plagiarism you’d mentioned in your post.
I remember being terrified of accidentally plagiarizing something when I started college. We were constantly told that plagiarism was a very big deal and could get our asses booted from school. I could have benefited greatly from some discussion, with examples, of what is good, bad, and questionable.
Due to my nervousness, I paid a lot of attention to citations. I made trips to the Writing Center (a place where we could get help with papers) to ask questions about them. I still made mistakes. I never stumbled to the point of getting in trouble, but I did get a few comments such as, “You don’t need to cite something like this,” “You cited this incorrectly,” and even, “Do you have a reference for this?” Yes, we covered this stuff in highschool, but I still made mistakes. I was corrected, and I learned. I’m glad I was given that opportunity.
I’m in a major where we do very little paper writing. We mostly do hands-on work in our field. Last year we had a very short research paper to do, and the assignment required us to use a certain style guide and make a proper reference guide. So I went through and did the paper to those details as required.
When I got the paper back, it was a good mark. He had marked me off a bit because of my running head on the cover page (I forget exactly what was wrong). That was all cool, I understood. And then when my classmates starting talking about their marks, I realized no one else had actually used the style guide. Most people’s reference pages were a list of website URLs, no proper form used. No one used a running head. Cover pages were not done to style spec. A lot of people did just what the student in the OP did: went to Wikipedia and just changed some words. And the ones talking about their marks all got within a few percent of me. The paper was so short a good part of my time was used making it conform to the style guide. If I had known the instructor didn’t care anyway, I could have got done much quicker.
Like a few people in this thread, when I did my one year of university before switching to a tech school for the aforementioned program, I was so scared of accidentally plagiarizing. I was never really taught how to write at the university level when it came to it. At the elementary and high school levels, it was considered fine to just reword your source without using cites. Because of that, I was so confused on how to use cites. When did you use them? Didn’t you always just reword without citing anyway? I only used cites when doing direct quotes. I’m still a bit confused about it, but I’ve never had to deal with it since that one year of university.
I realize that the matter has been pretty well resolved, but I am curious about one point.
The assignment was a five-page paper. The stolen bit was a paragraph. How much of the rest of the paper appeared to be stolen? How much of the rest of the paper appeared to be the student’s work? The answers to those questions would have figured prominently in my decision regarding “clueless on using sources appropriately” vs “blatant plagiarism.”
At my school, if I were to pull something like that, I’d automatically be failed. If I did it a second or third time (not sure), suspended. If you were to write a paper for a class, submit it to Turnitin, drop the class, then take it again, you are not allowed to resubmit the paper!
Most of the business and tech faculty at my school use Turnitin.com so whenever I do any group papers with people I have never worked with before, I pretty much feed chunks of the paper into Google. I have caught a group member copying before.
The more honest group members have asked for help on how to cite secondary sources. Some people believe that if you reword a piece of information enough, it does not need a cite. Or that you can use five sentences you pulled from a source and attach the cite once at the end. That last example is a little tricky, and needs a little creativity to manage.
I think workshops that teach referencing/citation should be mandatory for every college student.
Well, those days were pre-wordprocessor, so a fair degree of effort was involved, also we had small tutorials so it became pretty obvious if someone did not have a clue. Our system was two totally different subjects per week (different tutors) with a hefty reading list, essay followed by tutorial to discuss the essay.
Generally one would read out the essay - that would be discussed, then the essays marked later. Thinking about it, essays were not always marked as coursework did not contribute.
It was not exactly ‘stealing someone else’s work’, we always discussed things anyway - we were not competitive with each other - if anything the opposite - our tutors were only concerned that we understood the subject and obviously that we could perform in the final examinations.
Although it sounds odd, in real life quite a lot of things involve gathering information, understanding it and re-presenting it in a form others understand.
I don’t think even by UK standards, we were ‘normal’ students and none of us would have dreamt of submitting something they did not understand, but we got pretty good at finding quicker ways of ‘cutting to the chase’.
Personally I think that blindly copying (or even worse buying in) an essay is stupid, but for us it did not matter as course work did not count.
I would put it to poor scholarship. Point out to the student that the proper way to quote other people words is to credit them with the source cited. :o
The paper was so short a good part of my time was used making it conform to the style guide. If I had known the instructor didn’t care anyway, I could have got done much quicker.