Hey, Piper School Board . . .

[phouka]

The saga of Piper High School

C’mere. I’m gonna let you into a few ideas. Try rubbing them together so’s you can generate a clue.

1. Plagiarism is a bad thing. It means that the students didn’t do the work they did. It means they cheated.

2. Cheating is a bad thing. People who cheat should not be rewarded for it. They should get a zero on whatever they cheated on.

3. Not backing up a teacher who catches students cheating is a bad thing. You have in effect told all the teachers in your schools “Ethics and professionalism don’t count. We don’t care about you. We just don’t want to have to deal with whiny parents who think their precious children should be rewarded for their cheating.”

4. Holding a secret meeting wherein you try to bully that teacher into rescinding the zeroes is a very bad thing. Not only is it unethical, it’s also illegal. That’s why the District Attorney is now on your case.

5. Whining that people are being mean to you is a stupid thing to do. You got caught doing bad things. Multiple bad things. Teachers, students, and parents are understandably upset. The press is having a field day. Universities are making a point of telling you that “plagiarism is a bad thing” (please see Point #1). Your reaction is not going to garner sympathy. It’s going to make people think that you are populated by anacephalic idiots.

My suggestion to you? That is, before you are possibly indicted, sued, recalled, and tarred and feathered? Come forward and admit that you pulled a complete bonehead move. Do NOT - repeat DO NOT - try to blame anyone else. Reinstate the zeroes on the plagiarized assignments. Make a public statement of apology to Ms. Pelton and ask her to return. Throw yourself on the mercy (if there is any) of the faculty, staff, and parents.

Of course, though, that will never happen . . .

[lel]

The part about that which bothered me was that now people who graduated from that school are going to have a harder time with employment and such because the school now will have “a reputation for cheating.” Those who are honest are unduly punished by the actions of the stupid school board.

[Spritle]

The only thing that bothers me is…

The controversy began last year when Pelton, a biology tacher, gave zeros to 28 students she accused of plagiarizing a botany project from the Internet.

(I added the italics.)

As a teacher, I understood the ramifications of accusing someone of cheating. You MUST assume the student did the work with good intent. I read many papers with “advanced language” that I knew was copied. The issue is the intent of the student. Many times, a student doesn’t have the ability to paraphrase the text and work it into the paper. This does NOT excuse the lack of citation, but many students don’t want to cite work in a paper for many reasons:

1. “admitting” that they didn’t “do the work”
2. not knowing that it is proper, appropriate and necessary to cite information.
3. not knowing how to properly cite work (endnotes, footnotes, whatever)

For the teacher to simply suspect and accuse the students, she is setting herself up for lots of headache. To actually give a student a zero, she must be positive that the student plagiarized with intent.

The article doesn’t say if this was the case or not.

[Spiritus_Mundi]

From here.

The students accused of plagiarism were among 118 whom Pelton taught during the day. Pelton said the project has been assigned to Piper High biology students for 10 years. The students were required to collect and study 20 leaves, write two paragraphs about each leaf and deliver an oral presentation.

Rooney said students were advised in writing during the first week of classes that a report on tree leaves would be required and that it would count as 50 percent of their grade. The students also were told that anyone who plagiarized would receive no credit.

From here.

Almost missed in the subsequent furore was that Christine Pelton had used Turnitin.com - a plagiarism detection service that scours the internet for matching phrases that students might have copied and pasted into an essay.

From here.

Teacher Christine Pelton noticed a disturbing trend.

“They were giving the same report, word-for-word,” Pelton says.

Pelton went to the Web and matched up entire paragraphs from some papers, then told the students they’d plagiarized.

“The kids claim they didn’t know how to cite and what plagiarism was, and we covered it in class,” Pelton says.

She referred them to the district handbook they received at the beginning of the year and the policy inside. She referred them to the same policy on the syllabus, which the kids and their parents had signed.

0 sympathy for the cheaters.
0 sympathy for the parents of cheaters.
0 sympathy for the school board.
Great sympathy for the teachers, honest students, administrators, and everyone else in Piper County who is suffering from association with boneheaded school boards, dishonest teenagers, and negligent parents.

[Whack-a-Mole]

*Originally posted by Spritle *
Many times, a student doesn’t have the ability to paraphrase the text and work it into the paper. This does NOT excuse the lack of citation, but many students don’t want to cite work in a paper for many reasons:

1. “admitting” that they didn’t “do the work”
2. not knowing that it is proper, appropriate and necessary to cite information.
3. not knowing how to properly cite work (endnotes, footnotes, whatever)

“Admitting they didn’t fo the work” isn’t really an excuse.

As for numbres two and three I would think any high school student would be quite aware of what constitutes cheating and that plagiarism is certainly in that class (even if they don’t know the word ‘plagiarism’). Not knowing the proper form for cites is no excuse. You either find out or take a stab at it yourself. Even if you get proper citing form all screwed-up I don’t think you’d get punished for plagiarism…you did try to cite the work.

Based on the information Spiritus gave I’d say these kids knew full well they were cheating and not doing their own work. It sounds as if they didn’t even try to cover their tracks by re-phrasing what they were copying (not that that makes plagiarism ok but it makes the kids doubly stupid and lazy).

How the school board ever thought it was a good idea to punish the teacher is beyond me. In college I had a class where over 90% of the students in the class failed an exam. The exam was protested as too difficult to the university and the university had graduate students go over the exam and give their opinions. They too agreed the test was too difficult. The university’s response? The failing grades stood but the professor had to submit future exams for approval by a panel of graduate students versed in that area. The point of all of this? Even though cheating didn’t happen here the university had a policy of standing behind its staff and supporting them in their decisions even when they seemed more wrong than right (up to a point). The Piper school board couldn’t even manage that in a much clearer case than the example I just described.

[Ike_Witt]

Spritle, the paragraph that appears after the one you quote says:

Pelton said she suspected plagiarism because some reports contained identical material. The school board overruled her decision on the grades in December.

That seem to be a good indication that something was up.

Doesn’t the education system make things like this more likely to happen? Students are told that they need good grades to get into college. I may be wrong, but isn’t school funding based on the performance of students? If that is the case than student are enticed to cheat to help themselves and the schoolboard is enticed to look the other way to ensure funds. Imagine what happens when the cheaters get to college and get suspended or expelled when they try the same stunt.

[Spritle]

Thanks, spiritus for that link. It sure sounds more cut and dried than the first-linked article made it out to be.

Whack, I totally agree. As I said, it does not excuse the lack of citation. What I meant was that many students (I dealt mostly with 11th graders) were a bit confused as to what was allowable in a research paper. Some thought that it had to be completely original; to use information (even paraphrased) from an outside source is “not allowed.” Thus, they have to “do the work.” Using outside sources shows, in their minds, that they didn’t “do the work” and copped the information from an outside source. What they don’t get is that this is not only allowed, but the point of a research paper. They don’t want to draw attention to their actions (because they think it’s wrong) and thereby don’t include a cite.

adam, yes, it does indicate that “something is up” but the problem is one of intent. It is often that students of mine would work together to write lab reports. Heck, I even encouraged it. It is not suprising then that I would receive lab reports with one or two passages identical. This doesn’t mean that the work is not representative of the individual. It is representative of what that individual contributed/got out of the “work together on the lab report” setup. This is not the same as knowingly or willingly representing someone else’s work as your own.

I’m not saying that this isn’t wrong, I’m just saying that the intent to “defraud” wasn’t there.

However, reading the links posted by Spiritus, it’s pretty obvious what happened in this case.

I do have an issue, however, with one assignment being worth 50% of a grade. That is quite harsh for high school. Heck, it’s even harsh for most college courses. At that level of “accountability,” one would think the teacher would have broken it into smaller assignments/deadlines and checked the progress of the reports. Had she done this, she could have seen these “problems” before they became issues.

That is not to say that she was at fault, but adam pointed out that there is a lot of importance put on grades. I imagine that most students feared doing poorly on a report that was to make up 50% of their grade. It seems logical that they would do most anything within reason to improve their chances of getting a good grade. The “within reason” is different for different people.

BTW, school funding is done on a per pupil allotment, not based on performance.

As an aside, I gave a student a big fat 0 on a report that was directly lifted from the internet. When dad came in to challenge the grade, I gave him a copy of his son’s report and I had a printout of the internet page the kid lifted it from. I told him I was going to read the web-page text and he was to stop me when his son’s report differed from my copy. Halfway through the first paragraph, he interrupted me and, while admitting that the reports were identical, informed me that it wasn’t really plagiarizing because his son looked up the information himself :rolleyes: That didn’t wash. Kid got zero. Principal backed me.