Not a valid comparison. A student assignment is supposed to be an independent piece of work. Thus the check for plagiarism, because that’s the same as cheating on an exam. In teaching, you’re not only allowed, but actually assumed to teach other peoples’ stuff and not just your own.
Way back in the dark ages, I took a required Electronics course which included labwork. The labwork was done in pairs and my teammate was a guy who’d otherwise finished his coursework more than 10 years before.
Cutting a long story short, he decided to cheat, I told him it wasn’t acceptable and pointed out that the “painting over” he’d done would be evident to the teacher, he refused to redo the makeover. I ended going to the teacher in the company of another of the professors. As soon as the teacher saw us, he said “again?”
It was the 14th time he got failed for cheating; they had specifically arranged the groups so that he’d end up paired with any of the three students that the professors viewed as less likely to accept the cheating. But yeah, he somehow still managed to convince himself that there was nothing wrong with inventing results in order to make reality match theory. Reality and the teachers disagreed.
I had a BUSINESS ETHICS professor who supplied his own material. The material was almost entirely someone else’s in print Business Ethics text and almost in its entirety in electronic form. He did sprinkle it with some of his own commentary.
Its been a few years, I think I reported him to the Dean.
And if you search here, I think I might have done a rant on it at the time. But
- Business ETHICS class
- Academic PROFESSOR
I was appreciative that he was trying to save his students a buck…but all my other emotions about it had to do with shock.
And this is why they don’t learn. Pass class with no effort: what’s the downside?
If you take the problem at all seriously, I urge you to supply real consequences.
(From reading the thread, it looks like your hands are tied, but I’m not clear on who is tying them or why.)
Problem was, it’s not an individual assignment, it’s a collaborative project. If it were an individual submission, a fail would be the minimum reaction. And someone is going to fail, but it’s not clear yet if it’s going to be just one of them or all of them.
In Chinese:
I’m torn. Academically, I completely understand that plagiarism is bad. What I’m going to say is not meant as an excuse for copying material when that is inappropriate, as it clearly is here.
As an engineer, though, I have to say that the best way to get a report through an on the job review process is to find a similar successful report and use it as a template. In fact, for many reports, your company or agency will have templates that they want you to use and it will contain a lot of boilerplate language. Some of that boilerplate language is required by regulation or was developed by the company attorney to cover the company’s backside.
If you, as an engineer, use the standard language and outline for that kind of report, your quality control reviewers will just check off that all of the familiar bits are there and in proper form. If you start writing from scratch, the reviewers will pick the whole thing apart, asking for changes to show that they’re doing their job. And each one will want something different. It can delay the release of a report by weeks or months.
If your grad student has worked as an engineer, cutting and pasting may have become a habit. It’s not a habit that’s appropriate in an academic setting, but it is a habit that will work well after they’ve graduated. Many managers encourage it because it makes report reviews easier, because it makes report writing faster, costing less staff time, and because most managers don’t like the way most engineers write.
And, of course, this may not apply to this student at all. I just had to share.
As an example, one of the high points of this week was a pre-audit of some of my project files. The FHWA has recently specified that the project files include a memo for each change order. Since it’s new, we had no template memo. I went through the audit guidelines and created a template memo that would hit all the possible regulated points. If a point didn’t apply to that change order, the heading would still be there, just followed by a standard null statement like: “None” or “No additional working days will be granted for this change.”
The auditor really liked it. My bosses checked it out and asked me to email a copy to the other engineers. Now they won’t each have to spend the time developing their own change order memo and the department won’t have ten different memo templates. Most important, we know that we have a memo that will pass audit.
There are believers in the axiom of finding new actors for the blocked journey of individual demeanor.
If plagiarism is the second deadliest sin in academia (per the OP), what’s the first?
Then you got the dumb ass football player at UNC that turned in a recycled paper on Mohammedism (that was the give away) that the Professor, Honor Court and Admin didn’t catch. He was suspended for receiving improper help on the citations and sued the school to be reinstated. NC State fans, a rival school, reported that it was lifted from a book over 100 years old and he got busted. But then when you look at the issues UNC has had with the fake classes for athletes to keep them eligible over an 18 year period it’s no wonder they didn’t catch the paper.
They also didn’t catch the athlete that plagiarized an 8th grader’s paper on Rosa Parks. It too was brought to light by rival fans. One can only assume either the UNC professors aren’t very bright or just don’t give a damn about being ethical.
Falsifying data.
ETA: Per the OP, at least 
You forgot to say “Dammit, Jim!”
They didn’t notice the sudden improvement in his writing?
Regards,
Shodan
That does seem potentially really unfair to the group members. It could be that they all decided to just cheat. It could be that they divided up the work and one student was responsible for the intro. The others, not having a plagiarism control program and really only being interested that everyone turned in their part at least a few hours before it was due, didn’t check too carefully. They shouldn’t get hit for cheating.
Seems simple for educators, treat the plagiarized work as if it were never turned in. To do anything other than that there should be policies directly addressing the subject. It’s not really the concept of stealing that’s so bad here, the text may not be proprietary, but it is flat out dishonest. When you turn in a paper you’re making a claim that you wrote it yourself.
For me, this is the kicker. You HAVE to fail them, IMO. There is simply no excuse in graduate school. And if it’s a group project, you probably should penalize them all, although the actual “author” of the plagiarized section should receive a harsher punishment.
In my freshman classes, filled with wide-eyed 18-year-olds confronting the challenges of college for the first time (and, for many of them, the first time in their families’ history), i’m willing to cut them a little slack if the plagiarized section is very small, and if i truly believe that it was the result of poor understanding rather than intentional deception. If it’s just one or two sentences from the textbook in a longer paper, i ding their grade and take it as an opportunity to educate them.
What i will sometimes do, for minor and inadvertent plagiarism by a freshman on his or her first paper, is to give the paper a conditional “F”. I tell the student that if all subsequent work is completely properly, without any copying and with appropriate quotation marks and citations, i will remove the F and give some credit for the problem paper. I did that with a student this semester, and it worked fine. The rest of his work was clearly his own, and his outside material was clearly referenced, and properly placed in quotation marks where appropriate. The first paper was still penalized, but it received some credit. I know they should learn all this in school, but many of them don’t, leaving me with the choice of assuming they know it already, or actually trying to teach them how to do it properly.
But if the plagiarized section is large, or if it’s copied and pasted from the internet, all bets are off. And if the students are sophomores and juniors and seniors, they are similarly screwed. They fail, and get reported to the Dean of Students. The Dean keeps this stuff on record. A single instance usually results in a warning, and maybe academic probation (depending on the severity), and a second offense begins the suspension process. I think it should be even more draconian, but we have to keep the paying customers happy, you know!
Actually, if the policies are too lenient for this stuff, it’s usually not the educators themselves, but the administrators who are to blame. My “keep the customers happy” quip was not entirely tongue-in-cheek. There’s a mentality among some administrators that students are not to be held accountable for their failures and their dishonesty; rather, if someone plagiarizes, the instructor needs to ask what more he or she could have done to facilitate the student’s success (yes, this is how these people talk).
It’s a constant bugbear among academics at some institutions, and is very depressing.
I know, that’s hilarious. It is just so damn obvious.
My university uses TurnItIn to check papers, but every single paper that TurnItIn has flagged is a paper i would have easily caught all by myself. Aside from the basic issue of writing style, the students seem not to realize that we actually know the stuff that we teach, that we are familiar with the literature in our fields, and that we recognize the arguments made by different scholars when we see them.
Yeah, but teaching the research and findings of other people is not the same as copying it verbatim. Any teacher who simply reads from a textbook in class is doing the students and the institution a disservice. Frankly, though, i think that this happens far less than some critics and some urban legends would have us believe.
Your last sentence is true, but that’s why your first sentence is misguided.
If someone fails to turn in a piece of work, they will get a zero on their grade for that component of the course, and their overall course grade will also suffer. But they have not cheated. If someone turns in a plagiarized piece of work, on the other hand, they have cheated and they should not only get a zero, but should receive further punishment for the dishonesty itself.
I’m about two-thirds of the way through grading 75 research papers and haven’t found any plagiarism yet. But I’m pretty sure a few of the exchange students ran their papers through Google Translate.
That’s how it’s probably going to end up. Like I said, at least one fail.
It’s a project course, so a zero is equal to failing the exam in an exam course, not just a zero on a part assignment. That means a re-take next year, in parallel with the person’s Master’s thesis work and other compulsory classes. And “just” failing is the best possible outcome for the student.
I anticipate some desperate pleading during the upcoming interview…
You can spot a plagiarism in one or two sentences? Is it that obvious?
I assume it would depend on the student. I’ve never taught but I’ve had classmates whose papers demonstrated a horrendous lack of knowledge regarding mandatory components of sentences, like subjects, for example. One or two sentences of even mediocre writing would have stood out like a drag queen in Peoria.
Actually, if you’ve been grading papers long enough (this is year 28 for me at this job), it’s very obvious. High school AP kids can be very stupid.