I understand what you are saying, I just disagree. If there’s a policy that says plagiarism results in a failure that’s one thing, for a teacher to impose that unilaterally is another. I wouldn’t mind at all if that is the policy though.
I would disagree slightly; it is the right way. It ensures that people include all the necessary information, and that other people can find it quickly. Thank you for your help in creating intelligible technical documents.
But, obviously, that is completely different; after all, you don’t just use the same test protocols, do you? You don’t re-invent the wheel, so you can spend the time and energy on the parts that need it.
So what’s the worst sin in academia? Not banging the professor for a better grade, or giving out better grades for a banging?
Plagiarizing badly written or researched material?
Poor citation form?
Original work requires original writing because it hasn’t been done before. But the older I get, the less original stuff comes my way, being a fossil and all. It is important to teach students how not to get caught at plagiarism. Such as demonstrating before and after class how easy it is to use software to search the net.
Should the penalty for plagiarism have any relationship to intent? To make an analogy, intent is vital in most criminal cases and what often matters is what you were trying to do. So if you trade stocks intending to defraud, you can’t turn around and say you were just clicking in Scottrade, since when is that illegal?
One big concern that I’ve had over plagiarism policies and “shock and awe” anti-plagiarism lectures is that they don’t distinguish between people who brazenly copy entire articles out of encyclopedias and someone who inadvertently committed a “close paraphrase” violation, puts a cite in the wrong place, or misspells a source’s name (e.g. Janson vs Janssen, or National Institutes of Hyperpotency vs National Institute for Hyperpotency Studies).
E.g. source (Johnson, 1995) says “Upon observing the turmoil, I found that 75% of blingwads were avante.”
I write: “In fact, bukazoids are not the only thing that can be avante. Two thirds of blingwads are avante (Johnson, 1995).”
Some people would say that I should put quotation marks around “two thirds of blingwads are avante” because it is too close to what Johnson wrote. So I end up worrying and wondering.
It would seem more fair that automatic failure penalties would only apply in intentional cases. If you made a minor citation or quotation error, you would lose points in a similar way that you can lose points for grammar errors, logic errors, citing unreliable sources, and failing to properly analyze. E.g. “Overall, a pretty good paper, but in Paragraph 3 you plagiarized a little because you wrote “Smith and Brown claimed” but did not provide a page number as required by the University Style Guide. 83, B-.”
I was very disappointed to learn that, at The Very Large Research University for which I work, a faculty friend of mine was not allowed to flunk cheaters/plagiarists out of the class. The worst the office of academic affairs would permit him to do was give the students an F on the particular assignment.
I don’t believe that anyone who knows what they’re talking about would say that you should use quote marks in this case. You should never use quote marks if you’ve changed the original author’s wording, other than inserting ellipses and bracketed clarifications. The major ethical problem with your example isn’t the paraphrasing of “blingwads were avante” as “blingwads are avante”, it’s that you misrepresented Johnson’s findings. Johnson found three-quarters of blingwads to be avante while you claimed that s/he found only two-thirds to be avante.
In any event, the solution to too-close paraphrasing is to either change the wording more or just use a direct quote. It’s not to put quote marks around something that isn’t a direct quote.
Damnation, I spoke too soon. It’s one of those cases where the student includes citations, but about one-third of the content, none of it in quotation marks, is copied word for word from the sources. She will swear that she has no idea how this has happened.
And it will take me frickin’ forever to document.
Not plagiarism, but cheating in an Ethics class 
:
http://thedartmouth.com/2014/11/12/dozens-of-students-linked-to-cheating-in-religion-class/
I’m teaching at an international high school in Beijing. A group in one of my 11th grade classes gave a pretty slick presentation and their bibliography was pretty good. There was just one problem: the information was astoundingly incorrect on a major point. After the class, I checked their bibliography and, sure enough, the bad “info” came from a Chinese university website. To be specific, it was from an uploaded homework assignment for which the university student had received a failing grade.
But you’re missing the way the whole thing works. There is a policy. My policy.
As the instructor, i get to decide what happens in my class. If i want to penalize a plagiarist by reducing their grade on a paper, i can. If i want to penalize a plagiarist by giving them a zero for the offending paper, i can do that. If i think the plagiarism is more serious, and i want to fail the student for the whole course, i can do that too.
I also report the cheating student to the Dean of Students, who decides, based on the seriousness of the situation, and based on any past instances of academic dishonesty by that student, whether or not to impose additional penalties beyond the ones imposed in my class.
It is impossible to set exact penalties for plagiarism, because each case in unique. As i’ve already noted, sometimes it’s inadvertent and minor, while other times it’s intentional and major. But in all cases, it is made very clear to students, in the university’s Student Handbook, in my class, and in my syllabus, that the consequences for plagiarism can be very severe. They have no excuse for not knowing, and shouldn’t complain when they’re caught and penalized.
This. While I was teaching in graduate school. Caught a student who copied from the introductory essay on the source material. Changed a few words, but just lifted the essay and presented it as her own. As if I wouldn’t notice the essay was taken from the assigned reading. All I could do was fail that paper. Everything she did for the class was graded, er, rigorously moving forward. I don’t remember now if she failed the course or dropped it before completing it. She did not find it a welcoming place after turning that paper in.
I always enjoy dropping into these threads to post a friend’s article on plagiarism from when he taught at UIUC. (I went to high school with Prof. Braumoeller.) My favorite bit:
That isn’t plagiarism, but it is inaccurate and displays poor reading comprehension.
You should say that *three quarters *of blingwads are avante.
Perhaps, but if three quarters of X are Y, then naturally at least two thirds of X are also Y. So it’s actually a valid conclusion. Maybe my own thesis only requires a two-thirds correlation to support the conclusion that I’m trying to make.
It would be neat, perhaps, to have a “close paraphrase” marker that you could use to mark something that wasn’t a true paraphrase but wasn’t a direct quote either. I know you can mess things up with brackets and ellipses (e.g. “[All of] [t]he [investigated] units were found in such a…state [as to be considered relevant for this study]” (Miller 1977) if quoting “The units were found in such a transmogrified and electrodynamic state”.
So you could say something like,
Johnson was not the only person to conduct research in this area. Miller (1997) found that <CP> all of the investigated units were found in such a state as to be considered relevant for this study. </CP>.
But yeah, that’s not the agreed on standard.
Whoa. Can’t use other people’s stuff, can’t make up your own. Looks like what they say is true:
Academia is HAAAARRRRD!
It can be, if you’ve been teaching long enough.
I will admit, I appreciate it when the students make it easy for me, for example, when they leave in the URLs from the wikipedia page they copy-pasted.
It was also easy when I taught in the US, as students would copy-paste off British websites and not update the spelling (I occasionally see the reverse now).
And then the obvious sudden improvement in style and syntax as others have noted in this thread.
I had several papers along these various flavours in a fresher module of about 65 students this autumn. All sent along to the academic disciplinary office; he confirmed what I and my moderator agreed was poor academic practice (on some) and plagiarism (on the others), and gave the students 10 days to response in their defense. None of them have so far, which means an automatic fail of the class.
Arguing over anything that is actually important.
It doesn’t matter what point you’re trying to make, you’re still misrepresenting Johnson’s study. If the 75% figure isn’t really important to your point then you could paraphrase it as “a large majority” or something if you wanted to, but you can’t just invent a number and attribute it to a source because you like it better than the one that actually appears in the source.
I still disagree. I don’t think a teacher should be a moral arbiter. Are your rules written down and specific? What comprises plagiarism, is it a sentence, a paragraph, what percentage of a paper must be original? What about students who completely paraphrase an existing document but have done no actual work on the subject? What other offenses would you fail your students for? How about using drugs to stay up and study? Or the more trivial use of a #3 pencil to fill out a test instead of a #2?
I’m not judging you on this, I’m sure there are a lot of people who agree with you, and your school may agree with you as well, and I’m the kind of person who would just not turn in the assignment instead of copying something (in the unlikely event I ever enroll in a class). I think that based on certain specific standards failure should be the result of plagiarism, but I prefer things to be clearly established and not left to an individual’s judgement. So hopefully your school’s policy is in line with yours, and as I said before failure is fine with me if that’s an established policy.
You know the old saying, “cheaters only cheat themselves”, but liars are lying to me and I don’t like it. However, in this case I stick by my earlier statement, without some established school policy I think you should give students no credit for plagiarized work.
robert_columbia, certainly intent counts. It’s not plagiarism if it’s not intended. And missing quotes around a phrase may just be an issue of formatting. But a large part of addressing this problem is determining how much copying constitutes plagiarism. My comments are directed at cases where a substantial significant portion of a work is lifted directly, or with minimal alteration from another source.