I’m fairly certain this is the case with one of my students, who just last week was caught plagiarizing in two different classes (just parts of a paper in one class…the entire paper in the other :eek: ).
I think he lacks basic writing and research skills and has managed to disguise that fact up until this point by selective cheating.
Here, I don’t know what mark they record, but it most definitely is on the transcript.
An incomplete is an entirely different matter.
Actually, a person caught cheating or plagiarizing here at the c.c. can be failed and/or booted out for the first offense; it is at the instructor’s discretion.
To me its a fascinating issue - this issue of admitting kids that can’t handle simple research. As a parent, I hear endlessly about how competitive college admission is - your kids need great grades to get into college, its so expensive no one can afford it. As a recent college student of a cheap public college, there were a ton of students in a four year state college that did not have college level writing, math or study abilities - even for a not great state college - and it was more affordable for four years of college than a good new car. I know its tough to get into Yale or Stanford or MIT (AND EXPENSIVE), its even challenging to get into a good state school like Madison or UCLA or UT- Austin (which are cheaper, but far from cheap). But there are colleges out there - some of them four year colleges, that would admit my third grader (if they didn’t know he was in third grade) with his third grade skills - and quite possibly pass him with Cs.
This is a story from last year, and it amuses the *hell *out me every time I think back on it.
Long story short, I’m working on a PhD in linguistics and focusing on experimental phonetics. Last year I was about eight weeks into TAing an undergraduate class on historical linguistics when the professor told me that well over 60% of the students hadn’t turned in the proposal for their term paper yet, citing that it was “too hard” to think of something to write about. :dubious:
Anyway, since this was a 200-level course he didn’t mind spending some class time dealing with the issue, so he asked me to spend half of our next lecture running a sort of open-ended writer’s workshop. This basically meant “Spend forty-five minutes alternately badgering the people who didn’t do their proposal and helping them work out a topic,” and I opened the thing with a quick “Here’s how I go about deciding what to write about” spiel, which basically amounted to me narrating how I got from “Gee, that sounds interesting” to my first peer-reviewing publication. Things seemed to go well, and the whole thing concluded without incident.
Until they actually turned their papers in and the prof started grading them. He emailed me and asked me to drop by his office, and the moment I walked in he handed me a paper and asked if it looked familiar. I scanned it for about ten seconds, hazarded “Isn’t this mine?”, and winced as the instructor nodded and said “That’s not the worst part: look at the title”.
Not only had one of the students found and copied, word for word, the very article I gave as an example in the workshop, he didn’t even bother editing anything: he’d just printed it straight off of the library computer, crossed my name out in pen, and scrawled his on underneath.
I can’t believe there are college-level courses where you can cheat twice and not be expelled! At my alma mater, once and Honor Court would throw your ass out, no ifs, ands, or buts.
Sad, isn’t it? I wish I could expell them, but I can’t. I was told that I could fail her, though. She has the right to appeal. I hope she doesn’t, though, as that will be more work for me. Turns out she has two daughters who are college students as well. I wish I could see her talk to them about this.
Oh my. Please tell me that this person’s major was Fries and Shakes.
You have to wonder what mindframe some people are coming from when they do stuff like that. I don’t think they’re necessarily stupid, but that they just don’t get the deeper meaning behind what they’re supposed to be doing.
Years ago my ex gave some sort of writing assignment to her class. Two brothers from some remote part of the world – Indonesia, maybe? – turned in one paper that they’d done as a team effort. She told them that that was unacceptable, they’d have to turn in separate papers. The concept was beyond them. They were family, and every project was a family project. That’s just how life worked in their world.
It could always be worse. I used “Animal House” as a working model for my college experience.
Well they were Linguistics majors at the time, but one of the stipulations the arts school put on not kicking their asses out of the university was that they needed to find a new major.
To be fair to them, though, our department can be an extremely scary place if you don’t fit in: a lot of first and second-year students seem to take linguistics courses under the assumption that the experience will be quite similiar to taking an English class, and since what they’re actually learning is a science that seems to have been custom-tailored to frustrating new students, they run into trouble.
The real problem is that a lot of people fall into courses without warning. In theory we do have a course progression that will effectively teach the science, but that progression has never been formalized into requirements: anybody who really wants to can jump into a course that assumes a year or two of linguistics background without ever running into an adviser or prerequisite to dampen their enthusiasm.
I’ve only seen five linguistics students cheat in my entire university career, and all but one of the people who got caught were students who had found themselves in over their head and hadn’t gone to advising or office hours to get help.
ED: Oh, and the fifth cheater was some dumbass who copied his neighbor’s paper without realizing that there were actually four or five different versions of the test in the room.
I didn’t go to your college, but I think there’s a rather large “if”- if the Honor Court were made aware of the cheating. I know for a fact that, when I was a grader TA in a physics class, the professor did not encourage me to pursue it if I suspected cheating on homework assignments. I suspect that a lot of professors are willing to work something out with a suspected cheater (a zero on the exam or assignment or something like that) without involving the Honor Court or invoking any of the extra sanctions against cheating.
Not in college, but I’m a teacher at an elementary school in a culture where cheating is much, much more acceptable than in the US and it DRIVES ME FUCKING CRAZY. I’m pretty sure it’s a holdover from communist times, when everyone was encouraged to consider themselves as a part of a group and to work together on everything - they just see themselves as helping a friend. (Here I’m not talking about plagiarism, but when I get homework with suspiciously similar work.) I have told them again and again that when I assign something to Ivan, I want to know what Ivan knows, not what Mehmed knows.
Anyway, thank you god, I don’t work with the high school kids, but I’ve seen some incredible plagiarism from them anyway. My counterpart (the Bulgarian teacher I work with) teaches a 10th grade class and she recently had them write a short essay. Probably three out of the twelve essays I glanced over were obviously written by the kids. The kids who go to high school at my school are pretty much the kids who aren’t smart enough to go to better schools in larger towns and their English is uniformly terrible. And yet SUDDENLY they are able to write five page essays that closely resemble Wikipedia articles! It’s AMAZING!
(The saddest part is, I bet my counterpart didn’t even fail them for plagiarizing.)
Not at my alma mater. Honor Code was serious business there; very important. We didn’t have TA’s, we had professors. (Small, very academic college.) We had self-proctored exams, take home tests, that sort of thing, because the Honor Code was upheld by everybody.
When I was teaching, the students received a list of the rules at the beginning of the class. They signed them and returned them. The rules said “All work you turn in must be your own. Plagiarism will result in an automatic fail.”
I had one student fail out of the class for stealing source code from a Web site and turning it in as his own work (complete with the original comments–the only thing he removed was the copyright notice). The sad part is that he would have passed if he hadn’t done that.
I was required to notify the Dean of Students immediately if I caught a student cheating. It was the Dean’s office that determined whether the punishment went beyond just failing that one class.
And a note to the OP: To the best of my knowledge, none of the students that failed out of my computer science courses were creationists 
I make them indicate on EVERY exam that they will not consult outside sources. Plus it is all over the class site. I am just so discouraged. 
A question for the professors, how do you handle cases of minor plagiarism. What do you do if a student fails to enclose a source’s exact phrase in quotation marks? For example, if a student were to write:
According to Steven Jones, American steel production increased…
instead of
According to Steven Jones, “American steel production increased…”
Would this be an automatic fail for the class?
Please ignore this question; I am starting a new thread on plagiarism since the responses may be limited in this thread.
'Round about the year 2000 (remember that year), I was in S. Korea teaching English at a university in Seoul. The school decided to have an English language essay competition; all of us English teachers were asked if we wanted to serve as judges. I declined because I was laz… err, busy. One of my co-workers, a native speaker (Canadian) who had a Master’s in ESL, decided to act as one of the judges. All of the other judges were Korean English teachers, not native speakers (not that I excuse the lapse in logical thinking).
Anyways, time passes and eventually the winner is announced. IIRC, the winner was a 19 year old female Indonesian student (quite a few foreign students at this Korean university).
So a week or so later the winning essay was published in the student newspaper.
I read it.
It was a story about how the author had been a kindergarten teacher, and (various details removed for the sake of the SDMB reader’s sanity) had had her students write one good thing about each of his/her fellow classmates on a piece of paper. At the end of class, each student had shared and given the piece of paper to the classmate that the wonderful thing was about. Cut to years later, and a man had been killed fighting in Vietnam. Found in his belongings was a piece of paper from his kindergarten class which said something about how awesome he was… he had KEPT THAT PIECE OF PAPER ALL THOSE YEARS!!
This was a piece of “chicken soup for the soul” type glurge that had been circulating the internet for a couple of years. I’m sure some of you remember it.
Review with me, if you will: a 19 year old student writing an essay in the year 2000 about etc., etc., and her student had been killed fighting in Vietnam! And not ONE of the judges had caught it… or seen the glurge which had been circulating at that time for months.
A quick internet search, while sitting in the office between classes, found the exact essay, word-for-word.
While I was sitting there looking at the glurge, my co-worker, the Master in ESL, came in the office.
“Dude,” quoth I, “A-member that winning essay?”
“Yeah! It was really good.” said he.
“Huh. Pretty good for an Indonesian student, eh?”
“Yup. She’s really good at English writing, I guess.” said he.
“And old, too.” I offered.
He looked puzzled. “Huh?”
“She had a student like 50 years ago who grew up to be killed in Vietnam!” I exclaimed. “WOW!”
“What?” he asked.
“Did you read the essay?” I asked, “Here, try again.”
I showed him the web page I was looking at with the exact word for word essay on it.
“Um…” he said, “Err…”
A couple of days later the winning prize had been re-awarded to the second-place essay.
:smack: