Report her.
If someone is going to university, they need to follow the honor code. Otherwise they are cheating not only him/her-self, but also the other students, who are being compared to PLAGIARIZED work.
How petty a crime should all our Big Brothers bother themselves with? Or how serious a crime?
The plagiarism described in the OP appears to be one compound sentence that was then broken down into two sentences. That sounds very trivial to me, and reporting it seems frivolous. If it were a whole page of an essay, maybe that matters.
This whole debate sounds like debating whether we should call the police every time we see someone jaywalking. I really wonder what kind of a miserable society we would be living in where too many people think like that. These are the people who patrol their neighborhoods with a ruler, measuring how tall everyone’s lawns are.
The rest of the post was also copied, almost word for word from Wikipedia.
I think you got it backwards:
Many people think of plagiarism as copying another’s work or borrowing someone else’s original ideas. But terms like “copying” and “borrowing” can disguise the seriousness of the offense. According to the dictionary, to “plagiarize” means “to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own,” “to use (another’s production) without crediting the source,” “to commit literary theft,” or “to present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source.” In other words, plagiarism is an act of fraud. It involves both stealing someone else’s work and lying about it afterward.
Here’s what to do: Reply to her post and say “Wow! I am impressed! Your post was so informative someone has already incorporated into the Wikipedia page on the subject! Great work!” Then post a link and walk away whistling innocuously…
I don’t think anyone is saying that plagiarism is okay as long as you don’t get caught.
It’s absolutely wrong.
The discussion is whether one is obligated to report it as a matter of one’s personal code of honour.
Thank y’all for the responses. I didn’t expect so many.
It’s led to a nice discussion with my son, and ultimately it will be his decision. We reread the honor code together and it is in there that if you know of an incident and don’t report it then action can be taken against you as well.
This is my thought as well. This is not a major assignment and she will probably just get her wrist slapped. I doubt she will be expelled over this. It’s is a little 10 point assignment, not a 100 point paper. It’s better she face a small consequence now than a larger one later.
I agree with that!
That sad thing is too, this is a message on a discussion board. It doesn’t have to be long. She could have read both sites and and it shouldn’t have taken more than 5-10 minutes to compile an original post.
I have been dealing with this same dilemma.
I am in an online class and am required to respond to two of my classmate’s posts each week. The problem is that there are only 7 people in my group, and one of them is an inveterate plagiarizer. Her posts are disjointed, meaningless compilations of copy-paste jobs from usually 2 or 3 online sources.
I thought it should have been obvious to the professor and would self-correct, but when it continued, I decided to rat her out.
My decision was based in part on my belief that she was depriving me of an opportunity to complete my work because her responses were lacking in anything to reply to. Since I had to reply to two classmates, I was reduced to 5 choices instead of 6.
Universities hold all students to the highest standards of honesty and personal integrity in every phase of their academic life. All students have a responsibility to uphold the Academic Honor Code by refraining from any form of academic misconduct, presenting only work that is genuinely their own, and reporting any observed instance of academic dishonesty to a faculty member.
I voted to not report her before reading the thread, because I was imagining some buck-toothed, sensitive 11 year old who made a dumb mistake. She’s 40?! Yeah, send an anonymous note or something. Plagiarizing (off Wikipedia, of all places) as an adult is just sad.
Triviality? Who brought you up?
Passing off someone else’s work as your own is the opposite of trivial. It is a form of stealing, and it is a form of treachery. In academic endeavor it has always, rightly, been regarded as the worst of all possible behaviors.
As a faculty member, I’m not crazy about honor codes that require students to report other students. But this is how they generally work. The OP’s son is unlikely to be affected–this usually becomes relevant when significant numbers of non-cheaters clearly know about some cheating scheme and don’t say anything.
The plagiarizer could be clueless or could be an intentional cheat. Either way, she needs to know what she’s doing is unacceptable. A plagiarized discussion board post is unlikely to lead to serious trouble. But if the professor doesn’t call her on it, she may cheat (or screw up) on a bigger assignment, leading to real trouble. Even then, a first violation seldom leads to expulsion. It’s the subsequent ones that do.
People think all kinds of things aren’t really plagiarism (heh, I put it in my own words). The OP’s son might drop an email asking the professor what he should do if he needs to respond to a plagiarized post. Or, if it’s a brick and mortar class, drop by during office hours.
I reported a student in a photography class who copied a photograph in a big coffee table book and submitted it for an assignment. When I told the student that I knew what he had done, he flatly denied it. Then I told the instructor, who didn’t seem to take it that seriously, but I don’t know what became of it. To be honest, I didn’t feel good about it afterwards.
In a totally contradictory move, when another student later asked me for a photograph to submit for an assignment, I did. The class was part of a broader journalism course and some students, including him, were only interested in writing. They struggled through the photography class only to pass the course. He was never going to use photography after he graduated so I went along with it. I can’t explain the contradiction other than attributing it to being young and fickle. If the same situations cropped up today, I’d probably not snitch on the first student but still accommodate the second.
I don’t know if your son’s college utilizes such a program, but when I took a re-certification course at a local college last year, all student papers, posts, etc. were submitted to a program that is designed to compare the student’s work against multiple available internet resources. If your paper gets a ‘hit’, you either have to have some pretty impressive story concocted about how you got your sources, or you risk expulsion.
If your son’s school has that program, the problem will take care of itself. I hope it does and he can spare himself the pain. A forty-year old woman? Pffft - she definitely is trying to pull a fast one and should be called on it. I might have given an 18 year old some slack.
I’d tell him to mind his own business.
- Your son, in spite of the reprehensible “honor code” which seeks to make him the school’s “honor cop”, is, in fact, NOT a cop, and it is not his job to keep other students honest. This is a burden which will only work against him, not for him.
- The school will thank your son, and, then, watch him and have him pegged as a rat. They will not appreciate his actions, and may resent them.
- Somebody WILL find out who told.
- Staying out of this will teach him to mind his own business, and not go around judging other’s behavior.
- It will not help your son. Make him work on his own project.
You live in a very paranoid world, don’t you?
Especially in a new school, new class and wondering whether to report it the first time, I would write the teacher and say “I read in the school honor code that I’m required to report misconduct by other students. I think someone has copy/pasted a large portion of their answer from Wikipedia. What would you like me to do?”
Let the professor/school set the tone from how they respond.