What would be a fair punishment for a first offense at plagerism for a 6th grader who directly copied one sample sentence from her Grammar text to complete a homework assignment? I don’t think she knows what plagerism is, but she did it just to take the easy way out. Still, she has to learn why this is wrong on so many levels. Ironically, she copied the example wrong thereby making the homework answer incorrect. (Too funny.) She actually goes to try and prove she’s right by showing me where she copied the sentence! FYI: She is homeschooled. So, it’s not like I can consult her teacher on how to handle this matter! 
One of the standard punishments when I was in school was to write out a page from the dictionary. That’s probably not what you’re looking for here…
If she doesn’t know what plagiarism is, how can she know it’s wrong?
I have to agree. She seems to have made what she thought was a good-faith effort to provide the right answer. No punishment is warranted. She needs a lesson of more substance than “doing this will get me in trouble.”
I thought *plagerism *had to do with going to a French beach.
A think a lesson on why copying = stealing and how to cite properly would be sufficient. (6th-grade level, of course: footnoting can come later.) I don’t think the “easy way out” element comes in if she didn’t realize it was wrong. (That only applies for elementary school and possibly middle school students. By high school, you should know.)
Make her re-do the homework assignment, this time without plagiarizing, give a lecture on Why Plagiarism Is Wrong, and call it good.
This - quite obviously. There’s a deeper lesson about trusting sources (including her ‘teacher’) and that education is about demonstrating what you’ve learned, rather than what the answer is.
Teach her how to spell “plagiarism”, then make her copy it out over and over.
the Propper Punishment for Plagerism is Pugilisme!
I think the fact that she “cheated” incorrectly is a point you should highlight. The reason assignments are done is so that you understand the concepts. When you just copy what’s already there, you not only aren’t learning anything yourself, but also you can’t check to see if what you’ve done is correct specifically because you’ve skipped over the step where you do it yourself!
It seems like she simply didn’t understand the assignment and she thought that copying the sentence was the correct thing to do. Perhaps the assignment wasn’t clear.
For a sixth grader, I’d be willing to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume that she was doing the assignment in good faith. Was it a factual regurgitation question (e.g. “Where is the body of Woodrow Wilson?”) and she responded by looking through her textbooks until she found a passage that contained “Woodrow Wilson’s body is interred in the nave of the National Cathedral in Washington, DC.” and she copied that as the answer, or is it more of a “Write a sentence demonstrating the use of the progressive tense.” and she copied the example rather than coming up with her own?
Be careful - punishing children for things they don’t understand can damage their self-confidence and make them question their competency later, since they are taught that they can’t really know the rules until the punishment comes down…
A school that I attended had that punishment as an option, and one of my teachers actually used it, but at one time had gotten into a little trouble because they were assigning random pages from an unabridged dictionary, and one of the kids made to copy a page or pages told a parent that they were forced to copy the definitions of vulgar words, and a fit was thrown. When I had that teacher, all pages assigned for copying as punishment were pre-screened.
[quote=“robert_columbia, post:13, topic:581365”]
For a sixth grader, I’d be willing to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume that she was doing the assignment in good faith. Was it a factual regurgitation question (e.g. “Where is the body of Woodrow Wilson?”) and she responded by looking through her textbooks until she found a passage that contained “Woodrow Wilson’s body is interred in the nave of the National Cathedral in Washington, DC.” and she copied that as the answer, or is it more of a “Write a sentence demonstrating the use of the progressive tense.” and she copied the example rather than coming up with her own?
**Be careful - punishing children for things they don’t understand can damage their self-confidence and make them question their competency later, since they are taught that they can’t really know the rules until the punishment comes down…[/**QUOTE]
Huh?:dubious: She may not understand the actual academic lesson, but are you contending she doesn’t understand cheating is academically dishonest? I’d make her redo the assignment.
I think he’s (she’s?) saying the same thing I said - that if she copied the answer because she didn’t understand the assignment (and she thought copying the sentence was the correct thing to do) punishing her wouldn’t be fair. It’s quite possible that the real failure was the teacher’s, not the student’s.
When I did workbook assignments in elementary and middle school, we were supposed to copy our answers directly from the book. This all changed with the introduction of “plagiarism education” with paper-writing in 9th/10th grade.
OP, if your kid is home-schooled then are you teaching her? Or your spouse? Do you know whether she’s been taught the definition of plagiarism and how to paraphrase yet? Punishing her for a rule you haven’t taught her not to break is irrational.
academic lesson=you shouldn’t plagiarise. NOT she doesn’t understnad the assignment. Though that failure is not the kid’s fault.
Kid should be expelled. Plagiarism is worse than MURDER.
But in seriousness, I doubt many kids that age have even heard of plagiarism. First offense, just make the kid redo the assignment. Happens again, 0 for the assignment.
That’s exactly what I emphasize when I catch second-graders cheating: the point isn’t to get the right pencil-marks on the page, the point is to understand the underlying concept. The kid can either do the work I assign as a way of practicing that concept, or they can ask me for help. If I catch them cheating, that tells me they’re unwilling to try to learn the concept through normal means. Since it’s my job to help them learn, I’ll need to take extraordinary measures to help them learn. And they probably won’t like those measures.
After that speech, if I catch them cheating again, the extraordinary measures start. (Separating them from other kids, reviewing assignments more intensively with them, putting them on silent lunch/recess laps when they cheat, etc.)