I might have killed that professor’s family.
Sure, because school, for most of us, is where we learn how to invent wheels. It doesn’t matter that barely a single undergrad (and I include myself in that statement!) has an original thought - it’s original to them. The ideal is that they learn to think, even if those thoughts have been thunk a thousand times before. So they have to pretend, and their teachers pretend, that they’ve never seen a wheel, in order to completely grok the wheel from the ground up.
After graduation, sure, then it’s sometimes appropriate to order wheels off ebay and build the rest of the wagon around them. But, theoretically, because you know how to build a wheel, you’ll know how to build a wagon that uses them more effectively than if you had never studied wheels in the first place.
I was referring to Eureka’s college-level students being unable to rewrite things in their own words (just quoting whole paragraphs). My cousin is in 5th grade; I know he can take in information from sources and rewrite it in his own words. I remember writing reports in 1st or 2nd grade and being told that we could not just copy sources. (I had the same teacher for both 1st and 2nd grade so do not remember which year it was.)
Sorry for the mistake. I would claim it was a typo, but it is not even close. I don’t know what I was going for there. I think I got it right every other time, though.
It is textbook plagiarism.
See this page from A Pocket Style Manual by Diana Hacker:
My ex-professor friend would have chocked it up as “poor scholarship”. 
Two and a Half - are you a teacher?
I’m going to speak from my experience as an instructor of freshmen level English. Ask any one of us about how we feel about our job, and most of us are going to express incredible frustration at the sheer ignorance of most of our students. We tell them over and OVER again: Indent your fucking paragraphs. Make sure your verbs and your subjects agree. Italicize book titles. Use 1" margins. Double-space, for the love of the baby Jesus. Stop using Comic Sans, it’s a stupid font. No, Wikipedia is not considered an authoritative source. And so on and so forth. Some of our students are willfully stupid, incredibly lazy, and will do anything they can to get a decent grade with the least amount of effort. But most of our students want to learn. They just don’t know how. They don’t know that not using quotation marks is an academic faux pas that any decent scholar would have a heart attack over. They don’t see why they have to learn how to say things in their own words - “But he says it better than I can anyway!” Our job, as teachers, is to pound these things into their thick skulls until it sticks. And in order to do that, we need to make these students want to make these things stick. Most teachers, for all their griping about their idiotic students, sincerely want to see all of their students succeed. And sometimes that means relaxing those rigid moral and academic standards we ourselves have taken for granted, because we’ve had the privilege of growing up with them while many of our students are encountering them for the first time.
Yes, your example is textbook plagiarism. There is no doubt about that. So what do you want us to say? That we’d heap scorn on the guilty student’s head, paint a scarlet F on their forehead, and make an example out of them by kicking them out of class? What the hell good would that do, other than giving us an excuse to pat ourselves on our backs for sticking to our precious principles? Or, instead, we could take off some points, pull the student aside, show them why what they did is considered academic dishonesty, and teach them how they can avoid making that mistake again. And then maybe the student would actually, you know, learn something without becoming discouraged and feeling humiliated.
I have been substitute teaching, but I am not a teacher. I cannot believe the things some of the teachers allow their students to do. The interesting thing is that there appears to be a direct correlation between what the teacher expects and what the students do. My experience is pretty limited, but I can usually tell how the classes will go just by the instructions the regular teacher leaves - detailed instructions = a well-behaved, engaged class - one sentence/no instructions = a class of ignorant, disrespectful students.
If I had ever turned in a paper that did not follow the correct format (font, margins, etc), I would have been lucky to get the opportunity to rewrite it with an automatic one letter grade lower for a first offense - anything after that would have been an automatic fail.
I think Fretful Porpentine’s suggestion is pretty close to what I would do for a highschool or college student for a first offense of minor plagiarism.
I would give the student a zero until it was rewritten, but a maximum of a B- seems pretty good. I think his (her?) suggestion for a second offense is way too lax for a college student. I would fail the student for the class, but I do not have to worry about getting tenure. For a high school student, I would give him a fail for the assignment and have him write a paper on plagiarism and lower his final grade one letter.
I would never accept an assignment that did not follow the required format. In my high school and college classes, none of my teachers or professors would accept something that was not in the correct format. The students knew this and responded by following the format.
Tell that to the people in this thread.
(Comic Sans in not that bad of a font. I saw a paper the other day from high school senior that looked like it was in 18 point Viner Hand.)
I am running late so this post has not been read/proofread
For the those that thought no punitive action was necessary, would you give the student a pass if he plagiarized another source on a later assignment?
I’m a TA, but aspiring to be a professor at some point.
As a teacher, you need to strike a balance between educating your students and losing them because you are such an ass that they give up. For professors, that’s a great way to not get tenure (I can think of two examples at schools I’ve attended where that’s happened). When you are teaching the first course in something at a particular place, your first assignment needs to assess the students’ abilities. If I found that half of my students didn’t know how to use ACS format (what we use), I would give them a hand out, refer them to the style guide and tell them if they had questions, come to my office hours. I would give them maybe a half letter grade deduction on the first paper and something more sever the next time.
I won’t accept something that was deliberately in the wrong format, but if they lost their right left justification at some point when using a template, I don’t think I’d take off for it, as they are difficult to use and can drive me to the point of screaming.
In my experience, it’s the teachers/professors that assess their students abilities and go from there that are the best.
(bolded part my insert from the OP to clarify)
I much prefer the above hypothetical (or perhaps not-so-hypothetical from reading below) to the original. This is a great grey area.
My general rule of thumb is ten words. IIRC, from my one (and only) course in linguistics, a good generalization is that, if a sentence contains ten words or more, it is very likely to have never been uttered before. Therefore, if the student had failed to quote American steel production increased 14 percent in 1990, I could see them making a simple mistake. Minus a couple of points for style / grammar. The above quote is much more damning, but could still be reasonably explained by forgetting punctuation. Minus a grade at the 11th/12th level, minus a grade after a rewrite at the college level.
I do not, however, entertain the notion that this is a zero work, in and of itself. If this is the only case where quotation marks are absent, especially if there are numerous other examples of properly styled quotations in the paper. If, OTOH, this problem is repeated several times in the paper, I begin to see a major issue in author’s style, and much greater evidence of plagiarism.
I would submit that teachers who would use this one and only one instance of failed style as proof of plagiarism (to the point of giving the student a zero grade) see themselves as some sort of arbiter of all that is write and proper (ha!) in composition. Please remember that accusing someone of plagiarism is accusing someone of being unethical (i.e. a thief). I make the point of drilling into my students’ heads that plagiarism is theft of someone’s product just as much as stealing a hand-crafted chair. If I am going to accuse someone of being unethical enough to steal, I had better have incontrovertible evidence that they are, in fact, stealing. I don’t see this one mistake as being absolute proof of their lack of ethics.
The professor in Jamaika a jamaikaiaké’s link is an absolute ass. He is exact proof why professors are seen as living in an “Ivory Tower.”
-JustAnotherGeek
Teacher, 9th-12th grade science.
Returning to this thread late.
In this particular example, i would find the extent of the copying, without quotation marks, to be problematic. I would definitely bring it to the student’s attention, and make clear that copying whole sentences without using quotation marks is unacceptable. As for whether or not the offense would incur stiffer penalties (failure of the paper, failure of the course, etc.), that would depend on a number of things. Things like:
Because no matter how much the OP and some other people might wish that there were a single, universal template for dealing with a situation like this, the fact is that every such instance can only be evaluated in the context of the student’s other work, both within that particular paper, and in his or her previous papers.
As Apollyon suggests, if this is a first offense, and is the only example of unquoted source material in the paper, then it’s really no big deal. A warning is probably sufficient, and the student can take it as a learning opportunity. But if the student has been warned before, and/or has multiple examples of this type of copying in the paper, then the teacher’s response should be correspondingly more severe.
While the world might be a lot more simple and predictable if there were no room for subjective judgment in cases like this, it just wouldn’t work. As a teacher, one rather subjective criterion i use in deciding on how to respond to student problems is credibility, and this applies in areas other than plagiarism. Students gain (or lose) credibility with me, based on their behavior and performance in class. Let me give you an example, so you know what i’m talking about.
Say, for example, that i have assigned my students a paper, and the paper is due in class on Monday. On Sunday night, i receive emails from two students, letting me know that they have had a bad cold, have been unable to complete the paper, and would like to hand it in a day late. Both students should be treated exactly the same, right?
Consider this:
[ul]
[li]Student A has arrived at every lesson on time, has made frequent and insightful contributions to class discussion, has clearly done the assigned reading every week, and got an A- on the last paper, which was submitted on time.[/li][li]Student B has missed 2 of the 7 weekly meetings so far this semester, has arrived at least 15 minutes late for 3 other meetings (even after being warned about lateness), has never made a useful contribution to class discussions or shown the slightest indication of having done the reading, and handed in the first paper a week late.[/ul][/li]Which student is going to have more credibility with me when they email me asking for an extra day on the paper? And which student am i more likely to cut some slack?
I should add that, while the exactly parallel nature of the examples above is rather unlikely, and was done for illustrative purposes, the fact is that any teacher who spends more than a semester or two teaching college undergrads is likely to face a very similar scenario, and will need to make similar evaluations about student credibility.
Well, English isn’t everyone’s first language is it? I mean, maybe he grew up speaking Latin … in , you know, Latin America.
(g, d, & r)
Good god, I’m glad I’m not you people’s student!
Plagiarism is trying to pass someone else’s writing off as your own. This person clearly wasn’t trying to do that. They wern’t trying to trick anyone or shirk their work. They just didn’t know how to properly cite or don’t properly understand the standards of academic writing versus casual writing (this sort of thing would be fine, for example, in a SDMB post).
And, well, teaching people how to do things right is what teachers are there for.
I’d pull the student aside and ask if they knew what was wrong with the sentence. Then I’d explain the rule behind it and recommend that the student get a style manual.
I teach English as a foreign language and computer science.
Teacher, high school.
I think the board will agree that the reaction should be appropriate to the student’s level, yes? If this is an 8th grader’s theme, that’s one thing. On a doctoral dissertation, it’s quite another.
Just about everybody probably starts out plagiarizing, intentionally or not. Culling the essence from just one source and putting things in your own words is a difficult thing for young students. Getting to the point where you’ve read multiple sources, learned to balance competing viewpoints, structured thoughtful paragraphs and organized a good outline to give your work fluidity, mastered the nuts and bolts…that takes a long time.
I’d look at it as bad punctuation. If you want to have the students who plagiarized rewrite the paper with correct citation form to drive home your point, I say bravo.
One other thing: as a TA I learned that Asians sometimes plagiarize with disastrous results. They take the “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” thing too far by copying. If the professor assigns a paper on one source, they copy part of it and they’re not intending it to be interpreted as their own work…it’s a compliment to the person who wrote it. They know perfectly well the prof will know it’s copied…that’s their plan, in fact. In some Asian cultures I guess that’s not just acceptable, it’s desirable.
What’s the old joke? “Copying from one source is plagiarism; copying from many is research.”