No, not the usual “I work with incompetent buffoons” (which, BTW, I do…) but something more dire this time. I had to sit in as a witness to a discussion between a faculty member and two students accused of plagiarism.
Since the students were also rather young, both around 20 years old, there was a lot of, uh, …let’s call it unrestrained emotion. The faculty member had also obviously never had to deal with an issue like this before and was less than tactful. Overall, not a great way to spend an afternoon.
Nothing like watching someones chosen career path crash and burn before your eyes (OK, that’s a mixed metaphor, but you get my drift). The college has a strict policy on these things…one student will be expelled from her program of study (and, effectively, the school) and the other will have the option of starting over from the very beginning and repeating a year’s worth of classes.
Not that I am all soft on those who plagiarize, mind you. As the witness, I didn’t have to do anything except listen to everyone and take notes. It’s just that you kind of feel for these kids, since they were passing the course before this final paper, and it’s not easy to be a hard-ass when they are explaining their side of the story right in front of you.
Still, they clearly did something wrong. Turnitin.com gave their papers a 58% match and the first 7 pages had the exact same quotes from the exact same sources. Oh, and a thing about those “quotes”…the students copied the exact sentences, word for word, from textbooks and did not put them in quotations but instead cited the author at the end of the sentence. So, what looked like a paraphrase was an actual lifting of a sentence. The students claim that they thought this “was the right way” and that that’s what they had been taught.
Now, these are upper level students who have taken at least two composition courses by this time in their studies. However, maybe this is more common than I think, since I found this from a paper by Brian Martin
They also claimed that their reference pages were the same because they had the same general topic. So, why were the punctuation, capitalization and grammar mistakes exactly the same on both papers then? Why, because they used an online program that automatically loads their references into the needed format. Hmmmmmn….
There is a very good site here with an alternate view…questioning how schools treat plagiarism. The author talks about how this is used in the syllabus at the start of the course:
The site goes on to offer some excellent advice and resources for educators.
Today’s meeting ended with the comment that I always find amusing: “Well, we will just go to another school then and tell everyone how horrible it is here!” (followed by the inevitable “I’m hiring a lawyer”) Yeah, OK. And don’t let the door hit you on the ass…
And the picture at the top? I just liked it. Also, it is in the public domain so no citation is needed….but I did get it from an excellent site: Liam’s Pictures from Old Books
in general, kids don’t really understand citation at all, and nearly all of them cheat.
And I really like the new copyright notice
I had a couple of plagiarizers when I was a grad student. They were even roommates. There was no electronic or net-related way to tell how close their papers were, but I kept finding the exact same quotes and other signs that they both wrote their papers together at the exact same time. But I was Mr. Nice Guy, and just told them to write new papers on two different topics, and I’d forget about hte plagiarizing, but I did warn them that other faculty members would likely fail them without giving them a second chance. And to their credit, they both wrote decent papers.
The bummer was that I had a student I really wanted to fail … she never showed up for class, she never did any of the activities, she only showed up for the tests, and she JUST passed. I even had the other teaching assistants and the supervising professor review her final after I graded it … and they agreed that she just had enough to pass the class.
I do kinda miss teaching … but I don’t miss the politics. My advisor just got caught up in a mess at Kent State and was stripped of his position as department chair because the school wanted to discpline one of his faculty members, and couldn’t, so they made him a scapegoat. So when I see stuff like that, I’m glad I’m out of the academic world.
I can’t defend the quote issues very well. But as for the reference page mistakes, that one is perfectly understandable. A lot of students don’t know about places online that will do reference pages for them. When a fellow student tells them about one, people will use it. And if that site does it wrong, few people will go to check it.
Hmmm, I suppose, with this topic, I do need to point out that I did pretty much take the gist (along with some words..but I DID paraphrase…really…I, uh…oh forget it…) of my copyright notice from my sister’s blog.
I was kind of hoping that the whole familial relations thing would make it OK with her, and I did mean to mention this to her before but forgot (that part, at least, I know she will understand!)