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What Do You Do When Confronted With a Plagarizing Student?
by Cliopatria
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At Rhode Island College, a freshman copied and pasted from a Web site’s frequently asked questions page about homelessness — and did not think he needed to credit a source in his assignment because the page did not include author information.
Sarah Brookover, left, a senior at Rutgers University in New Jersey, with Vibiana Bowman Cvetkovic, a reference librarian.
At DePaul University, the tip-off to one student’s copying was the purple shade of several paragraphs he had lifted from the Web; when confronted by a writing tutor his professor had sent him to, he was not defensive — he just wanted to know how to change purple text to black.
And at the University of Maryland, a student reprimanded for copying from Wikipedia in a paper on the Great Depression said he thought its entries — unsigned and collectively written — did not need to be credited since they counted, essentially, as common knowledge.
Professors used to deal with plagiarism by admonishing students to give credit to others and to follow the style guide for citations, and pretty much left it at that.
But these cases — typical ones, according to writing tutors and officials responsible for discipline at the three schools who described the plagiarism — suggest that many students simply do not grasp that using words they did not write is a serious misdeed....
I believe that the students who commit plagiarism in the history courses that I teach are usually motivated by a combination of two factors:
a) They are not very interested in history, so actually doing the research and thinking for themselves would not give the the psychic reward that it gives to some students. Also, it is not as easy for them to come up with ideas of their own as it would be for students who are interested in the material.
b) They are very busy. They are taking a bunch of courses, and they do not have the time and energy to do a good job in every course. Plagiarism saves a lot of time and effort.
But this is just an impression, involving some guesswork. I cannot claim really to know what the motives are.
Nat Bates -
8/18/2010
Sorry, I should have signed with my real name. My mistake. I am Nat Bates. I'll leave silly monickers for other lists.
reptibust -
8/18/2010
Professor,
May I ask a question. I do not disagree with you on your policy. Plagiarism is a horrible, horrible thing. And, to be honest, I have never committed it. Now, I want to explain why I have never committed it. I have never committed it because I have too much pride. If anything, it is not because I am such a wonderful person. Quite the contrary, I might be an even more insufferable person because I have too much fondness for my own ideas and way of expressing myself. I am probably even insufferable. Have you read any of my comments on HNN? You can accuse me of many things, but lack of confidence is not one of them.
My question is this:
What is to root cause of plagiarism? Is it simply bad morals? Or, is there a deeper lack of confidence that one's own work will actually make a difference? Is real and genuine individuality actually rewarded in Higher Education? I suggest that it might be the very lack of confidence in "ME, THE INDIVIDUAL" that could lead people down this road. I used to honestly despise people who cheated because they stole from me when I was honest. Yet, since part of my spiritual practice involves forgiving people, the thought of their possibly having an inner void has honestly helped me to re-evaluate my bad feelings towards my fellow human creatures.
This is something I ask as a question and not an indictment. My Professors were great, and mostly respected individuality and creativity Yet, does the System want individuals, or does the System simply want obedient people? You as a Professor might want individuality, but what of the broader political context?
No excuses for plagiarism. Believe me, I am firm on this. I agree with you. Understanding is not the same as exclusing.
Nat Bates -
8/17/2010
Fortunately I had some cool Prof's who did not fall in to that trap. I was lucky where I went to college. And, curiously, I do not hear about a whole lot of problems with plagiarism there!
james joseph butler -
8/15/2010
You're so right. I returned to grad school as an adult and it's maddening how Profs expect students to do the same thing I did twenty years ago; digest and regurgitate without including me. I'm happy to originate research but more often we're asked to consume and streamline. It's dull, mind numbing, and breeds conformism. And A's.
Nat Bates -
8/10/2010
I remember one of my Professors taking me aside at BART one time after class. He began to talk about a paper that he suspected had been plagiarized. I felt an immediate fear in me, with the scared good will of a child being accused. You all remember the "Who..me?" of yesteryear.
He quickly assured me that his suspicions fell on another student. The paper was a bit above that person's writing ability. As for me, he said, my style was too unique. He claimed that my writing style resembled Gonzo Journalism of Hunter Thompson, where each paragraph was a stream of consciousness. My style was too unique, in a zany kind of way. I was back-handedly insulted/complimented/relieved.
And yes, I have been a Gonzo Journalist ever since. Everything I have written has been in my own unique style. I have never quit. For years I have written in a stream of consciousness.
I have too much pride and egotism to plagiarize. Perhaps the Educations System has it all wrong. Maybe more creativity and individuality is the way to go, filling people with confidence. I mean, honestly, with more people filled with themselves and insufferable in the way of some of our best writers (and our worst), we would have a lot less plagiarism. Instead of humility on the part of students, perhaps a bit of bombast would actually increase our sense of honesty.
Yet, the System continues to call for uniformity. How sad, and then cheating becomes epidemic. Of course, it must be the fault of students, Youtube, Creationism, Republicans, Democrats, Comic books, bad diet, lax parents or Multi-culturalism (choose one). It could never be the fault of the educational model itself. Oh-no...
Mark O'Neill -
8/7/2010
While I only teach 1000/3000-level courses, I use in class essays to get students to provide their own thoughts and usually avoid plagiarism concerns. I ask students to reflect on what goes into forming their opinions. Questioning sources starts with identifying them. I've found that research projects for students who lack almost any context to be of limited value for the intro courses and even some plagiarized asssignments in the past have been wildly off base. Software to detect plagiarism in more advanced courses is a vital tool. Perhaps using it to evaluate early drafts of students' work could correct their course before they turn in the final product?
I forgot to recommend as well Peter Hoffer's Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, and Fraud in the Writing of American History. I think it would be another great book to use as a text in a historiography class.
Jonathan Rose -
8/6/2010
Turn 'em in to the Dean. Then they get a fair hearing before a disciplinary board. That the policy at our university, and it's a good policy.
I know some faculty prefer to deal with such cases on their own, by dropping grades and/or demanding rewrites, but there are problems with that approach. It can't identify multiple offenders: I have no idea whether the accused student has plagiarized once or many times. And different professors apply very different ethical standards. Some only administer a slap on the wrist. At the other extreme, I remember a case where a student was hauled before our disciplinary board for omitting one footnote, obviously a minor oversight. We voted to acquit.
Edwin Moise -
8/6/2010
My usual penalty for plagiarism is an F for the course. This is in line with my university's policy. On rare cases, I have been more lenient, but never so lenient as simply to give a zero on the assignment that was plagiarized.
I only call it plagiarism if the copying is massive. Occasional passages copied word for word I just treat as student sloppiness, about which I don't get excited.
I recent years, my syllabus for every course has included a very specific description, based on experience in past years, of the particular forms that plagiarism would be likely to take in that course, if it were to occur. What sort of behavior by a student, on which assignments.
Only once have I spotted plagiarism on a preliminary draft. I told the student that it if had been a final draft rather than preliminary, I would probably have had to bring a formal charge of plagiarism, and give him an F for the course. He ignored the warning, and his final draft was plagiarized. I gave him an F for the course.
It is very important that plagiarism cases be reported officially to the university administration. That way the student goes on the list of people who have been caught once, and cannot pretend to be a first offender, if caught by another professor in the future.
Javier Ramirez -
8/6/2010
If students find what plagiarising consists of to be hard to grasp then they are in real good company http://hnn.us/articles/1081.html
It all depends on the degree of severity and intentions. The example above about citing Wikipedia seems like an honest misunderstanding of the "common knowledge" rule (not the case of the "purple plagiarising bandit" obviously). The "common knowledge" rule needs to be more cleary spelled out not only in upper level undergraduate history methods courses but throughout a history major or any liberal arts major's academic career. For most of my undergad history days the only time a professor would say anything at all about cheating was on the first day of class when going over the syllabus and even then it was only briefly to read where it stated something to the effect "Refer to the University's policy on academic cheating". I think when dealing with historiography professors should go over the cases of professional historians having been caught in the act with their students. HNN did a great job of putting together these cases in the link above. I think an excellent book that should be used is Jon Weiner's Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud, and Politics in the Ivory Tower. This piece about plagiarising in Australia is inforamtive of the problem getting a defintion that students can understand
At the small, private liberal arts college where I'm teaching there is a clearly defined policy on this issue which is required to be included in every syllabus. Nevertheless I had four cases last semester--all of them cut and paste jobs from Internet sources. The consequences at this school can be pretty serious so this semester I'm going to give them fire and brimstone in the opening lectures in hopes of, in the words of Barney Fife, "nipping it in the bud."
Jonathan Dresner -
8/5/2010
It depends on the assignment: I've gotten pretty good at assigning essay prompts that don't lend themselves to cut&paste, so the most common time for plagiarism is the comprehensive final essay exams. At the point, there's no time for remediation, and all I can do is penalize. Some semesters I start with an assignment, though, in which the students have to define plagiarism, and explain what the penalties should be: often they come down harsher than my colleagues; I rarely have plagiarism from classes where it's explicitly addressed im this manner.
