<p>My d is TAing a (science) course for the first time. In reviewing some student papers this past weekend, she came across what she thought was a student lifting material out of the internet, and quickly found the apparent source. </p>
<p>My question is: How well do undergrads understand the rules for proper attribution of material used in papers? (How well do we adults understand it?) What is the line between using someone else's material (i.e. plagiarism) versus using someone else's idea with some re-wording (don't know what you call this) versus original thought?</p>
<p>D and I had quite a discussion on this, and frankly, I'm not sure what the lines are. </p>
<p>FWIW, the prof made an announcement , suggesting those students who thought they may have "forgotten" to properly attribute sources (although it was not explicit in the assignment) should send an email to the TA. about 1/4 of the class did!</p>
<p>I had a horrible experience with something like this teaching a high school English class a few years ago. A (good) student included something very technical in a paper, using idiosyncratic terminology, that she could not possibly have understood, and that had almost nothing to do with the rest of the paper. It was presented as if it was her original work. It was essentially one longish paragraph out of a 5-page paper, the rest of which was pretty clearly her original work.</p>
<p>I went back and forth with the student many, many times. At first, she said it was hers. Then, she gave me a source for it that I knew was wrong, but I schlepped to the library to check it anyway and confirmed that it was wrong. Finally, I decided that she wasn't some research genius, and I googled one of the idiosyncratic words, and immediately found the paragraph, verbatim of course, on a website connected to the student's future college. There followed, a long e-mail correspondence in which I tried to help her understand what she had done wrong, and in which she was pretty nasty and hostile.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, I was going back and forth with the school's English chair, whom I had told about the problem when it first arose. At first, she wanted to suspend the student and give her an F for the course. I argued against that -- I thought this was misdemeanor plagiarism, not felony plagiarism. The English chair didn't think misdemeanor plagiarism existed. But then she raised it at a faculty meeting and discovered that the school's history department, which saw plagiarism issues a lot, recognized several grades of plagiarism, of which this was the most minor. I forget what minor punishment was meted out to the student, except that part of it was that she had to rewrite the paper to satisfy me as to attribution and apologize.</p>
<p>The whole experience was awful. The student -- a spring semester senior who should have known a lot better -- was, or pretended to be, completely obtuse. There were some tough things going on in her life at the time, including lots of college admissions stress, and everyone -- beginning with me -- was a little worried about her. It took hours and hours of my time, and got me nowhere.</p>
<p>Wow, sound to me like the school needs to address what plagiarism is and is not at the beginning of every school year, especially for the new Freshman. The policy should also be posted somewhere [ on the school's web page? in the handbook under academic policies?] so everyone- students, parents and teachers can read up on the policy at any time.</p>
<p>I attended a college which had an honor system, and which supplied students with a lengthy, detailed pamphlet in which they discussed in detail what was plagiarism. My own reaction at the time was "Oh my, I plagiarized my way through hs"......not because I copied things and represented them as my own, but because my ideas usually paralleled something that I had read in the research.</p>
<p>I do think that the line has been blurred somewhat today with all the working in groups and collaboration. I think some clarity on what plagiarism and dishonesty is might be helpful to many. Concrete examples are very useful.</p>
<p>I had a good friend who had the same thesis advisor as I did, and he was a brilliant guy who went on to a joint MD PhD at Harvard. He noted that our common advisor had added a footnote or two on nearly every page of his junior paper that led to his thesis. ( I think this was done just to let him know that others had had the same idea at some point---not to backhandedly accuse him of cheating).</p>
<p>
[quote]
My question is: How well do undergrads understand the rules for proper attribution of material used in papers?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>There's a lot of confusion over things like whether and when to put footnotes or endnotes, what exactly the proper format is for citing a source, and just how different what you write has to be in order to avoid plagiarizing. But it was understood among people I knew that, say, lifting a paragraph from a source was not okay.</p>
<p>I was on the Committee on Discipline as an undergrad, and we were more lenient with freshmen in these types of cases, most of the time, under the presumption that a lot of new college students genuinely don't know.</p>
I posted about this earlier this month. It is some kind of scary. No one seems to know the rules without directly speaking to each prof (as in JHS's anecdote about the no tolerance "everything's a felony" teacher as opposed to the varying levels of the history teacher).</p>
<p>I don't know JHS, if that was misdemeanor plagiarism to start with I think it turned into felony plagiarism when she lied to you.</p>
<p>I'd be interested to know what the levels of plagiarism are though. I guess reusing an entire paper is the worst, lifting a piece of something word for word was the very bad, and paraphrasing without sourcing is not quite as bad. When I was in college I just footnoted like crazy used quotation marks when appropriate and never had any problems. It didn't seem to matter that I didn't claim to have too many original ideas.</p>
<p>Harvard issues a booklet "Writing with Sources" to every freshman, but it isn't clear how many in fact read it even once. </p>
<p>A student who is TAing should always consult the course instructor when coming across apparent instances of plagiarism. It is the instructor's job to deal with them, not the TA's.</p>
<p>I don't think the issue is having original ideas (how many of us could claim that throughout our lifetimes?) but processing other people's ideas (finding the most appropriate evidence or interpretation) and restating them in our own words.</p>
<p>There is intentional plagiarism: buying a whole paper or lifting parts or whole papers of the internet.</p>
<p>There is unintentional plagiarism which can include failure to cite sources so that it appears that the ideas come from the paper writer; or inadequate sourcing such as acknowledgding a source at the beginning of a long and complex passage, so that readers are under the impression that only a couple of sentences rather than the whole passage are borrowed from someone else. In the majority of cases, students are guilty of unintentional plagiarism.</p>
<p>It is interesting that the situation that alerted my D was much like the one you saw: language that clearly did not fit, terminology that had not been introduced into the course. At the prof's suggestion, she met with the student, who at first denied things too, until my D asked her to explain the terms in some of what she wrote. The kid then burst into tears (which was tough on my D!). (Marite, guess this prof does not agree with you?)</p>
<p>I do think there is irony in the fact that the same tool that makes it so easy for students to find stuff to lift, the internet, also makes it so easy to find the source that was used.</p>
<p>Maybe we should hit the students that lift quotes directly from the internet the hardest just for being too lasy to not even re-word things? (or praise them for making it so easy to get caught?) (just kidding...)</p>
<p>I personally think the prof, expecting your undergraduate D to deal with another undergraduate is being derelict in his/her duties. The prof, not the TA has ultimate responsibilities for grading. That applies to dealing with breaches of academic discipline.
I feel badly that your D had to deal with it. I know that accusations of plagiarism can take an enormous amount of time to resolve. It really is not fair to your D.</p>
<p>Marite's referenced "Writing with sources" is available ( in somewhat cumbersome format) online. I quickly read the plagiarism section which is in section 3 or 4. Something like this would be useful for many students to reflect upon, since violating these rules can get you thrown out of the game altogether. </p>
<p>Does Harvard say anywhere that it is used (i.e. posted0 with permission?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>The irony is that while plagarism is a moral offense, copyright violations are legal offenses....one that university staff commits all the time.</p>
<p>Here's another source published in Neat New Stuff by Marylaine Block:</p>
<p>Academic Plagiarism <a href="http://www.ucalgary.ca/%7Ehexham/study/plag.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.ucalgary.ca/~hexham/study/plag.html</a>
Many students lack a clear concept of what plagiarism is, and why it matters, so this site will be useful for both teachers and librarians trying to train them in academic honesty. It not only illustrates various forms of plagiarism, but in each instance shows how to use the misappropriated material responsibly.</p>
<p>I'm with tokenadult - these kids should know better. And they do. They just think the plagiarism won't be found out. A few years ago -- before google became a well-known search engine much less a verb -- maybe kids weren't as informed about lifting material straight off the internet. But today that excuse doesn't hold water, and is generally addressed in most self-respecting high schools.</p>
<p>Just to explain my thinking on "misdemeanor plagiarism":</p>
<p>Actually, I thought what my student did was a little worse than that, but she still didn't deserve the full weight of the law coming down on her. She copied a paragraph essentially verbatim (a couple word changes) without attribution, but (1) it wasn't central to the paper she wrote, and in fact the paper would have been fine and complied with the assignment without it, (2) a simple citation would have fixed the problem, and (3) her lie that she had written it was transparent and recanted fairly quickly, and her mis-attribution thereafter could easily have been the innocent result of poor notes. (I immediately knew it was wrong because I knew the work of the author she named, and knew he didn't use jargon like that. She had no idea who was whom.) Also there were some mitigating factors: She did a decent job on the rest of the paper, the plagiarized portion of the paper related to defining a concept that she had asked me to define for her and I had deliberately been cryptic, frustrating her, and, as I said, I could tell she was under a great deal of emotional stress and was barely holding it together.</p>
<p>I guess I would see the gradations of plagiarism as (6) brief, immaterial paraphrase without attribution, (5) brief, immaterial copying without quotes and attribution, (4) more extensive paraphrase with some, but inadequate attribution, (3) more extensive paraphrase without attribution, (2) extensive copying without quotes and attribution, and (1) whole-work copying.</p>
<p>Compounding her sin, for me at least, was the fact that she really had no idea what the paragraph she copied meant. She hadn't tried much to figure it out, and hadn't really used any of the concepts in the rest of her paper.</p>
<p>I'm not sure what the legal situation is regarding Writing with Sources. S has it somewhere, and I glanced at it some time ago. I know it was written by someone in the Expository Writing program (indeed taught S in that program) and that it was intended for distribution to all Harvard students.<br>
I'm told it's being or has been revised since S got his copy.</p>
<p>It is hard to say without knowing more. It is possible that the author gave the right to the publisher to compile the author's individual chapters into the book which the company copyrighted as a compiled work, while the author retained the copyright for the uncompiled chapters. But if this were the case, the copyright page of the book should have stated so.</p>
<p>More likely is that the author, as the author, though he had a right to post his own writings without permission of the publisher. Indeed, US copyright law allows "fair use" :
[quote]
Section 107 contains a list of the various purposes for which the reproduction of a particular work may be considered “fair,” such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.
[/quote]
But teaching has been held to mean using copyrighted material as part of a presentation in a course. I am not an attorney, but know that an author can reserve rights to post one's work on the web (for example, and relevant here) while allowing a publisher to copyright. But I don't think the such material would then be marked as copyrighted by the publisher. </p>
<p>maybe one of our copyright experts can comment?</p>