Advice on academic integrity issue

Parents Forum
41

Again here are the professor’s words: “While it is entirely up to you what direction you choose, I want to encourage you to consider extending your research. This is a topic that you already have background in so you’ll be able to move forward fairly quickly in the course…” I see nothing that could be interpreted as reusing a paper from a previous course.

I also think the context here is important: she was late writing the paper. Other students wrote 10 pages, she only wrote 5, added to 5 previously written. Ungraded draft, yes, but still, it had to be written, and others didn’t use an old paper. It would be a mess if students all thought they could reuse papers or parts of papers!

The daughter here should have asked explicit permission of the professor to reuse the paper, not the topic, and should have asked the TA beforehand, though submitting a note with the paper would have been better then nothing. It is hard not to think that she used the vagueness of the professor’s language to justify doing what she did.

One of my kids is fairly clueless about this type of thing. She recently had to drop a class and is planning on retaking with the same teacher. Even she (sorry to write about her like this, she is a great kid) told me she is going to ask if she can use any work from the 2/3 semester she just completed. She knew to ask. She also knows to protect herself.

Again, I don’t see anything at all in the professor’s message that would encourage what she did. I guess as this thread goes on, I am feeling worse about her chances. I hope this does not traumatize her and that she tells them that she has learned something, even if it is to protect herself in the future. Maybe her particular college is lenient and maybe the teachers who know her well will advocate.

42

Hi OP
glad you brought this up, it’s really important for college students to understand. I work at a college and integrity is part of my area of work. I agree 100% with Juillet. I would advise your daughter to follow his/her advice exactly. Self plagiarism is taken very seriously. Having used that kind of software I can say that when it shows up, it is glaringly obvious, slightly changed phrases or not. Good luck to your daughter, she probably wants to make this right. A one letter reduction is a very lenient punishment in my experience.

43

First, some background: I’m very embedded in these sorts of issues—I’m college faculty, and I’m currently co-chairing my university’s faculty committee on academic integrity issues, where we’ve been working on tightening up policies (including making them clearer) and making sure the processes involved are clear and fair, along with the fuzzier but probably more important goal of getting a culture of academic honesty in place on campus.

So, that said, I’m with @juillet and @compmom and the others who see this as something that’s going to stick, and for good reason.

This comes down to a self-plagiarism issue involving different expectations of what is involved in that. This is to some extent understandable—self-plagiarism is one of the least-understood aspects of academic honesty in higher education among those relatively new to it, and so I’ll take a bit of space to elaborate on it.

To try to explain it, I’ll start with an obvious example. If I published a paper a few years ago in the Journal of Basketweaving Studies as (dfbdfb 2011), I would not be entitled to republish that same paper later on in the International Journal of Underwater Basketry as (dfbdfb 2014).* That would be self-plagiarism, (dfbdfb 2014) would be retracted, I would suffer professional embarrassment, and probably some other professional hit. (Not to mention that my odds of making full professor down the road would likely go down significantly, even if I otherwise meet the requirements.)

Now, reprints do happen, of course, and they’re professionally important. But if this happened—say, (dfbdfb 2011) was recognized as a really important paper in the field of Underwater Basketweaving, and so I was invited to have it republished in a collection of essays coming out this year. If the editors of the collection got my permission (and that of the Journal of Basketweaving Studies, if the publisher retained those rights), then I’d have a new publication, (dfbdfb 2015)—but it would be marked as a reprint of (dfbdfb 2011) in every case, including on anything I submitted to my university to document research productivity.

Now, to get closer to the OP’s child’s case, let’s say that I realize that (dfbdfb 2011) could be improved on, and so I write a new paper that takes some ideas from (dfbdfb 2011) and expands them in new ways. I submit this paper to Cane Weaving Quarterly, and it’s accepted to come out next year as (dfbdfb 2016)—but note that I’d be expected to cite everything that comes from my earlier paper as (dfbdfb 2011). That earlier paper is out there, and I can’t just cut and paste from it to create something new. In a very real way, (dfbdfb 2011) is no longer “mine” once it’s been accepted for publication (for the parallel with the student’s case, replace with: once it’s been submitted for a class)—it has become its own entity, and I have to treat it as such.

However, no matter what, if it turned out that (dfbdfb 2016) was essentially just (dfbdfb 2011) worded a little differently and/or with a couple new results slapped onto it, that would be self-plagiarism—perhaps not as serious a case as the (dfbdfb 2014) case described above, but still the sort of thing that could well result in a retraction, and certainly would result in very real professional embarrassment and a tarnishing of my reputation in the research community. (And really, for those of us who are academic researchers, research reputation is much of the currency—in a very real sense—we operate with.)

And that last paragraph seems to be what has happened in the OP’s case—a previous paper had been recycled, not in new and original ways, but simply by tacking more stuff onto it. This isn’t the worst of all possible cases of self-plagiarism (it’s not like the previous paper was simply turned in with a new date, after all), but it still is.

Fortunately, it’s a good learning experience, and one that will hopefully result in the OP’s child learning. That’s the ultimate goal of academic integrity policies, after all—it’s a teaching and learning process, not strictly a punitive one.

  • I'm just going to go ahead and enclose my fake author-date citations in parentheses throughout to keep them together visually, even when it doesn't really work for any citation style I'm aware of.
44

I think it is hard for non-academics to relate to some of the issues with publication. To me, the fact that this was a late effort and that other students had to write the full 10 pages are the most relevant. And stretching the professor’s intent, whether unconsciously or consciously. Common sense, if one realizes one is part of a community, tells you that her actions were just not fair. Any student who stayed up all night writing the full 10 pages and got it in in time, would tell her that. I am sure she is a good kid and the faculty know that, that is not the issue. Perhaps all students have a little tunnel vision when stressed, but colleges are communities and many rules exist for the benefit of the whole.

45

@waitingtoexhale, I am not the OP and it’s not my daughter that’s involved here. I think I must have become too passionate about the issue!

@compmom, I agree that the fact that this was submitted late does change the tenor of the discussion. I’m not fully on board on the 10 page/5 page issue. To me that’s a matter of quality and one person’s 5 page paper can far exceed another’s 10 pager. Just in case you can’t tell already, I’m far too wordy and never had trouble filling the page requirement. That did not mean that what I wrote was good. The hardest part of writing for me was paring down. We don’t really know and can’t really evaluate the time spent or the worth of this student’s draft.

And now I’m veering off topic for a second (feel free to ignore) to vent about academic dishonesty but geez, I wish college professors took group work and unequal effort as seriously as you guys take this. No one seems to notice or care when students in a group drop the ball and allow others to take on all the responsibility. I would love to see a form submitted with the final project delineating who has contributed what and then have each student sign the form attesting to his work. It’s easy to tell the kid to take charge but anyone who has been in that situation or has had a kid in that situation knows that that’s just not all that easy. I’m just the parent and all I can do is listen sympathetically when my daughter vents about her classmates but it is incredibly frustrating and, it seems to me, a whole lot more academically dishonest than what’s described here. My vent is over and I am sending you back to your regularly scheduled programming. :slight_smile:

46

Well, many of us do already have stuff like this in place, so… :)>-

47

Sorry, but turning in previous work with what she thought was permission from the professor in an ungraded draft to a TA with the full expectation that revision will take place before the full paper is turned in is not anywhere near the same as submitting a previously published work for publication and trying to pass it off as original. And I’m sorry, the whole “it’s not fair to the other students” argument for a 10 page ungraded draft just makes me roll my eyes. Please. It’s equally “not fair” that some kids have taken AP and then retake the course in college and fly through it, busting the curve and getting good grades without having to study, while others struggle. It’s “not fair” that some kids can draw on resources not available to others (e.g., friends, parents, additional texts, etc.) for help in understanding material and studying for tests. “Fairness” to others should not be the measure of academic integrity; that should be measured merely by whether your behavior provides an honest representation of your intentions and your own work and abilities.

48

@dfbdfb that’s really good to hear.

49

Well, pages are definitely an issue in my classes. Any topic can be written on for 2 pages, or 5, or 10, or 20, or 200 depending on the level of depth and focus. It makes me nuts when students turn in papers shorter than the minimum and then complain they had said “all they could” about it, and didn’t want to “pad.” Then I’ll go through the paper, paragraph by paragraph, showing where things were glossed over, where assertions were made but not explained, where the “so what?” was missing, where evidence was needed, where transitions were lacking, etc etc etc.

I’m fine with students asking for advice on drafts about how to expand and develop more (it’s a writing class), but don’t tell me “that’s all I had to say.”

50

@allinsh1 Correct me if I’m wrong, but kids who take courses in college that duplicate the materials they took in a HS AP class are usually doing so either because the university doesn’t accept that AP course for credit or because they aren’t confident that the AP course they took actually taught them the basics they need to move forward to the next level course in the department. Both of these are entirely legitimate reasons to take introductory courses and are not either unfair to other students or failures of academic integrity. Faculty often agree that AP courses are not actually the equivalent of what is taught in a college-level course on that subject (which is the reason for many not being accepted for credit or students being advised to repeat a course like Calculus when they’ve already taken an AP version).

51

@profparent - I am not arguing that retaking a course is an academic integrity issue. I’m arguing that retaking a course is an advantage that students who have not previously taken the course do not have, as a way of demonstrating that using “fairness” to other students (as asserted by @juillet and others earlier) in terms of everyone operating from a level playing field regarding effort required to complete assignments has no place in a discussion of academic integrity. Thanks for proving my point.

And FWIW, yes, there are plenty of students who retake courses not just because they think they need the refresher, but because they have room in their schedules to do so and think it will be a GPA boost for them. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be allowed; just pointing out that it is an advantage that other students taking the material for the first time do not have.

52

A college’s honor code has nothing to do with retaking AP’s.

Bottom line- the college does not want students “double-dipping”, i.e reusing material a student created for one class to get credit in another either sequentially or simultaneously. It is the college’s right to consider double-dipping an honor violation, and my guess is that this student won’t be doing this again. Take the lower grade and move on.

You guys are getting caught up with this fairness business. All fascinating of course- but not the point of a college honor code. I can’t take a drafting class and create a model of a transportation hub, and then use it for my final project in an urban planning class. This concept is not hard for anyone who has actually been to college to understand.

OP- the punishment seems fair and appropriate (D is not getting expelled). It’s like making an arithmetic mistake on your taxes (inadvertently). The IRS figures out you made a mistake, they send you a bill for the back taxes plus penalty fee. They don’t come to your house and confiscate your candy or take away your car keys. Your D is learning a valuable lesson by taking the punishment-- even for an inadvertent mistake, and even if she doesn’t believe she did anything wrong- which will serve her well in adulthood.

Good lesson to learn in college IMHO.

53

I just talked with my mid 20’s youngest who said she thought schools should do more education on what plagiarism is. She said she knew several people in college who took courses that were similar and used variations of one paper for all the courses!! So some policies are I suppose intended to address a slippery slope.

I wasn’t suggesting “fairness” as one way to think about why policies might exist.

I think that the number of responses on this thread shows that these issues resonate for students, parents and faculty and that my 24 year-old is right, more guidelines needed!!

54

Full agreement, and there’s a general recognition in academia that we need to do better. One problem that gets run into regularly, though, is that even when students are taught it, the details tend to be forgotten. It’s the basic problem of pedagogy, really—how do you get the details to sink in?

55

I know my husband turned in the same paper for two courses in graduate school. Neither of us had the slightest inkling that there might be something wrong with doing that.

56

exactly, students are expected to not plagiarise, but it is never really taught in the way that it should be. There should be more specific teaching of how to avoid it, and what is and is not plagiarism. I think students are often confused about what constitutes plagiarism and what does not, and this needs to be clearer. In op’s case it seems extreme that it was reported for a rough draft, since I feel like it shouldn’t matter unless it was for the final draft. after all, the rough draft is the stage where you edit and correct mistakes before the final paper.

57

Julliet and dfbdfb (is that some kind of SAT analogy question moniker! :slight_smile: ) hit the nail on the head. I fully agree with their views on this topic and want to thank them for their illuminating posts.

58

I can just say that we go over and over and over this in our first-year comp classes, including telling them about self-plagiarism. But some of them still, at the end of the semester, are forgetting intext citations, doing the Works Cited wrong, forgetting to include it at all !!! It’s definitely a work in progress, and like @dfbdfb says, they “get” the general gist, but don’t remember the details.

I think a lot of problems overall are an inability to recognize where self-checking is necessary-- sort of an “oh, this is probably okay” wishful thinking. I see it with all sorts of details: lack of proofreading, lack of checking citation manuals to get the citations right, guessing at MLA format rather than going back to the book to check, guessing that sending this paper to the TA is “probably” alright.

I don’t know what causes it, but the “probably alright” mindset is epidemic.

59

One issue with correct format for citations, etc. is that, at least for my daughter, teachers have been all over the place in which style they wanted - MLA, APA, or something unique. I can’t remember which she used in her AP classes in HS but I know it was different from what they wanted in college. Also, over the past few years the correct format for citing on-line sources has changed (or rather matured might be the correct term) - so you need to be on top of these things when writing a paper.

However, she always gets the format correct by using the Purdue OWL for reference and checking with the teacher if in doubt (professors are always happy to help with formatting questions). I do agree however with garland in that many students are lazy and don’t sweat the details.

60

Kiddie, welcome to the working world.

One company requires a standard template for documents with narrative which is vertical, but data always presented horizontally. Your next job will require all documents which contain a chart, graph, or spreadsheet to be entirely horizontal. One company needs all excel tabs dated to make sure that only current data is being shared; another company requires that any document requiring a signature includes previous iterations and edits, and every document preserved until a final copy is agreed upon. Your first job may require that anyone cc’d on a document get a final copy as a courtesy; the next job may insist that distribution be restricted and that final copies only go out on a “need to know” basis.

I don’t think a kid ready for college level work will have a hard time understanding that that citations, formatting, editing and protocol are subject to change over time, or subject to change depending on the situation or the circumstance. Nobody keeps carbon copies anymore; technology changes, document retention policies change. It is good prep for real life for a college kid to learn to verify BEFORE handing anything in what the required protocol or style manual is in that situation.

Shouldn’t be too taxing for a HS grad to learn.