<p>This thread just horrifies me. I can’t believe universities are being so draconian in their approach to this issue. Who among us has not in the throes of an all nighter inadvertently left out a citation??? For goodness sake – the Dartmouth case is just preposterous.</p>
<p>annasdad- concerning post 33 I agree with you. I think that should be a consistent message.</p>
<p>I agree that we need to be cautious about commenting on the Dartmouth case, given that we don’t know all of either side. The sanction does seem harsh, but we don’t know everything that the dean knew. </p>
<p>On the other hand, I think some posters here really don’t appreciate what an honor code means to a college. The honor code tells students (among other things) that we take academic honesty seriously. And by agreeing to live by the honor code, students are agreeing (again, among other things) to take academic honesty seriously. To most of the world, being sloppy about citations might be no big deal. But by having an honor code, colleges are telling students that being sloppy about citations is a big deal.</p>
<p>Hey, if colleges want to expel people because of overdue library books, they can do that if they like. I reserve my right to form my own opinions about the reasonableness of such rules, though.</p>
<p>Sounds like garland’s college has its priorities in order. There ought to be a lesson involved.</p>
<p>Amesie, I spent years at Bryn Mawr, which along with Haverford has one of the toughest honor codes in the business. I do understand what an honor code can mean to a college. In academic integrity along with every other kind of honor, it’s legitimate to consider proportionality between punishment and crime, and distinguish between deliberate and inadvertent wrongdoing.</p>
<p>I’d say the same thing about theft from a fellow student. If a student argues that he took someone else’s backpack inadvertently, because it resembles his, and he was just lazy about checking the name tag, that’s still an honor code violation. But if the board believes his story, it makes no sense to punish him as harshly as a deliberate thief.</p>
<p>“I can only imagine how difficult it is to figure out who is actually guilty of intentional plagiarism vs. those who lack intent.”</p>
<p>Well, sure. But if there’s some kind of hearing where both sides get to argue, the decision-maker can make a judgment about the credibility of the accused. Courts do it all the time, and so do parents questioning a misbehaving child. It’s an imperfect system, but much better in my view than treating every homicide as a first-degree murder.</p>
<p>I don’t think anyone has said that punishments shouldn’t be tailored to fit the offense. Even Dartmouth says that:</p>
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<p>(From the link to the Dartmouth report that Sybbie quoted earlier)</p>
<p>More evidence that the article fairly represents Dartmouth’s position which is that a 3-terms suspension is getting off light. </p>
<p>I’m sorry, but this is like bizarro world to me. I can easily see myself doing something that dumb at 3 am without any criminal intent. I just can’t be that perfect.</p>
<p>I’m glad that in most civil society, intent and integrity still matter.</p>
<p>ClassicRockerDad, I’ve been aware of the Dartmouth case, and astounded by it, for years. It has always been my thought that the appropriate professorial response would have been to blitz the kid and say, “There seems to be a document missing from your paper. Please forward it to me immediately.” The professor obviously knew that the kid wasn’t attempting to plagiarize, since a) the citations were marked in some way, and b) it would be insane–especially on the part of a senior–to omit ALL of them! If the student had omitted SOME of the citations entirely, the idea of deliberate or accidental plagiarism would hold water. </p>
<p>The professor could quite reasonably choose to lower the grade because of the error and late submission. But a formal charge of plagiarism just seems nuts to me.</p>
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<p>I agree with (b). I am not so sure about (a). Were the citations marked in any way? I don’t know. If you create footnotes or endnotes in Word or WordPerfect, then those notes should be in the same document, not a different document. Additionally, this is how the article describes what was (and was not) in the paper:</p>
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<p>This sounds to me like, perhaps, there was no evidence in the paper that he had meant to insert the citations but just forgot.</p>
<p>Also from the Dartmouth article:
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<p>Again, it is not clear that anything in the paper would have alerted the professor that the student had forgotten to add the citations.</p>
<p>Additionally, we don’t know what happened before the student turned in this final draft. In reviewing students’ drafts, I always flag the issue of missing citations if it seems that there should be citations but there are not. Who knows if the professor did address the issue of citations on earlier drafts, before referring this for disciplinary action. (It is also possible, of course, that the professor did over-react, but I don’t think we have the evidence to decide that for sure.)</p>
<p>Amesie, your points are well-taken. I read the account to suggest that the citations were indicated by attribution (“In Plato’s Symposium, Alcibiades says that the nature of the beloved is …”) but that the specific book/page cites were missing, but perhaps that is not the case.</p>
<p>Even if the professor did not over-react, the punishment seems extreme, given the evidence the student was able to produce. But of course that is a matter of opinion and custom.</p>
<p>One of the lessons here is clearly not to leave work until 3am the night before. </p>
<p>There is much reference in college statements about plagiarism that makes it clear the goal is about forming original thoughts and not (inadvertently or otherwise) seeming to claim another’s thoughts as your own.</p>
<p>Does it matter that we can cite examples of adults who got away with it? Does that exonerate? </p>
<p>I think it matters that the colleges state their expectations- in handbook, an info blurb about citations, an honor code you agree to, whatever. Clearly some profs will allow you to fix the problem while others stick to the rule. Just because some are more lenient doesn’t mean all should be. </p>
<p>DH struggles with kids who don’t know what an original thought is. They think an original thought can be something they recently dscovered and use for the first time.</p>
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LOL.</p>
<p>Though I must admit to being absolutely petrified when I submit things through plagiarism detectors. I would not deliberately plagiarize, but when you are writing about something that has been written before millions of times before, I do wonder how many different ways there are to say the same thing. But I guess the detectors do make me think very carefully and I have yet to get an unacceptable percentage.</p>
<p>We knew a grad student who had to do a group paper of some sort. One of the four in the group completely plagiarized his portion of the paper. Luckily the other three were not penalized for it. I can’t remember the exact details, but I think the others in the group actually discovered the plagiarism themselves right at the last minute when the paper was due, so were obliged to report it.</p>
<p>If the argument is that intentions are what matter, then who would ever be found guilty? How can someone prove or disprove intention? And what happens when word gets around that some students are let off because they are believed, while others are not? That would soon become lawsuit city. And it’s really avoidable–as i say to my students, the easiest part of my assignments is to get their MLA citation correct–it’s not rocket science–just follow the rules, don’t freelance (“well, I don’t have my handbook with me, but this looks right”), and, when in doubt-cite cite cite. We have class lessons, tutors, websites, workshops, handbooks–all are available to help a student do this correctly. (And no, one overlooked citation isn’t going to get someone a suspension, probably not even at Dartmouth–the people making these judgments may possibly know stuff we don’t know, as Annasdad pointed out.)</p>
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<p>I think through the preponderance of the evidence.</p>
<p>A paragraph pasted from Wikipedia with a few adjectives changed to throw off the plagiarism checker and no citation is pretty convincing evidence that there was an intent to deceive. (See: Doris Kearns Goodwin)</p>
<p>Quote marks left off one otherwise properly cited passage in the midst of an otherwise flawlessly cited 20-page paper should carry the presumption of an innocent mistake.</p>
<p>Obviously, there are gray cases that call for more nuanced judgment.</p>
<p>Didn’t we argue on the Title IX thread that preponderance could be subjective?</p>
<p>In any case, the reason I had looked up attitudes about plagiarism, in that hs scenario was because it was one case of a missed citation, in a context where the originator of the thought had been noted. And, the teacher was clearly a jerk, before this. Fortunately, that kid got off with a warning from the principal, but it was a lesson learned.</p>
<p>Not to be legalistic, but if your college has these standards, don’t muck around, don’t test their will and authority.</p>
<p>“If the argument is that intentions are what matter, then who would ever be found guilty?”</p>
<p>LOTS of people. You don’t have to take the accused’s word for it. Some denials are implausible on their face: “I’m a Dartmouth junior, and I didn’t know that buying a paper from APlusEssays.com was plagiarism!” Sometimes there’s corroborating evidence, like a painstaking 5-page bibliography saved prior to the due date on the student’s hard drive. Sometimes there’s damning evidence, like a roommate’s recollection of the accused crying, “I haven’t started my term paper and it’s due tomorrow, I’m so screwed!”</p>
<p>Prosecutors have to show motive or intent in most crimes, but there’s a very high conviction rate anyway. Possessing 100 individually portioned bags of cocaine = intent to distribute.</p>
<p>I see your point, Hanna, and i do think there’s a gray area. My post about what happens at my school is about that. What I see most often brought up as plagiarism is some srot of patch writing–lines that follow the sense of the purloined source with some words changed, woven into other sources and the students’ own words/thoughts. No one ever intends that to be plagiarism ;they changed it, right? </p>
<p>There is an explosion of gray area because of the internet; cutting and pasting basically didn’t exist when I went to school. I spend hours sometimes trying to track down a source–and I’ll tell you, it does bug me that my time is wasted. I don’t doubt that somewhere, sometime, someone got over-punished for one missing parentheses. I can only say from my own experience that that is not what anyone thinks the problem is. The problem that does exist is widespread and getting more and more common. Thinking and doing original work is HARD; cutting and pasting is EASY.</p>
<p>I once had a paper submitted that talked about “the Great War.” Took some time to find the book … but I did.</p>
<p>My husband had a paper submitted that lifted quotes from book reviews on Amazon.</p>
<p>Usually we are tipped off to plagiarism because something “isn’t right.” Suddenly the prose becomes polished; judgments are introduced that betray highly sophisticated or advanced knowledge; or key words or phrases are used that are typical of a particular author in the field, but not all in the field, and unlikely to be known by the student. You’ve got plagiarism on your hands.</p>
<p>It’s easy to judge it “intentional” when whole paragraphs are lifted, without quote marks or citations, from obscure sources, or the web. When the student’s words are woven together with the words and insights of others but are clearly dependent on the thought, logic, and wording of that source, the intention was clearly to borrow someone else’s work. There may not have been the “intent” to deceive by incorporating paragraphs from another source; but there was the intent to borrow without attribution. And that is plagiarism. </p>
<p>Our school has a policy that all plagiarism needs to be documented and reported because unless it is, students will often repeat the offense. And the penalties increase as the number of offenses do. Students who beg or ask that we handle something “off the record” are usually betraying the fact that they have been written up before. At that point, it’s hard to keep being sympathetic.</p>
<p>Am I correct in that there is some Internet site that a teacher can use to identify plagiarism? If that is true would it benefit the student to run their own paper through the site to identify potential problems of inadvertent plagiarism?</p>
<p>Turnitin.com is one such site. It is not particularly useful in all areas or for all topics. And it can really only catch plagiarism if it has an electronic source against which to measure the paper. So where there are papers for sale on line, I think it can catch the plagiarism. Or it can compare a student paper to web sites, etc.</p>
<p>Students can run their papers through turnitin.com. You submit the paper, and it gives you a “receipt” showing what percentage of the paper is “plagiarized.” English papers were a pain for my D (HS required turnitin), because if, say, you had to write a paper on a poem, every quoted word or line would show up as “copied” (if that poem were online). Then the students have to go through and somehow document that the “copying” wasn’t plagiarism.</p>
<p>A number of teachers at our HS went to the policy of having papers written in class – but I think that was to prevent parental “interference.” Another kind of “plagiarism”?</p>