<p>It sounds like you are approaching this in the right way. I agree with the poster who said that they would have immediately shot over to the school for a meeting.
(Although it doesn’t sound like it happened here) I am amazed that resubmitting your own later draft to the online program can flag a paper for plagiarism. I guess it would be obvious what happened once the two works were compared by a human, but that still doesn’t seem quite right.</p>
<p>I’m not so sure that getting down to the school as quickly as possible to talk with counselor is necessary or appropriate. The teacher was giving you a heads up of what is going on so you are in the loop. I’m not sure how all the plagiarism websites work but I do think they list the type of plagiarism and where it came from–so It would be easy to find out for sure.</p>
<p>If D is a junior, I would let her deal with the consequences (0 can be painful) herself. I would find out why she felt she needed to result to plagiarism, especially since she knew it would be turned in through this particular site. Maybe she is stressed and is having difficulty with time management. You might step in and help her prioritize. </p>
<p>She needs to know that you do not approve of her behavior and she should also apologize to the teacher for her actions. I would encourage her to devote extra time and energy to the class it happened in to try to make up for her indiscretion.</p>
<p>Let her know that now is the time she is developing the person she wants to be. Let her think about that for a while.</p>
<p>I’m wondering if the classmate (if it’s a current student) whose paper she read/borrowed heavily from is also being punished. Fear of having someone else borrow one’s work was always a powerful motivator to my kids to keep them from sharing essays they’d written.</p>
<p>I’d also chat about time management and that she’s got to plan her time better so she doesn’t have to resort to cheating. Agree that the consequences of this happening in college are MUCH more serious.</p>
<p>I’d make sure your D understands why what she did is plagiarism. These kids get so used to cut-and-paste that they don’t always think about these things. S2’s IB program spent a LOT of time educating the kids on plagiarism and proper citations (Purdue’s OWL is excellent), starting freshman year. They also used turnitin.com for regular writing assignments. Plagiarism on the Extended Essay = automatic disqualification from getting a diploma.</p>
<p>The one thing S2 and argued about last fall was about what constituted a fact/idea that needed to be footnoted vs. “common knowledge” for purposes of his Extended Essay. He wrote his entire first draft based on stuff he had read in the papers, magazines, heard on the radio, etc. over a couple of years. It was all assimilated into his brain as common knowledge. Getting him to go back and footnote was a real ordeal.</p>
<p>Automatic F in the course if it was blatant such as plagiarizing and entire paper. If it was a failure to properly footnote properly a source used in the paper I would reduce the grade on the assignment by 1/2 grade point. Many of us has made that mistake from time to time.</p>
<p>During my soph year at Ohio State a student was caught cheating on an exam and was immediately expelled from the College of Engineering. He did take up another major in the College of Arts& Sciences.</p>
<p>adogpa - Your plan of action, in addition to talking to your student first sounds like a good approach. I would offer a twist on the ‘lecture from parents’. I am guilty of this in different situations. I found with one of my students a far more productive and less aggressive tactic was to require a written report from the student that directly correlated to the students actions. Perhaps ask her to research and report on actions taken at different universities for plagiarism. The time taken is time your student wants to be doing something else. They have to actively think about the topic at hand. It takes you out of the equation. You can still ‘lecture’, however perhaps more in a response to her written work. As opposed to saying ‘You received a zero this time. If you’d been in college the punishment would have been far different’, you can say ‘As you have found, in college this is not tolerated and leads to XYZ.’ This is no longer your opinion that a teenager tends to think is blown out of proportion, but a fact they have reported themselves they can not dispute.</p>
<p>I would also want to be very, very clear in finding out from the school what your students actual record will or will not reflect, and if there is any way this will find it’s way into the GC report next fall. It doesn’t sound like it, however your daughter will have to answer questions regarding discipline history in many different forms (not just the way the Common App is written) depending on where she applies. The most important thing here is not to give contradictory information than the school.</p>
<p>Deep breaths…</p>
<p>I work with 5-10 year olds using computers. The older kids were working on reports and thought copying and pasting from the internet was a very OK thing to do. Boy did they learn quickly that there was no tolerance for that kind of thing. Now they have to write their information long hand on paper after reading the articles or websites and then rewrite in their own words for their projects and cite references. It became really obvious that those who just copied and pasted had no idea what their projects were about. Hopefully will have nipped this in the bud. We’ll see.</p>
<p>Just to clarify. I personally would have been down at the school because it is our district’s policy that any grade of 0 because of plagiarism results in a disciplinary notation on the student’s official transcript. If that is the case, then this little life lesson just got a whole lot larger. And I stand by my suggestion of notes of apologies to the teacher, principal and counselor. If OP’s D did do this, then I believe it is more disrespectful than anything and that needs to be addressed. JMO.</p>
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<p>First, to be clear – I am militant about plagiarism, my writing’s been plagiarized and I’ve caught students who have plagiarized and I believe in punishing a plagiarist.</p>
<p>But – if I were in your shoes, as the parent, I would not punish my child. I’m pretty sure that had my kid plagiarized we would have had several long talks about it and I would have made sure she understood what constitutes plagiarism and why it should not happen, but I would not have grounded her socially.</p>
<p>I would hope the teacher and the school have clear rules for how plagiarism is dealt with and punished, and that those rules were followed. She violated the school’s rules when she plagiarized, and the school/teacher should punish her – not the parent. My role as a parent here would be to comfort her and to make sure she understands that I still love her despite what she did. I would be clear that I support the school punishment (assuming I do), and make sure she understands what she did wrong and why it is wrong.</p>
<p>My experience is that many schools do not have very strict punishments for plagiarism, and they fold under pressure. In one case, I had a parent advocate for their child and I was forced to drop the zero, even though it was quite clear the kid had copied a website verbatim. (This was an eighth grader and the parent argued that the kid had never learned that direct copying was wrong.) That’s just one example – almost every case of plagiarism I’ve dealt with the punishment has been argued down successfully, much to my chagrin.</p>
<p>Beware plagiarism checkers… Here is an Inside Higer Ed article on them: [News:</a> False Positives on Plagiarism - Inside Higher Ed](<a href=“http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/03/13/detect]News:”>http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/03/13/detect)</p>
<p>"My experience is that many schools do not have very strict punishments for plagiarism, and they fold under pressure. In one case, I had a parent advocate for their child and I was forced to drop the zero, even though it was quite clear the kid had copied a website verbatim. (This was an eighth grader and the parent argued that the kid had never learned that direct copying was wrong.) That’s just one example – almost every case of plagiarism I’ve dealt with the punishment has been argued down successfully, much to my chagrin. "</p>
<p>Either my public magnet high school and junior high schools in NYC were unusual or enforcement standards regarding plagiarism or other rules have gotten lax due to a greater tendency for parents to go over the top in defending their kids who blatantly break the rules. </p>
<p>What’s more sad is that I have heard many rants from college classmates and friends who teach/TA at elite private universities about how parents are increasingly doing this for their college aged kids. In the case of a few instructors, TA friends, and even undergrads at a few Ivies…including Harvard…I’ve even heard of a few parents hiring lawyers in attempting to threaten the schools with lawsuits to force the school to give their child more favorable treatment regarding mediocre grades and/or bad conduct. Blechh!!</p>
<p>I suggest that you fast for three days.</p>
<p>Our DD got nailed with plagarism last yr because she missed quoting a source. At first they were going to give her a 0, and an F for the quarter, place it in her permanent record plus, kick her out of NHS and FNHS. They took it very seriously. I demanded to see the paper, and I was upset, because it was one quote in a 3 page paper that she had sourced every other quote. </p>
<p>Some schools are very stringent. In the end she got a 0 and had to re-do the paper, but would not receive a grade for it. It did teach my DD a very valuable lesson that sourcing is very important.</p>
<p>Put yourself in your kids shoes…after all, you were in high school once too. How would you wanted your parents to take care of it then?</p>
<p>Getting caught cheating is embarrasing enough for students who take pride in their work.</p>
<p>I don’t think lecturing the student or grounding socially is necessary in most cases.</p>
<p>Here’s a question: do colleges check common app essays? My D has a friend who basically rewrote an essay from a tutorial book…I mean - who plagiarizes on a college app?!</p>
<p>^ Yes, colleges do check essays for plagiarism. Perhaps not in all instances, but it does happen. </p>
<p>Who copies their college app essay? Students who have gotten away with it in high school? Students who honestly don’t understand that copying two or three sentences of text applies (although they should)? Students who are feeling overwhelmed by the application process and simply can not deal with writing another essay? Students who are purposely throwing an entire application because it’s their parents dream school, not theirs? Who knows? What they may not understand is the ramifications may be far beyond their applications simply being disregarded. I honestly don’t know what the consequences are. I don’t think you can lump the students who do this into a single category.</p>
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<p>Blue, </p>
<p>Simple! A thin envelope over a fat envelope.</p>
<p>People forget that these essays for many colleges are scanned prior to the admissions board.</p>
<p>For example, when DS applied to Notre Dame, they stated they were adamant, that they drew a line at the word count because the essay was scanned into their computer program, and with amount of applications they could not go through every essay if kids passed that number. Additionally, they felt it was reflective of the students ability to get their point across in a specific constraint.</p>
<p>I do know other colleges that will give a % leeway, but again these essays go through a computer program. If they are scanning them for word count, I would not take the assumption that they aren’t scanning them for plagarism, since most profs do that at the university level to start with.</p>
<p>Both my kids were aware of folks who copied a theme/specifics from college essays their English teachers used as exemplars. There is a reason they did not post essays, even after they have gone off to college!</p>
<p>Agree that there is a difference between copying someone else’s paper and failing to cite one item in a paper that is otherwise properly attributed, and if it were my kid, I think I’d want to have a meeting with the teacher/administrator and my kid so that we all understand what exactly happened. Not that I would fight the consequences, but to make sure that my kid learns what he did wrong.</p>