<p>On three separate occasions in the last few weeks, I have found myself in a conversation about college students and plagiarism. What was interesting to me is that in the three cases, three pretty different penalties were imposed -- in one case, the student failed the course, in another the student failed the paper but not the course, and the third was not directly penalized but allowed to write a new paper.</p>
<p>Just wondering what other parents think is most appropriate. To me, failing the course seems perhaps harsh (although maybe the paper was most of the grade) but I am not sure that just writing another paper really sends the right message either.</p>
<p>It may depend on the nature of the plagiarism. For example, forgetting to add a citation when one has faithfully cited everywhere else is a far cry from deliberately lifting large sections from someone else’s work with no attribution.</p>
<p>What Consolation says. Relatively innocent mistakes are one thing, and they can happen, but outright plagiarism committed by a college student is serious. It raises questions about why they’re in college at all.</p>
<p>I don’t know the details but I got the sense that all three cases were deliberate copying and pasting from internet sources. Not completely sure though.</p>
<p>depends on the school’s and/or professor’s policy, and how many offenses. If a first offense, an F on the assignment, IMO. But if it is the final project, an F could mean failing the class.</p>
Forgetting to cite something when you’ve been faithfully citing throughout the paper - maybe lose a few points
Literally copying an assignment/large sections of an assignment - zero on the paper, but not necessarily on the course. Potential disciplinary action (administration).
Continually plagiarizing - fail the course and disciplinary action </p>
<p>Are there different cultural norms with regard to plagiarism? I remember in graduate school (during the time when dinosaurs still roamed the earth) there was a scandal when three or four PhD students in our department failed their prelims because they had all plagiarized…and apparently not very subtly. These were smart people and generally ethical students (two were nuns, for goodness sake!), and I did get the feeling that they were confused about how serious this act of intellectual dishonesty would be taken here. </p>
<p>I agree it depends on the extent of the plagiarism, and probably the nature of the assignment as well. </p>
<p>I think it is ridiculous to call obvious citation errors academic dishonesty, or to treat them any differently than one would any other mistake. If a student writes “According to Joe Smith…” but doesn’t give a footnote, that’s an oversight, but clearly not an issue of trying to pass off someone’s ideas as one’s own. Yet, there are colleges in which that would technically leave you liable to a whole range of penalties for “plagiarism.” </p>
<p>At the other extreme, if a student cuts and pastes an entire paper from the internet and hands it in as a final paper, I don’t think even expulsion is necessarily too harsh, since that kind of dishonesty really calls into question all of a student’s past work. How can the school feel comfortable giving someone a degree when it is quite possible that every single grade they’ve gotten up until the point at which the cheating was discovered was also based on outright theft? </p>
<p>If a major paper is substantially plagiarized, I don’t see how failing the course could possibly be an excessive penalty - on what basis would the student be passing? </p>
<p>I am very troubled over the fact that simple errors are labeled plagiarism. Just last night, D was looking over a paper that was due and realized she had inadvertently left out a citation. All other things were cited, and the work was all hers, so it was a clear mistake rather than anything deliberate. But under her high school rules, it would be have been taken pretty seriously. At this time of year, our kids are cramming in tons and tons of school work, as teachers frantically try to fit in all the curriculum that remains to be taught. Is poor teacher planning their fault? No, yet when it’s after 1 AM, alertness declines and mistakes happen. So I agree that a few points deduction should be the only penalty for true mistakes. </p>
<p>The other problem I see is the new trend to have the kids teach themselves everything (“websearches” and the like) using the internet. D complains that a lot of times you can easily find the answer, but the source may not be one viewed as reputable. Looking for a more reliable source can take too long, and so sometimes the kids just don’t bother citing the fact at all, rather than drawing attention to an issue by citing the oh-so-terrible Wikipedia. Kids used to be able to tap into knowledge they received via a lecture or the textbook in order to do assignments. But since high school teachers never seem to lecture anymore, and even textbooks are falling out of vogue, the kids have to use online sources for practically everything, Frankly, citing everything continually is really time-consuming and I think this can be a cause of some of the problems on a high school level. </p>
<p>For college freshmen, lots of plagiarism is unintentional. Even kids with good high school prep often didn’t learn the ins and outs of citation styles. So, you have a conversation with the kid. Sometimes, they really believe you can put one citation at the end of a paragraph and call it good. When that’s the case, you send them to the writing center and ask them to redo it. Maybe there’s a penalty on the grade.</p>
<p>Anything copied from the Internet/another source results in an F, whether for the assignment or the course is at the discretion of the prof. </p>
<p>I will say that foreign students sometimes believe they’re supposed to copy the experts and can’t imagine a US prof wants to know what they think (because the experts already know it). They should probably also be allowed to rewrite, although perhaps with penalty.</p>
<p>Recycling one’s own work is a form of academic dishonesty. It can be done but only with permission, beforehand, of the prof receiving the paper. Most are going to say no because they want you to, oh I don’t know, maybe research/learn something new? I always say no to double submissions. If the student goes ahead anyway and I find out, that’s an F. </p>
<p>In my neck of the woods, high school English classes spend a lot of time on plagiarism - what is it, how to avoid it, and the penalties for plagiarizing. So, assuming that students still graduate without realizing how to cite and assuming that they don’t understand that copying and pasting from the Internet is disallowed - surely they will learn these things in the first month or so of college, right? Ordinarylives seems to indicate that even those students who are fuzzy on the ins and outs of citations understand the prohibition on copying and pasting.</p>
<p>If we’re talking about a paper where large sections are copied directly without attribution, then I say the student fails the assignment, no excuses. Citation mistakes are a different matter.</p>
<p>My high school kid wrote a paper, coping just the first few sentences from an internet source without attribution. Apparently several other kids did the same and were caught. They each got a zero on their papers.</p>
<p>At what point does paraphrasing become plagiarizing?</p>
<p>I have heard several horror stories of this type, in which students accidentally failing to provide complete and accurate citations are punished as if they had deliberately and knowingly lifted entire passages from the Internet. </p>
<p>Does anyone know if there is a way a student can check a completed paper prior to submitting it, to identify any passages that mirror those in other documents and then make sure that such passages are given proper citations or attributions? If so, I would direct my own children to do this (for all I know, they are aware of this if it exists) each and every time they submit a research paper, to allay anxiety that they might be accused of dishonesty for a mistake that resulted from carelessness. </p>
<p>@frazzled2thecore, the easiest way to avoid this is to cite virtually everything, even when it seems like “common knowledge.” A student might get dinged a little for over-citing, especially in upper-level courses, but the consequences will be pretty mild compared to those for under-citing. More likely, if a student is over-citing, she’ll get a comment in the margin but no penalty at all.</p>
<p>As to “passages that mirror those in other documents,” a lot of professors use turnitin dot com. It looks for exact matches, both to published work, and also to other student essays (they get stored in the database forever, I think). The report a professor gets does indicate the extent of exactness, and any reasonable professor can tell the difference between a few words that accidentally match and an extensive pattern of matching. Statistically, it is very hard for more than 5 or so substantive words to match those in another document by chance. For a simple example, try Googling the phrase of yours that I quoted. It turns up zero matches.</p>
<p>Some people will claim the situation is the former, when it is actually the latter. I’ve TAed some online courses. Some students will do things like lift three or four paragraphs from another source, change the wording a little, and include it in their paper. When called on this, they say they should have footnoted. Footnoting does not rescue that kind of plagiarism!</p>
<p>Or they’ll write something like, </p>
<p>
</ten></p>
<p>Then when you call them on it, they’ll say they should have put quote marks around it and footnoted. No, they should have written the paper themselves, not pulled out something from Alice Jones. Once the quote marks are inserted where they should be, it becomes apparent that the student didn’t write a paper, but cobbled some quotes together.</p>
<p>The worst is the students who defend academic dishonesty.
“I don’t speak English very well.”
“The expert said it better than I could.”
“This paper is not an important part of the course.”
“Everybody does it.” </p>