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[larryc]

I am shocked at how minor many of your penalties for plagiarism seem to be.  In my department, a single act of plagiarism means that you fail the entire course.  We make sure students know this, and really we don't seem to get much plagiarism compared to what many of you report.  Given the seriousness of the offense, why do some of you have such minor penalties as a zero on the assignment, or even worse, allowing a rewrite?

[smart_e_pantz]

I am shocked at how minor many of your penalties for plagiarism seem to be.  In my department, a single act of plagiarism means that you fail the entire course.  We make sure students know this, and really we don't seem to get much plagiarism compared to what many of you report.  Given the seriousness of the offense, why do some of you have such minor penalties as a zero on the assignment, or even worse, allowing a rewrite?

Because at my college the administration will not back-up a professor's decision to flunk a student for the course for plagiarism.

[dagny]

Here at We Aim to Please U, we can't assess any penalty until the student has been officially charged with academic misconduct, and found guilty (either because they cop to it, or via a hearing). It's ridiculous. Even then, we can't fail them for the entire course--we can only fail them for that assignment.

[acrimone]

Here at We Aim to Please U, we can't assess any penalty until the student has been officially charged with academic misconduct, and found guilty (either because they cop to it, or via a hearing). It's ridiculous. Even then, we can't fail them for the entire course--we can only fail them for that assignment.

Those are unacceptable working conditions.

[dept_geek]

Here at We Aim to Please U, we can't assess any penalty until the student has been officially charged with academic misconduct, and found guilty (either because they cop to it, or via a hearing). It's ridiculous. Even then, we can't fail them for the entire course--we can only fail them for that assignment.

Those are unacceptable working conditions.

Sadly, acri, they are also common working conditions. We can fail an assignment/exam for academic misconduct. After that, they must be charged. You need to carefully read the student code of conduct and the other handbooks to see what you can actually get away with.

[voxprincipalis]

My school handbook says that all cases of academic dishonesty must be reported and settled by the signing of a dishonesty settlement form or by a hearing. By signing the settlement form, a student acknowledges what hu has done, and accepts the penalty given by the instructor, which must be outlined in writing and reviewed during a meeting with the student.

It also says that the penalty for academic dishonesty should be more severe than the penalty for not turning in the assignment at all -- that is to say, an "F" plus something like a final grade reduction. But the student may contest either the charge of dishonesty or the penalty, in which case it goes before the school's review committee, which then gets the chance to both determine whether academic dishonesty occurred and set the penalty. So if the student plagiarized, and the instructor gives an F for the assignment plus a one-letter-grade course reduction, and the student contests and takes it to "court", hu may walk away with a *worse* consequence than if hu had accepted the original penalty (if hu is guilty of plagiarism, that is).

VP

[somewhatfrustrated]

How about two papers, full of spelling errors (of an acronym no less) where the student who copied didn't even bother to remove the other students name- just added his/her  own.

[neutralname]

I'm disappointed.  Where's the Hall of Fame part of this thread?  There's nothing like venting about student stupidity.

I use turnitin.com for all my student paper submissions, and it definitely helps.  It does not completely prevent student plagiarism, but it makes life easier.  If your school does not sponsor it, insist that it does.  (No, I'm not associated with them.)

Where I teach, profs have basically complete freedom to impose whatever grade penalty they want, and they report the plagiarism to the administration to document it. 

Unfortunately, we are not free to impose the "tar and feather" penalty, and we are not even allowed to require students to stand outside wearing "I CHEAT ON MY PAPERS" placards for a couple of days.  Where's the justice?

[lesage]

Error

[avaya]

I am shocked at how minor many of your penalties for plagiarism seem to be.  In my department, a single act of plagiarism means that you fail the entire course.  We make sure students know this, and really we don't seem to get much plagiarism compared to what many of you report.  Given the seriousness of the offense, why do some of you have such minor penalties as a zero on the assignment, or even worse, allowing a rewrite?

I feel the same way.  If you do not penalize the student severely, they WILL do it again.  "Oh, if they catch me, they'll just let me rewrite it like last time."  It's actually enabling cheaters.

I understand that some schools won't let you do that.  I work at a SLAC (small, not selective) that is totally tuition-driven.  But reading these forums makes me SO HAPPY that the deans & faculty are extremely concerned about academic integrity.  Our policy is "two strikes & you're out" - that is, kicked out of school.  So faculty don't mind turning students in for the first violation b/c the student won't get kicked out, but will make them think very hard about trying it again.  In fact, it's our administration that is pushing faculty to use turnitin.com - many don't, but most of the new ones do.  I wish they all would b/c that would mean students couldn't recycle papers.  Of course my assignments are so specific, you can't use a recycled paper for them (at least not without getting caught).

[big_giant_head]

Re-harshness of penalties.

Yes. If they get away with it they'll do it again.  They should know better and they should get an F for the course.

But sometimes, no.

I teach freshman composition at a CC.  I don't want to just punish them for doing something wrong; I also want them to learn how to do it right.  Some plagiarists, granted, do it because they get away with it.  But a lot of others have just never been taught how to paraphrase, how to summarize, how to integrate research into their own thinking.  Teaching that is my job (actually it's a high school teacher's job, but for various reasons, most high school grads really don't know how to do these things), so I give them one more chance than I would expect someone to do in any other kind of college class. 

I created an exercise for my CC students that really seemed to help.  I brought in some "student" paragraphs (that I had written, with various errors of attribution).  I also brought in the books being referred to, so my students could see what the text looked like in the original, how it had been integrated, whether the "student" was faithful to the source, etc.  The students had to find the page, read the source, correct the cite in the paragraph, and finally create a proper citation on a Works Cited page.  The exercise takes between 2 and three hours, done in groups (it's a twice per week, 3 hour class, 8 weeks long).  But when my first group finished, the lightbulb really had gone on over a lot of heads.  And they could see how it CAN be done correctly.  Really: nobody had taught them how to do it right.  Just giving them a brief lecture or handout with a couple of 'don't do this' examples is sometimes not enough.

If you haven't read Graff's _Clueless in Academe_, I recommend it for his discussion of the culture clash between students and professors.  This isn't just a matter of little thieves who need to be ferreted out.  It's also a matter of us being able to get them to understand that  academic honesty really does matter--and not just by punishing them, but by providing examples of what happens to professionals who get caught plagiarizing (not the depressing cases where the huholes aren't disciplined or fired, though), and then by showing them step by step examples of how they can become good scholars. 

[iomhaigh]

Turnitin just caught a student who cut and paste from 18 different web sources!  I am sure that many of those sources were cross-pilfered from each other, but 18 is a new record for me.

(and thanks for starting the hall of fame!)

[mikey]

Thanks, C-grunt, but when you have a student hand in a paper of SELF-ANALYSIS and find that it's plagiarized, you're looking at willful intent!

You DO have a great exercise there, though.  I do something similar and it helps.

[avaya]

Re-harshness of penalties.

Yes. If they get away with it they'll do it again.  They should know better and they should get an F for the course.

But sometimes, no.

I teach freshman composition at a CC.  I don't want to just punish them for doing something wrong; I also want them to learn how to do it right.  Some plagiarists, granted, do it because they get away with it.  But a lot of others have just never been taught how to paraphrase, how to summarize, how to integrate research into their own thinking.  Teaching that is my job (actually it's a high school teacher's job, but for various reasons, most high school grads really don't know how to do these things), so I give them one more chance than I would expect someone to do in any other kind of college class. 

I hate to say it, but I actually spend a lot of time with my students on this.  I give them a plagiarism exam in which they can see the various different ways to cite sources, and they have to evaluate which would be considered plagiarism.  About 75% called something that was plagiarism "acceptable."  Then we go through it slowly, talking about each problem.  We spend about an hour on it.

I also pass out a sheet that shows what the news media considers plagiarizing.  Here's the original and the plagiarized version - and the columnist who was found to have done this (before he ever got his washingtonpost.com job) resigned, and the editor said he would have fired him:

Murray had written:

"Translucent and glowing, they ooze up from the ground and float through solid walls, wriggling countless tentacles and snapping their jaws. They're known as the Phantoms, alien thingies that, for three decades, have been sucking the life out of the earthlings of 'Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.' "

Domenech wrote:

"Translucent and glowing, they ooze up from the ground and float through solid walls, splaying their tentacles and snapping their jaws, dripping a discomfiting acidic ooze. They're known as the Phantoms, otherworldly beings who, for three decades, have been literally sucking the life out of the earthlings of the human."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/24/AR2006032401206.html

This shows them that plagiarism doesn't have to be 10 pages of direct copying to ruin your career.

Then, before their research assignment, we cover it again.  What are the two main ways of plagiarizing?  (Stealing words and stealing ideas.)  Etc etc.  We spend about 30 minutes on it.

And I still turned in 8 students (out of 120) for plagiarizing this semester.  So yes, we definitely need to explain to the students what plagiarism is, why it is wrong, and how it will kill your career in the long term.

But nonetheless, many students don't "GET IT" until the book is thrown at them.  If you fail to do so, you may indeed be enabling their behavior.

[genespleen2]

I have a sad story about plagiarism--at least sad to my way of thinking.  Several years ago, in my latter grad school years, I was sharing a TA office with another grad student.  One morning I came in to find slipped under the door a paper that responded to an essay assignment for my class.  So far so good--I didn't encourage students to turn in papers that way, but there you go.

But the problem: the name of the paper was unfamiliar to me.  It wasn't one of my students.  Yet the paper looked very similar to one I had only just graded.  It turned out that my colleague had assigned a similar topic, and this student of hus (ugh) roomed with one of my students.  Once my colleague and I agreed to turn the matter over to the student Honor Council, the matter was out of our hands.

It turned out that my student had given hus paper to my colleague's student, who then copied it more-or-less verbatim.  The Honor Council determined that this was done with the donor's connivance (hu wasn't able to claim successfully that "I didn't know hu was gonna just copy it!")

Well, my colleague's student was a rising star athlete, on scholarship, and was a first-generation college student from a very poor rural region of the country.  By all accounts, up to this episode of cheating hu had a good reputation as a conscientious student.  But the Honor Council had been plagued with a poor reputation for enforcement for the several semesters prior to this, and now decided to Make an Example.  Student lost the scholarship, and had to leave the university.  I always had a bad feeling about this; this was a violation that was life-changing for this student, and in a bad way.