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[anthroid]

A few other thoughts:

- the parts in #2 and #5 about "after being told about academic dishonesty issues" are unnecessary if the policy is announced on the syllabus, right?

- maybe add a definition of plagiarism in that original paragraph? something like "Plagiarism is defined as presenting someone else's words or ideas as your own."

- I don't like "Lending a paper for any reason to another student:  Failure of the paper." What if a student wants to lend a paper to another student because it's ... worth reading?

We have had several instances of paper "lending" which led to paper stealing in the past year.  Seems better to have a clear policy against it which can then be bent.

I am amazed that clear statements of expectations are being read as "anger."  I'll show this to my faculty in the fall and get a sense of whether they read that in there or not.

Thanks again, everyone, for your thoughts.

[bio_prof_]

The wording of Anthroid's policy appeals to me because I believe the students will understand it. While I agree that the definition of plagiarism should suffice, it simply would not to most of the students I teach.  The expansion of the definition might make it far less likely that a student will whine and waste time on a technicality. Considering what you had to put up with last semester, Anthroid, I assume not wasting time is one goal for this policy!

[anthroid]

The wording of Anthroid's policy appeals to me because I believe the students will understand it. While I agree that the definition of plagiarism should suffice, it simply would not to most of the students I teach.  The expansion of the definition might make it far less likely that a student will whine and waste time on a technicality. Considering what you had to put up with last semester, Anthroid, I assume not wasting time is one goal for this policy!

:~)

You should see the university policy if you want legalese, long definitions, and clear direction!

Thanks, friend.  Yes, I wrote the policy (to which the university policy also will be attached!) with recent experience in mind. 

[harsh_critic]

Here is a response from a lowly asst. professor--

If the university has a plagarism/cheating policy, why does the department need to amplify it? Should not the department head be working with the administration to change the university policy if the DH finds it to be deficient?

Now it seems that as the classroom instructor, I will need to brief my students on the university policy, how that university policy is changed/amplified by the department policy (and what if there is a conflict between the two?), and then my own classroom policies. So now we have 3 possibly different sets of guidelines to remember/follow and ensure are not in conflict with each other, and to expect the students to pick up on the nuances of each. To the lowly instructor this simply adds a level of administrative burden without added benefit.

As a classroom instructor, I expect to have some level of academic freedom to teach and grade (consistent with the university policies). Adding the specifics from this department policy severely restricts this academic freedom that I have and limits my options on dealing one-on-one with the offending student. For example, if I were to punish a student more severely than this policy suggests I should, the student now has a new argument for appeal of the penalty (not IAW the department's policy).

The department chair will attempt to counsel the accused student and the instructor making the accusation will have to show evidence of plagiarism. 

Why does this policy require the instructor to go to the department head every time to prove plagarism? Does the DH not trust the instructor?

The core question here is this--what problem are you trying to solve with this new department policy? Could the problem be effectively and efficiently solved using other methods which do not infringe on my academic freedom as a professor?

[anthroid]

Here is a response from a lowly asst. professor--

If the university has a plagarism/cheating policy, why does the department need to amplify it? Should not the department head be working with the administration to change the university policy if the DH finds it to be deficient?

Now it seems that as the classroom instructor, I will need to brief my students on the university policy, how that university policy is changed/amplified by the department policy (and what if there is a conflict between the two?), and then my own classroom policies. So now we have 3 possibly different sets of guidelines to remember/follow and ensure are not in conflict with each other, and to expect the students to pick up on the nuances of each. To the lowly instructor this simply adds a level of administrative burden without added benefit.

As a classroom instructor, I expect to have some level of academic freedom to teach and grade (consistent with the university policies). Adding the specifics from this department policy severely restricts this academic freedom that I have and limits my options on dealing one-on-one with the offending student. For example, if I were to punish a student more severely than this policy suggests I should, the student now has a new argument for appeal of the penalty (not IAW the department's policy).

The department chair will attempt to counsel the accused student and the instructor making the accusation will have to show evidence of plagiarism. 

Why does this policy require the instructor to go to the department head every time to prove plagarism? Does the DH not trust the instructor?

The core question here is this--what problem are you trying to solve with this new department policy? Could the problem be effectively and efficiently solved using other methods which do not infringe on my academic freedom as a professor?

Good points.  I am trying to communicate to all of our students, very clearly, that we recognize plagiarism as a serious problem (which it is in our department and in the university generally) and that there are internal to the dept. as well as external to the dept. remedies (which we are allowed to do under university policies).  University policies leave it up to instructors pretty much--do you want to go through the university committee or deal with it in the department?  There had been no policy within the department about how to deal with plagiarism that the instructor doesn't want to send to the university committee.

Do I trust my faculty?  You bet.  Do I insist that they have evidence if they're going to get me involved in the discussion?  Yep.  How is that mistrust?  I don't want to get sued for false allegations.  I would hope any accusation of plagiarism that is brought to my attention would be backed up by proof.

You should not have the option to treat a student the way YOU wish.  There are clear policies on plagiarism, and it is not an infringement of your academic freedom to require you to follow those policies.  If I insisted that you could not write about the policies, or you could not teach what you thought was appropriate, that would be limiting your academic freedom.  But enforcing policies uniformly is good practice.  You don't get to submit whatever grades come into your head, and you don't get to submit them whenever you want.  Students seem to be far more litigious lately and anything that smacks of differential treatment will land you in hot, hot water.

I do appreciate your thoughts, however.  Thanks!

PS  It's spelled "plagIarism" not "plagarism."

[lagueux]

We have had several instances of paper "lending" which led to paper stealing in the past year.  Seems better to have a clear policy against it which can then be bent.

I'm sure that paper "lending" can easily turn into paper recycling (and not in the good send of recycling), but might it not be better to err on the side of encouraging academic dialogue and the exchange of ideas rather than resorting to an absolute Orwellian prohibition on showing your paper to a classmate (even if this policy is occasionally "bent")? I think I'd rather that a few instances of paper-recycling go undetected than cultivate an atmosphere in which students feel that they can't innocently show their papers to someone else (or even glance at a friend's paper) for fear that that will result in them failing their own paper or worse.

I think the "clear policy" you need, anthroid, is that copying someone else's paper is plagiarism. That goes far enough; to add on to the policy and propose that actions that might *tempt* one to plagiarize are also prohibited (and are themselves plagiarism) is, for my taste, going a bit too far. If we're trying to eliminate the temptation, then we'd better prohibit connecting to the Internet as well. My guess is that glancing at Wikipedia has probably resulted in more (inadvertent) instances of plagiarism than any paper-sharing has.

[snowbound]

"Students seem to be far more litigious lately and anything that smacks of differential treatment will land you in hot, hot water."

But that's exactly what you're proposing with the Orwellian policy against letting anyone see a paper you've written, with the understanding that it would be enforced in some cases and not in others.  So . . . you create an atmosphere of fear that cuts across informal peer review and obstructs that out-of-class cross-fertilization of ideas which, for truly engaged motivated students, can be the most important, exciting part of their educational experience.  And then you "bend" the policy depending on . . . [what?] . . . thus possibly landing yourself in hot water.

Surely the *intention* behind the paper sharing is all important.  You don;t need to ban ALL sharing of one's work, only sharing for the purposes of plagiarism.  Maybe something like, "A student who deliberately aids or abets someone else's academic honesty (e.g. by loaning them a paper to plagiarize) will be deemed equally guilty of the dishonest act and will be subject to the same penalties." 

[aandsdean]

Anth,

I don't have time to read the whole thread, but as for the "why it's wrong issue," my syllabi say:

Plagiarism is stealing from the ideas and work of others, and as such will not be tolerated.

Cheers, aands

[dyst_uk]

I can understand why some people are saying that it may be important to distinguish between informal peer review and copying ideas.

For 6 months of my final undergrad. year everyone was too scared to peer review, because some idiot gave someone else's 'lent' essay in as their own during resits*.  This resulted in that person failing (quite rightly), but the entire year got a severe tongue-lashing, which scared everyone from doing peer-review (as there was no sanction they could impose on the person who had lent the essay).

I think that plagiarism rules and academic integrity do need to be covered in more depth and simpler language than in the official university documentation. 




* If you are given an extension on work where I am, you usually submit it in the September, with standard exams being sat in January and June.  It is highly unusual to resit a course; one usually resits the assessments only.

[anthroid]

Anth,

I don't have time to read the whole thread, but as for the "why it's wrong issue," my syllabi say:

Plagiarism is stealing from the ideas and work of others, and as such will not be tolerated.

Cheers, aands

Thanks.  Somehow my students here don't get why this is wrong...

snowbound, good points.  Your language is better than a global rule. 

Thanks, all.

[jeffreyhall]

A few quick notes on your policy:

The department chair will attempt to counsel the accused student

How do you attempt to counsel somebody?  You either do or you don't.

2.   Continual use of quotes without quote marks

Shouldn't this be "continued" rather than continual?  (Also in point #5)

8.   Using a paper in one course for another course

This should probably read "Using a paper from one course in another course".

7.   Lending a paper for any reason to another student:  Failure of the paper

I agree with other posters that this is a strange rule.  If I had read this in department literature when I was a freshman I would not have gone to that school.  If I had read it as a graduate student, I would not have applied to that department.  Good students come to college precisely to think and read and write and exchange ideas.  A successful plagiarism/cheating policy encourages good behavior and punishes bad behavior.  This rule would be punitive towards good students.  Dishonest students won't care one way or the other.

[anthroid]

The student may or may not accept the attempt.  Is the student counseled if she won't come to the meeting or pay attention while in the meeting?  I don't think so.  I've tried to counsel her but she won't allow me to.  I think the wording actually meets the many situations I've encountered.

No, I mean continual.  Students will quote and quote and quote and quote throughout a paper without attribution.  That's continual quoting.  (I think...it keeps going on.)

I take your other points.  Thanks!

[philo]

I'm curious about why you feel the need to have a departmental policy on this.  Someone else asked a question that came close to this earlier, but I think you understood the question a little differently than I did and took the answer in a different direction.  I'll be chair in a few weeks, and I would be afraid to do something like this myself; I think that my faculty would resent it.  I'm a tenured associate, and my chair has never handed me boilerplate and told me that it has to go into all of my syllabi.  I don't this to sound critical of what you're doing, which I'm sure is appropriate in your context.  I'm mostly interested in discovering the difference between our departmental cultures that makes it appropriate for you but not for me.

I think that here the attitude would be that individual faculty members can be trusted to properly implement the university's plagiarism policy, and that while that policy is pretty general, there isn't any burning need for our specific ways of implementing that policy to be consistent within the department.  Of course it is a problem when there are really wide discrepancies between how instructors handle cases, but this is a problem regardless of whether they are in the same department or even same college; it may be an argument for making the university's policy itself more specific.

Part of the difference may be that a pretty high percentage of the classes that we teach are gen. ed.  Most of our students, in other words, are not OUR students---our majors.  And we have very little trouble with our majors plagiarizing.  Since the gen. ed. people will usually only take one course from our department, whether or not we have a uniform departmental policy is uniform wouldn't matter to them.  Maybe if we had more majors, it would seem more important for them to meet with a uniform policy between instructors.  Even then, though, as long as we are united in taking the issue seriously, I'm not sure that it matters much if we have somewhat different ways of penalizing it. 

By the same token, I don't think that it would be appropriate in my department for me as head to get involved in counseling every student involved in plagiarism.  Again, if I thought that more than a tiny fraction of these would be majors or minors, I might think differently.  I don't need to interact with all of the gen. ed. students that get caught plagiarizing each term, though.  Even if we did have a departmental policy, and even if the faculty didn't resent THAT, I think that they might resent the implication that they couldn't be trusted to implement that policy on a case by case basis.

I'm afraid that none of this will be very helpful to you, because our situations are apparently so different.  But as I get ready to start chairing, I'm very curious about how different department chairs perceive their roles.  One general comment that might be of some use, though, is that I don't think I'd hand the students a schedule of penalties for different "degrees" of plagiarism.  Having a written policy that is too specific, and that the students are handed at the start of the term, might just encourage plagiarists to turn into lawyers and raise a lot of groundless complaints about whether the policy was being applied properly.  Vagueness can be your friend, sometimes, and I think it is better simply to inform students about the worst penalties that plagiarism can produce.  Also, I'd consider making reporting to the university committee automatic.  It is the only way to catch repeat offenders who cheat in different department's courses.

[normative_]

The overture to the policy struck me as something that I might say in class at the beginning of the term, but not something that I would write into the syllabus itself. I write something in there so that the students' can't claim they didn't know.

My overture simply states that academic honesty is taken seriously in this course, and that the following constitute plagiarism and result in failing the course. Paraphrasing is a borderline issue in my courses which I define as plagiarism as well. Proper academic use means:

"1. Individual responsibility for all individual work, written and oral.  Copying from others or providing answers or information, written or oral to others is cheating." (This also covers cheating in examination situations).

"2. Providing proper acknowledgement of the original author.  Copying from another student’s paper or from another text without written acknowledgement is plagiarism.  The same is true for paraphrasing-the simple modification of such material without changing the course of thought or crediting the source."

And then there is the issue of commissioned papers or people being abused in group projects:

"3. Group projects still require group members to take responsibility for their equal share of the work. The contributions of individual members must be identifiable to avoid confusion. Having someone else write one’s paper or assignment is also plagiarism."

I think that if you warn them first that there is no need for a milder punishment for different sorts of offences. I've found that this opens the door to attempts to negotiate ex post facto how bad the offence was, if there was any wiggle room. I'm very strict. Alas, my university lets them repeat the paper if they fail due to plagiarism. They allow them to fail the exam but write a make-up.

[snowbound]

Alas, my university lets them repeat the paper if they fail due to plagiarism. They allow them to fail the exam but write a make-up.

This is the nuttiest policy! Some of my colleagues do likewise, and I just can't understand it.  Student A writes his own paper, which is poor, and gets a D+ (but at least it is his own work).  Student B doens't even attempt to do the assignment, but just copies something from the internet instead, figuring she'll get maybe a B+ for it.   Teacher spots the plagiarism and gives the paper an F.  Which student deserves a second shot at a decent grade? 

Unless the teacher has a blanket policy inviting all students to keep turning in re-writes until they get a grade they like (for teachers with small teaching loads or endless amounts of time for grading and re-grading), then the plagiarism-earns-you-a-second-chance policy actually *rewards* students for plagiarizing.