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[t_r_b]

I've scanned recent threads and haven't found any devoted to the general discussion of plagiarism cases. I hereby declare this thread open for that purpose. Here is my own latest tale.

Here I thought I'd made it all the way through the semester without a plagiarism case,* but that was not to be. It was a short assignment reviewing a book we've read. The student did write some of it herself, but a sentence or two was lifted directly from the blurb on the publisher's website.

My dilemma is, this is a minor assignment that comes out to roughly 2% of the grade for the course. A zero on this assignment might knock her from a C+ to a C (or something like that), or maybe not, depending on how the average works out after the final. That strikes me as a very light penalty for plagiarism. School policy does allow for a sweeping range of possible penalties, but since this offense is relatively minor (first-time offender - as far as I know, of course - and only a portion of a minor assignment) I'm not sure whether I'd have much institutional backing for taking a tougher approach. Any suggestions?

* Actually not true: at the beginning of the semester, on a similar assignment, a student plagiarized from the assigned reading itself. In that case, the mishmash of borrowed passages the culprit concocted was so incoherent that I had already given it an F before I realized it had been lifted. For these reasons, I considered it more a case of mind-blowing stupidity, even though it was technically plagiarism.

[mystictechgal]

Oh, I'm going to be in the minority, but that's okay.  If you have the time, and if you have the inclination based upon this student's other work (which may be seen to be preferable treatment for some reason--only you can determine if that is defensable, if necessary, in the long run), I'd ask the student to come to office hours.  Ask--simply ask--about the sentances that you've marked as plagiarized, and, ultimately, why they chose to use them without using quotation marks or attribution.

Just as I'm arguing elsewhere that foreign students should be held to the standards of the institution  in which they have chosen to study, so should native students.  But, foreign, or native, they come from different backgrounds of previous study, and previous standards.  It seems to me that this is far less egregious than simply cutting and pasting whole paragraphs from Wikipedia or another source.

In this case I'd be interested in knowing why they omitted citation or, at least, quotation marks.  I don't know that a student like this needs to be pilloried, but, neither should they be given a total pass.  Hearing their explanation may say a lot. Seeing how they incorporated their usage, in written format, may also contribute.

At the risk of being ridiculed, I will point out that on a lot of Internet sites--including this one--the idea of "fair use" is emphasized.   Using a link to the source is necessary, quotation of more than a small portion is forbidden without that link or attribution.  But, while people posting to these Internet sites either understand, or are made to understand (I'm a moderator on one such site, enforcing the understanding), not all immedtly "get" the requirement of setting their few sentance "borrows" off in quotation marks, indentations, italics,  or some other way that makes it clear that it is "borrowed".

Neither they, nor the foreign student that has been taught differently, needs to be branded for life, but both need to learn what is proper.  On the web site that I help to moderate those lessons come without a grade, but with the potential shame of being called out and the ultimate penalty of being banned for repeated infractions.  In university I would hope that they would get, at least, the same kind of warnings for a sentance or two type of infraction before the ultimate plagiarism penaly is fully invoked.     

[tenured_feminist]

I think this is reasonable. I could see going a bit further, but I think this is a good one for consciousness raising.

If it helps, I had one earlier in the term that I discussed here, also involving a lightly weighted assignment. We had a big encounter session and much CR about the issue and some other consequences -- the U knows about her issue, though she wasn't sanctioned. Since the incident, she has been a model student in every way. Maybe I'm completely naive, but I think that some good learning happened.

[glowdart]

OOooooo I'm jealous, TF.  I have a couple who have continued to be the same atrocious students that attempted to skirt around an assignment by cheating on it.  Somehow, I seem to always get more grief from the tiny assignment plagiarizers as opposed to the ones who cut and paste their entire research paper.

I would say give them a zero on the small portion, remind that they can be expelled/suspended/whatever and send them a copy of the student ethics code. 

Do you have any of the student's other work?  If so, then I would check it.  This could be a bad choice made because the assignment was worth so few points, or it could be a habit. 

I once went back through a bunch of small point assignments that I never bothered to check because they were our field's equivalent of the "what did you do last summer" exercise, and those were plagiarized.  One small assignment turned into one large F and major sanctions from the institution. 

Also, these are the cases where I refuse to round final grades, which I usually do.  If you have plagiarized, then your 72.5 remains a 72, and thus a C-. 

[airball]

Is it part of a larger assignment or series of assignments? In other words, does it get its own line in your assessment scheme?

I had a student cheat on a single homework assignment worth 5%. But homework as a whole was worth 15%. I talked to my chair, and he okayed my plan to give the student a zero for all the homework. During my chat with the student, I mentioned that I could hu for the course, but decided to be lenient and just drop the grade by that 15%.

airball

[t_r_b]

Is it part of a larger assignment or series of assignments?

The latter. It is one of five short assignments that cumulatively total 10% of the final grade. I reviewed her record, and her previous submission received a much better grade than earlier ones, but I took another look at it (and googled it) and I'm pretty sure it's legit. Which makes this all the more sad: she has shown she can do the work, if she puts in the effort.

In this case, I don't buy the "she didn't realize it was wrong" argument. It's not that she failed to use quotation marks or citations: this is not an assignment that called on them to consult other sources at all - much less the publisher's blurb. They were to read the book and write a short evaluation of it. In lieu of doing that, the student googled the book, found the publisher's website, and presented a portion of the publisher's blurb as her own opinion. I don't see much gray area there.

I'll discuss the case today with my colleagues. I've asked the student to meet with me after our next class meeting. We'll see.

[whiteknight]

It would be nice to keep all discussion of plagiarism in one thread. Kudos for this thread.

[svenc]

... (first-time offender - as far as I know, of course - and only a portion of a minor assignment) ...

The "as far as I know" bit is why I refer all plagiarism cases up the food chain.  My institution explicitly lays out that grade penalties and academic referral are two different (but not mutually exclusive) options.  If your syllabus states that you will fail the student on that assignment than do that, but also write the referral so that the student can be slapped on the wrist and it will be on file.

Personally, my syllabi specify that a failing grade will be awarded for the assignment and the course, so if anything I'd have the opposite concern in this case (but would fail her anyway).  A student would have to be really out of touch to risk her entire grade for a 2% assignment!

[qrypt]

I've had two big ones this term.  One person was, it seems, paying someone else to do her work; that someone else fed her an essay available for purchase on the internet, and she turned it in.  Her main response to me: "I can't believe he would do that to me!"  She has failed the course for that one. 

The second copied 75% of his essay from Wikipedia.  It then works out that prior to submitting it he had already been caught twice in another class -- so in addition to failing my course he is getting his sorry a$$ suspended by the dean.

I take pride...

[andreapsy]

The second copied 75% of his essay from Wikipedia. 

well, a good friend who teaches at a SLAC just had this happened, but it got better. The student copied 100% of the assay from Wikipedia and when caught simply said that she actually wrote the Wikipedia article. My friend, who thinks she's pretty net savy, actually tracked down when the wikepedia article was written, and found out that it was sometime after the assignment was announced but weeks before it was due. So she could not really prove that the student wasn't the original writer!

[svenc]

The second copied 75% of his essay from Wikipedia. 

well, a good friend who teaches at a SLAC just had this happened, but it got better. The student copied 100% of the assay from Wikipedia and when caught simply said that she actually wrote the Wikipedia article. My friend, who thinks she's pretty net savy, actually tracked down when the wikepedia article was written, and found out that it was sometime after the assignment was announced but weeks before it was due. So she could not really prove that the student wasn't the original writer!

Similar stories have been told on the fora recently.  Did your friend actually let it slide?

I say fail the student for not doing any original work for the assignment (double-dipping is an explicit no-no in my classes), and refer the student for academic dishonesty.  Let the folks getting academic conduct committee credit on their CVs parse the bulls***.

[andreapsy]

The second copied 75% of his essay from Wikipedia. 

well, a good friend who teaches at a SLAC just had this happened, but it got better. The student copied 100% of the assay from Wikipedia and when caught simply said that she actually wrote the Wikipedia article. My friend, who thinks she's pretty net savy, actually tracked down when the wikepedia article was written, and found out that it was sometime after the assignment was announced but weeks before it was due. So she could not really prove that the student wasn't the original writer!

Similar stories have been told on the fora recently.  Did your friend actually let it slide?

I say fail the student for not doing any original work for the assignment (double-dipping is an explicit no-no in my classes), and refer the student for academic dishonesty.  Let the folks getting academic conduct committee credit on their CVs parse the bulls***.

Although if the student was smart, she probably said that she wrote the assignment and then, in light of no info on wikipedia, decided to contribute to human kind by uploading the assay. So she did the original work as the work was done FOR the class, not for wikipedia. Now, I don't know if this is what he argued, but it would have been a good one :-).

[t_r_b]

After class today, the student failed to show up. (I'm pretty sure she was there - she just didn't stick around afterwards). Big shocker, I know.

It turns out that our misconduct policy distinguishes between wrist-slap penalties (oral reprimand, do-it-over for full credit) and those that actually affect the student's grade. The former can be handled informally, the latter require an arduous bureaucratic process, even if all I want to do is reduce her score on the assignment. As it happens, I want to give her a zero on the assignment, which seems like not much more than a wrist slap, given that it's a tiny percentage of the final grade, but I can't do that without going through the bureaucratic process. Of course, as svenc suggests, the process will ensure that there is a paper trail, in case she makes this a habit, but it's still a royal pain in the posterior.

The saving grace of the day was that in the midst of writing up the official notice of this student's wrongdoing, another student stopped by with questions about her lecture notes. This was remarkable because: she had actually taken lecture notes; she had typed them up after class; she had good, intelligent questions about the material; she had done very badly in the first part of the course, but thanks to the notetaking, etc. has really turned things around. Meeting with this student gave me a much needed reminder of why I'm in this job.

[csguy]

I typically add a penalty -- negative points for what we call "academic irregularities" Zero doesn't really penalize them -- it's the same score they'd get if they didn't turn anything in.

(I believe there are products you can purchase at the drugstore for irregularity).

[zarathustra]

The second copied 75% of his essay from Wikipedia. 

well, a good friend who teaches at a SLAC just had this happened, but it got better. The student copied 100% of the assay from Wikipedia and when caught simply said that she actually wrote the Wikipedia article. My friend, who thinks she's pretty net savy, actually tracked down when the wikepedia article was written, and found out that it was sometime after the assignment was announced but weeks before it was due. So she could not really prove that the student wasn't the original writer!

The student probably couldn't prove he/she WAS the original writer either.

Technically, if you have something "published" and you use it somewhere else, aren't you supposed to cite yourself?

I'd still bust the student for having a paper identical to an internet source, unless they could prove they were the wiki author.