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creamcity
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« Reply #151 on: October 17, 2010, 09:50:11 AM » |
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Calling the student into the office for a conversation is a required step at my campus in investigation of plagiarism, so it is crucial to clarify if there is a required process at your (or any) campus. When I first had to do so, I researched how to handle it and found good advice in CHE articles and elsewhere. All affirmed my angst, saying that it is the most worrisome step from the prof's perspective. But it need not be, with planning ahead.
My best advice would be to write down the questions to ask of the student -- based on the content of the question and answer, as if it were a classroom conversation on the topic, not an investigation of plagiarism. I.e., what was your source for that answer? In several such conversations, my experience has been the same as the tales told in the advice that I read: The plagiarism becomes evident, quite quickly. Not that the student realizes it, in many cases. For example, in the last such conversation I had with a student whose plagiarism on a paper was obvious, word for word, the question about the source elicited "I'm not sure; it must have been from the book." So we looked through the book; nope. Other readings; nope. Finally, I googled one of the phrases, and up came -- as well I knew -- the word-for-word passage on a website.
Then, the student's defense was, well, that must have been part of what my frat brothers found for me, or maybe my father, because they all "helped" with the research, and we sort of all did the paper together.
Bingo: Another definition of plagiarism, putting one's name on work done by others. . . . By the end of the conversation, the student had unwittingly admitted to several different aspects of the campus definition. After that, the rest was just weeks and weeks of paperwork, prolonged by a threatened appeal, but it never happened. It would have been a slam-dunk, anyway, based on that crucial office conversation. (And, btw, I made sure to have a witness, the TA, with us.)
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