next »

[fiona]

I'm very puzzled by this. It looks like the professor allowed plagiarism, but the university is somehow guilty of defaming him for saying so.

Elucidation welcome.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/court-rules-former-ohio-u-professor-was-defamed-in-plagiarism-scandal/34692?sid=pm&utm_source=pm&utm_medium=en

The Fiona

[hegemony]

It looks to me as if the professor "failed to adequately monitor" his students' work by doing something like not reading the work closely enough or not checking for plagiarism.  His claim, it appears, is that his students plagiarized without his knowledge; the university apparently feels he actively colluded or actively turned a blind eye, rather than being unaware.  The university apparently stated as much in official documents and he protested vehemently.  Note that "dozens of theses" contained plagiarism, of which twelve were this professor's.  One wonders what the role of the other professors was.

[darkside]

I teach freshman comp, and even though I clearly state in my syllabus that I fail students for one instance of plagiarism, my boss and mentor told me that the gold standard is to just allow the student to rewrite the paper, even if blatant cut-and paste can be documented as 30% of the paper and the topic was discussed in writing four times in the unit and was on the assignment sheet.

Therefore, students who want an extended time to complete assignments can cut and paste an entire paper from the Internet and get two more weeks to actually write the paper. Meanwhile, my grading load would double, but who cares about that?

Screw it. I just pass everyone. I fought this kind of crap for 10 years. I'm done. If what these kids want is to live in a society where everyone has credentials they didn't earn, fine. I'll be so old by the time they're running the show that all I'll care about is whether the bolts on my wheelchair are tight.

The one effort I make is to tell the students what is going on and what the likely results will be. I tell them that if that isn't the future they want, it is in THEIR hands to protest. Of course, I tell them that I am an exception and DO fail students, but I don't.

[rosajj]

Plagiarism is widely used by student now a day. Student now are very lazy, they just copy all the content from any book. I don't allow this kind of activity since this is prohibited by the law. This is always happening in my class in engg., what I did is return those papers to the student for reconstruction.

[olddrone]

One learns over the years how time-wasting it is to report and follow through the seemingly ever-increasing plagiarism cases; it is so much easier to simply ask the student to redo the assignment even when he/she has copied and pasted the very sample—say, Annotated Bibliography—you have posted at their nagging requests. 

Why?  The institution wants to rake up as much tuition money as possible by keeping these intellectually challenged “customers” while loud-mouthing the importance of academic integrity and excellence.  If one pretends to have any sense of conscience nowadays, one can lose job as she/he can be considered as a trouble-maker who is “unfit.”  Remember the business of retention no matter what.

[mended_drum]

This is a depressing thread. 

It's not true at my institution.  In fact, I am specifically prohibited by our Honor Code from deciding to just let a student rewrite a plagiarized paper.  I'm required to send it to the Honor Court.  The only exception is if the student has attempted to cite properly, but made mistakes.  In those cases, I still have to send a letter to the dean, explaining the circumstances and my preferred sanction (grade deduction, rewrite, etc).  The dean doesn't have to accept that, and if a student has more than one such letter on file, he'll tell me to submit the work to the Honor Court.

The conviction rate, by the way, exceeds 95%, and the minimum sanction is failure of the course.

Does no one else work somewhere with a vigorously enforced Honor Code?

[glowdart]

Does no one else work somewhere with a vigorously enforced Honor Code?

No, but I'm semi-allowed to do what I want.  I never allow a rewrite and record a zero.  Do it twice, and you've failed the course.  I long for the days when I could actually fail a student in the entire course for the first instance plagiarism, though; instead, I've just made the major written assignments in my upper-level courses worth so much of their grade that they can't pass the course with a zero on that assignment. 

[polly_mer]

Does no one else work somewhere with a vigorously enforced Honor Code?

We don't have an honor code, but I am allowed to apply any sanction I like for plagiarism, including failing the course, without a hearing as long as I have documentation and have written the penalty in the syllabus.  We are strongly encouraged to report all cases of plagiarism, particularly cut-and-paste, up the line so that the dean of students can both keep a record of plagiarism and impose extra sanctions to teach the lesson of "thou shalt not plagiarize".  We have a hearing board, but only cases that involve probation, suspension, and expulsion (and we've had a few students expelled in recent years for academic dishonesty) go before that board.

I am distressed, though, that people don't appear to have read the article and don't remember the original scandal.  The plagiarism in this case is in more than a dozen graduate theses, not a class paper.  The original defense as reported in the paper CHE was along the lines of "nobody writes anything original in an engineering thesis, so this is a bunch of humanities folks getting their panties in a bunch over nothing.  Big whoop."

[monsterx]

I teach freshman comp, and even though I clearly state in my syllabus that I fail students for one instance of plagiarism, my boss and mentor told me that the gold standard is to just allow the student to rewrite the paper, even if blatant cut-and paste can be documented as 30% of the paper and the topic was discussed in writing four times in the unit and was on the assignment sheet.

Therefore, students who want an extended time to complete assignments can cut and paste an entire paper from the Internet and get two more weeks to actually write the paper. Meanwhile, my grading load would double, but who cares about that?

Screw it. I just pass everyone. I fought this kind of crap for 10 years. I'm done. If what these kids want is to live in a society where everyone has credentials they didn't earn, fine. I'll be so old by the time they're running the show that all I'll care about is whether the bolts on my wheelchair are tight.

The one effort I make is to tell the students what is going on and what the likely results will be. I tell them that if that isn't the future they want, it is in THEIR hands to protest. Of course, I tell them that I am an exception and DO fail students, but I don't.

This is also the unofficial line at my university.  We have a very strict plagiarism policy, but I am the only one who uses it.  There is an exam board we are supposed to send plagiarists to.  Those who have to deal with the cases have personally come to tell me not to do it.  The students I send up only really get the full punishment by the exam board if they are foreign students of certain specific nationalities; if they are local they get a do-over.    It is all very chummy and nice.

[olddrone]

I too miss those days when I could fail a student who was found guilty for plagiarizing an assignment: if you plagiarize an assignment, you fail the course.  This is what a good school should practice.  An honor code, if it works, will be excellent although I know differently even among cadets in military academy, which is all about honor.

Invariably, however, a teacher gets one of the nastiest student evaluations from these failed or failing students; not many administrators seem to have the mental capacity to discern the grain from the chaff while assessing these types of student evaluation.  As a result, one can easily lose a class, another reason that supports, however inadvertently, not jumping through the hoop.  Not worth it.

Imagine you are up for tenure and then imagine having these types of negative student evaluations in your portfolio.  (One of the better student evaluations I have experienced is the one that asks students to assign their *expected grade* from the course, which often clarifies the orientation of the students' comments).

[mended_drum]

I cannot recall a student convicted of academic dishonesty in one of my classes ever filling out a course evaluation.  I seem to remember that the students have been withdrawn early enough in most cases that they are no longer in the class when evaluations are done.  One case was handled after the end of the course, but that student had disappeared before evals.

I do remember the original article, by the way.  It was also depressing and demoralizing.

[monsterx]

I cannot recall a student convicted of academic dishonesty in one of my classes ever filling out a course evaluation.  I seem to remember that the students have been withdrawn early enough in most cases that they are no longer in the class when evaluations are done.  One case was handled after the end of the course, but that student had disappeared before evals.

I had several plagiarists do their evaluations together once - and they gave me as a group the lowest possible score on everything.  Even on things which aren't bad to have a low score on (like "do you think the amount of work was too little, just right, or too much"? ).  We have very low response rates for evaluations, so they were about half the responses.  And yes, the scores do count,  because I am in the wrong for pursuing this, and they are the persecuted victims.  Anyways, evaluation scores are numbers and therefore are valid data regardless of how they are produced, in the eyes of the adminstration.  I'm just glad I don't have to come up for tenure at my current institution. 

[polly_mer]

I cannot recall a student convicted of academic dishonesty in one of my classes ever filling out a course evaluation.  I seem to remember that the students have been withdrawn early enough in most cases that they are no longer in the class when evaluations are done.  One case was handled after the end of the course, but that student had disappeared before evals.

I had several plagiarists do their evaluations together once - and they gave me as a group the lowest possible score on everything.  Even on things which aren't bad to have a low score on (like "do you think the amount of work was too little, just right, or too much"? ).  We have very low response rates for evaluations, so they were about half the responses.  And yes, the scores do count,  because I am in the wrong for pursuing this, and they are the persecuted victims.  Anyways, evaluation scores are numbers and therefore are valid data regardless of how they are produced, in the eyes of the adminstration.  I'm just glad I don't have to come up for tenure at my current institution. 

Move, Monsterx, move.

[dr_alcott]

Once, my dean has encouraged me to think of a plagiarism case as a "teachable moment" instead of failing the student. I suppressed my anger and explained that there were many "teachable moments" in my classes, syllabus, and assignments, and the student ignored them all. The dean didn't argue.

For now, at least, except in the most unusual circumstances, our administration puts faculty in charge of grading and they stay out of it. I realize I'm lucky.

[monsterx]

I cannot recall a student convicted of academic dishonesty in one of my classes ever filling out a course evaluation.  I seem to remember that the students have been withdrawn early enough in most cases that they are no longer in the class when evaluations are done.  One case was handled after the end of the course, but that student had disappeared before evals.

I had several plagiarists do their evaluations together once - and they gave me as a group the lowest possible score on everything.  Even on things which aren't bad to have a low score on (like "do you think the amount of work was too little, just right, or too much"? ).  We have very low response rates for evaluations, so they were about half the responses.  And yes, the scores do count,  because I am in the wrong for pursuing this, and they are the persecuted victims.  Anyways, evaluation scores are numbers and therefore are valid data regardless of how they are produced, in the eyes of the adminstration.  I'm just glad I don't have to come up for tenure at my current institution. 

Move, Monsterx, move.

Already arranged, contract signed, tenure negotiated, and we are looking at houses…
The evaluation system isn’t the only problem in my current institution. 
I just don’t know how I can wait out the whole for my new job to start.