A little over a week ago, students in my embryology class handed in their term papers. The first one I read was by a student who had a history of doing “whatever it took” to get a better grade, including being caught trying to cheat on a make-up exam in a different class. However, despite this I was not ready to discover any honesty issues with the paper, until I started reading it.
The student , let us call her “N,” apparently did not realize that after reading her hand-written short essays all semester in class, I am somewhat familiar now with her writing style. It was immediately clear to me that her writing style was not the same in the paper, which automatically put me on alert. However, since she had citations in her text, I assumed she was just quoting or nearly quoting the text of her cited sources for each footnote.
At least, I thought this until I came across page 2. On page 2, the upper paragraph had a light blue background. Now… why would this one paragraph have a light blue background when the rest of the paper was white? I could only guess that it was because she pasted in something and forgot to remove the HTML tags. (Word’s default is “paste as HTML” unless you otherwise specify using “paste special….”)
I was now alert to the possibility of plagiarism, and so I turned to the web, and the first thing I did was type her subject, “Genetic Disorders,” into Wikipedia’s search window. Immediately, I saw that the whole first page and a half of her paper was copied, verbatim (except with fake footnotes to her sources), from this site. I then typed random sentences from the rest of her paper into Goolge, and discovered that the last 2 pages (of a 5 page paper, this is 3.5 pages total) were copied almost just as verbatim from the Human Genome Project’s website on gene therapy, including the same section headers and even two identical typos.
Now, anyone who has spent time in a university setting knows that plagiarism is taken seriously. It is potentially grounds for dismissal from the university. Ordinarily I do not like to see things escalated that far, particularly if the student has only committed a single infraction. Since N had submitted a rough draft that I did not find to be plagiarized (though I admit, it is probably just because I didn’t think to look), I left her rough draft stand (my policy was the rough draft would stand if a final draft was not turned in, and so I took the position that the plagiarized paper was the same as not having been turned in, and left it at that). Her grade on the rough copy was a D, so that was what I gave her.
Unfortunately she tried to submit this same plagiarized paper to her genetics professor for her genetics paper — after being warned by both him and myself that students were not to submit the same paper to both of us (and after already being caught once with plagiarism on the paper in question). This professor reported it to the chair, who then called me into her office, and said that by her reading (which is correct as far as I can see), university policy requires us to escalate, no matter what we want. In fact I’m not supposed to decide on how to reprimand her at all, but submit it to the authorities (the chair, who submits to the dean) and let them decide.
I’m not sure how this will end but it is times like this that I would rather not even assign papers to students. The school pushes us to do it because they want students to learn how to write scholarly papers, and that is a solid goal and I am proud of them for being so insistent about it. But the plagiarism inquisition is just not something I would like to spend my time on in between semesters.
My hope is that the chair and dean will agree that a D is appropriate for the paper and leave it at that, but we shall see what happens.
In the mean time, for those of you out there doing college or high school papers — do your own work, dammit! It’s better to submit nothing and take a 0, than to submit plagiarized material and risk expulsion and a black mark on your academic record.
As a student, I have to tell you that a D is not an appropriate grade for anything which has been proven to be plagiarized. A D paper is one that was written and ended up being below what would be considered acceptable, or one that misses the topic but was still relatively well written.
But the key is that the paper was still written by the student.
One on hand, I’d love to have you as a professor. Especially knowing that I can plagiarize and get away with it.
On the other, I’d be disgusted if I knew that one of my classmates plagiarized a paper that I worked hard on (no matter what grade I got on it) and was not punished as the rules say should happen.
I’m glad that this student got caught by someone who was willing to turn them in like that.
By: cheesetype57 on Tuesday, December 11, 2007
at 1:39 am
Remember, her grade on that paper was a 0. The D was for a prior draft of the paper, which by the rules of the course stands if no revision is turned in. I treated the revision as if it had not been turned in (not your own work = no credit = 0). So her score defaulted to the rough draft.
Two other students did not turn in a final draft — one was happy with her 92%. One wanted to turn something in but missed the deadline (by many days) and was stuck with an 80%. Both of these people also got a “0″ on their final draft, but their rough draft grade stood in its place.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. However, I will tell you as a teacher that from many years of experience, I have had to deal with administrations that do not back the teacher in these cases. So it becomes a balancing act — can I penalize the student appropriately without causing the student to contest the grade? It’s not that I don’t think my assessment is correct, but in too many places I have known that the administration will not back me up, and that makes it more trouble than its worth.
C
By: Chessack on Tuesday, December 11, 2007
at 11:49 am
There’s a difference between not turning something in and turning in someone else’s work.
Are you saying that the two other students who did not turn in a final copy are the same as the one who plagiarized?
By: cheesetype57 on Tuesday, December 11, 2007
at 1:41 pm
I teach journalism, and our school uses the death penalty — permanent expulsion from the program –for plagiarism and other sins such as making up sources. We give students explicit instruction about what constitutes plagiarism, with specific examples, and what they should do to make sure they don’t commit it even accidentally. (Even accidental plagiarism, such as forgetting to attribute information gathered from another newspaper or wire service, will bring about the death penalty.) We do this harsh culling because of such highly publicized incidents as Jayson Blair’s transgressions at the NY Times. Students need to know they cannot do this.
By: Steve Doig on Tuesday, December 11, 2007
at 4:13 pm
In a perfect world I’d agree. But I have been at too many institutions that do not back the instructors up, and cave to the students, I guess… so I try to avoid that escalation, because I’m never sure if I will be backed up or not.
Already by the way, this student is threatening a lawsuit. Usually when that happens the administration caves at that point. We will see.
C
By: Chessack on Tuesday, December 11, 2007
at 5:50 pm
If people never push for the full extent of the law then it will never happen.
By: cheesetype57 on Tuesday, December 11, 2007
at 10:00 pm
The student is threatening a LAWSUIT? Ye gods, that’s ridiculous. But it is, I guess, indicative of how bad this problem has become. Students have actually started to think that faculty don’t have the right to punish them for plagiarizing.
In my own classes I seem to have a fair degree of success with being REALLY, REALLY scary about plagiarism in the first week of class. I lay it on thick about how ridiculously easy plagiarism is to spot, and how bad the consequences will be — I say they’ll automatically fail the class. In the end I may not actually fail everyone who plagiarizes — it depends how bad it is — but the threat is there, and that (I think/hope) makes it harder for them to come back later and say “Oh, I didn’t know how serious it is”.
The result is sometimes overcompensation by some students, who, in a panic, cite and footnote absolutely everything. But it’s easier to persuade them to dial back on the citation mania than it is to have to deal with the plagiarists who thought they could get away with it.
Oh, and I’d suggest that not requiring a revised paper is not a good idea. Requiring revisions is a good way of forestalling plagiarism, since for a student to revise a paper in a substantial way, s/he has to actually understand it. Which is harder to do if you didn’t actually write it.
By: gazza on Tuesday, December 11, 2007
at 10:59 pm
The problem is that there needs to be a consistent policy in place. The chair of the department and I had a long talk this morning and she ended up agreeing with me that a warning was probably appropriate in this case, but that we are going to keep a file on this and if the student does it again then we will escalate. If she comes in (the student) that is probably what we will tell her. The reason is that we have not been consistent in enforcing these rules (I say “we”, but I am new here).
You’re probably right about the revising part — I should have forced it. But the problem was I was asked “do we have to?” but the team who got an A on the rough draft and I thought, well, why revise? It was nearly a perfect paper. But to be fair I then had to say that if one student’s paper could stand without revision, so could others if they were happy with it. In retrospect, I should’ve just said, “No, it’s required.” Live and learn.
I think what’s going to come out of this is a departmental policy that everyone has to follow, so that all teachers are consistent. For example, there is no department-wide policy that you can’t recycle papers from one class to another, so it is handled on a class-by-class basis. Oh, we all think you shouldn’t do that but a written policy is not in place… students are just told verbally. And so we need to have more consistency.
I also want to quote something you said:
In the end I may not actually fail everyone who plagiarizes — it depends how bad it is .
Yes, this is my point above. It depends how bad it is. And it also depends on how much you can prove it. This student is having a problem because she pasted the HTML graphic background into Word and so it is a blatant copy-paste. Some of her classmates probably also copied but I don’t think I can prove it so I flagged the questionable passages but I didn’t punish them as severely. (And of course this is one reason she is threatening a law suit, because it is, to her eyes, inconsistent… whereas to me it is two different cases, one easily provable, and one not as provable).
Speaking of proof, one of the older faculty said this same student had another incident a couple of years ago that was suspected, but again not provable, so nothing was done… which may be why she thinks it’s still OK to do it. Again… inconsistency.
Odds are the student will be relieved to get a warning and drop the aggressiveness, and we will move on. However, now we have documentation of what she has done, so if she does it again, that’ll be all she wrote (I assume). In the mean time our next department meeting will probably be devoted to setting a department-wide policy on all cases of academic dishonesty and exactly what we will do.
C
By: Chessack on Wednesday, December 12, 2007
at 8:38 am
That much circumstantial evidence doesn’t just happen. If you think there’s plagiarism, document it.
But anyway, just the fact that she was told not to turn in the same paper for two classes and did anyway should be enough for failing both assignments.
By: cheesetype57 on Friday, December 14, 2007
at 10:21 pm
The problem with just a warning, and the use of litigation is that if it works, she’s just learned that when She screws up, sue the person who catches her and that will solve it.
By: Jibblescribbits on Friday, December 14, 2007
at 10:24 pm
Our example person here, N, has some clear issues. We met with the chair (both I and the other professor along with her) and she frankly came off as a bit of a raving loon. For example, she complained that on the rough draft I gave her only a 62 and another group an 84 when they had both done similar work. I looked at the rubric scores for both and pointed out she had a 0 for references, and I only did that if someone had no bibliography. She insisted she did have a bibliography. I asked if she had the rough copy with her, and she did, so I took it and turned to the back and there in my green ink and handwriting was the question “Where is your bibliography?” (and there was none).
At any rate the chair’s concern was the lack of consistency in the department, and that the dean would not support us sending one student to him but not others. I have only been here this semester, but the chair has been here a long time, and she said we as a department have varied — some people give a 0 for the assignment, some take off some points but not all, some an F for the course, some send it to the dean. It’s not right to do something different for every student, and this lack of consistency can leave us vulnerable to both having the internal university arbitration go against us completely as well as to lawsuits. Of course the reason it has been inconsistent is probably because most teachers want to deal with it on some level less severe than sending it up the chain to the dean, in other words, they are trying to give students a bit of a second chance or what have you, but that won’t help us with the dean, who is only going to care about consistency.
In the spring we are hopefully going to come up with a clear departmental policy, and then starting next fall publish it to the students, make them aware of it, and then enforce it across the board. That should help with this sort of thing (I hope).
C
By: Chessack on Saturday, December 15, 2007
at 7:27 am
Good luck with getting something consistent. I know it will help these sort of problems a whole lot in the future.
By: cheesetype57 on Saturday, December 15, 2007
at 10:26 am
For what it’s worth, I’ve had several professors who have allowed only those above a certain cutoff the option of not revising.
If you got an A- or higher on the first draft (and it is a first final draft, not a rough draft), and you’re happy with it, you don’t have to revise.
By: Erechtheides on Monday, December 17, 2007
at 9:48 am
Interesting the way this unfolded…I’m a science writing prof at a mid-sized mid-Atlantic school, and I’ve seen similar things happen in the past few years.
Your first mistake: You graded the drafts. I used to do that, too, but then it gave the students too much power over a decision whether to revise or to remain satisfied with their grade. Writing should be viewed as a process, and even the students with a nearly perfect paper should have to revise–even if their revision is small. (I tell my students that even the best published writing is never truly finished and can always be revised and improved–and I defy them to write anything so genius that no flaws can be found.) Not grading drafts helps avoid problems like this one.
The second mistake: the punishment. Imagine I’m a student in your class. It’s the night before the revision is due, and I haven’t done any work. It’s late, and I want to go to bed, or text-message with my friends, or whatever the kids do nowadays. If I don’t revise the paper on which I got a “D” on the draft, I end up with a “D.” If, however, I plagiarize–which will take me all of fifteen minutes–I’ll either succeed and end up with an awesome grade, or I’ll be caught…and just have to take that “D.” There is, therefore, NO disincentive for me to plagiarize.
I understand your department lacks such a policy, and it’s good that you’re making one. But please make sure it has teeth. Administrators should be made aware that simply not accepting a plagiarized paper, or having a student rewrite a plagiarized paper, is not punishment at all. It’s no wonder students like this end up in patterns of plagisrism–if this is all the punishment that happens in one class, why not try to get away with it in another?
It doesn’t matter if you haven’t caught other plagiarists and punished them similarly. Not one bit. If a student says, “But Suzy plagiarized, and I don’t see you punishing Suzy,” that’s exactly the time to tell the student what my kindergarten teacher liked to say: “You just worry about YOU.” And then I’d go and Google the hell out of Suzy’s paper.
And don’t fall into the trap of believing that your own syllabus trapped you–since the student turned in a “D”-worthy draft, you can’t give the student lower than a “D.” That’s a fallacy. The student did turn in a “D”-worthy draft, but then she committed an act of academic dishonesty. That changes the game. At the very least, she should fail the paper, if not the class. The rules of baseball say that you have to reach first base before the ball is caught by the first baseman in order to be safe. But if you take out a handgun and shoot the first baseman while you’re running…technically you’ve made it there safely, but Big Overriding Rules say that you’re far from safe. That’s a terrible analogy, but you get the idea.
Keep up the good work, and if your administration undercuts your efforts to punish plagiarists, always push for a punishment that’s a notch beyond what you’d ordinarily give.
Oh, and recommend your department purchase a license to turnitin.com. It’s like automatic Googling for all papers, and it’ll catch this stuff in a flash.
By: Adam on Monday, December 17, 2007
at 10:00 am
Just remember the results from my very informal poll: students hate Turnitin.
Not because it catches plagiarism, but because it’s another deadline to meet. And every professor can do things differently.
I had one professor who would tell us that papers were due on Tuesday in class, but they had to be in Turnitin by 11:59 pm on Monday night.
A few professors have the paper due at the same time as class starts. Which is all fine and dandy unless the internet decides to break.
Most professors just have the paper due online sometime the day the paper is due in class. This seems to be the student favorite, because they can still write the thing until the last second and only have to print it off and run to class.
Plus there’s the whole decision on if you’ll allow ‘revisions’ to be turned in or not. Almost every student I’m friends with would love it if they could turn in their paper and see how much of it is flagged for plagiarism, or at least have a safety net if they upload the wrong file.
And please, don’t be a Turnitin Nazi. One of my professors gave points for having the paper turned in there. We had a student who couldn’t get it figured out his freshman year and went to basketball practice thinking the professor was nice and would give him some slack. He got nothing.
By: cheesetype57 on Monday, December 17, 2007
at 11:27 am
Believe me, I think more harm than good can come about if profs rely TOO heavily on turnitin. But as long as you use it in a thoughtful way, it can be immensely helpful.
I have my students turn in papers at the beginning of class, as I always did before Turnitin came about. They can bring in a physical copy of the paper, or they can e-mail it to me (but must get an e-mail confirmation in return from me). I tell them to also upload it to turnitin by the time it’s due–but if they don’t, it’s no big deal. Turnitin can accept stuff late, and I don’t penalize them for that–as long as a copy of their paper made it to me on time, it’s on time.
This semester I had to get thirty students to each submit four separate papers, plus revisions, to turnitin, and I had very few problems. If a student’s paper wasn’t uploaded after a while, I just sent that student an e-mail with a gentle reminder, and problem solved.
As long as you’re not the kind of idiotic prof that Cheesetype57 describes, it should all turn out okay. It sure would save you a lot of Googling time.
Also, turnitin allows you to either let, or not let, your students see their own originality reports. I don’t let the students see them, simply because I don’t want them obsessing over them or trying to figure out ways to game the system. Then it’s just a matter of trusting myself when I look through the papers and knowing that I won’t unfairly accuse students.
Undergrads hate turnitin for two reasons that I can discern: One, the cheaters hate that now they’ll be caught. And two, everyone else fears that they’ll be wrongly accused. But if you use the program correctly, and you apply a modicum of common sense when sifting through the originality reports, this should never happen.
Besides, it’s easier to teach Turnitin Nazis to change their policies than it is to teach a new crop of freshmen not to plagiarize.
By: Adam on Monday, December 17, 2007
at 12:10 pm
Adam said this: “If I don’t revise the paper on which I got a “D” on the draft, I end up with a “D.” If, however, I plagiarize–which will take me all of fifteen minutes–I’ll either succeed and end up with an awesome grade, or I’ll be caught…and just have to take that “D.” There is, therefore, NO disincentive for me to plagiarize,” and it bears repeating.
I’ve had a lot of student plagiarists suggest to me that a “fair penalty” for plagiarism might be to drop the grade and pretend they never turned anything in. That’s like a bank robber saying, “Well, how about I just give the money back, and we forget this ever happened?” The world doesn’t work that way. The penalty for trying to break the rules *has* to be worse than simply getting no benefit from having tried.
In short, I think your colleague is doing the right thing to put your institution’s plagiarism machinery into effect, and you shouldn’t feel sorry for the student. (In your place, I’d also get her draft back and check it for plagiarism, and if it turns out she plagiarized both, bring two separate cases against her. But I’m kind of a hardass about plagiarism.)
By: Alex on Monday, December 17, 2007
at 1:55 pm
You know, I never thought of that. I guess it would be two separate assignments so you could do that.
By: cheesetype57 on Monday, December 17, 2007
at 1:57 pm
I have to say, I really don’t understand your “more in sorrow than in anger” response. This student cheated, deliberately, 3 times from your account (on the paper for you, on the paper for the other class, and because she wasn’t to hand in the same paper for both), and you seem sad about giving her just a D. I’d be sad because I wasn’t allowed to run her through with a sword (I specifically asked if this was permissible, and my chair said it is not).
She treated you with disrespect, and she clearly did it on purpose, but you seem almost to think that is your fault, even though you gave her feedback that showed she needed to pull up her socks on documentation.
By: whatladder on Monday, December 17, 2007
at 2:25 pm
Not to keep harping on the same point, but I agree with whatladder. I reserve my sympathy for the unintentional plagiarists–students who plagiarize by, say, plunking two full sentences into a paper, not using quotation marks, but still citing the source. This is still plagiarism, and the grade on this paper must be lowered, but I have plenty of sympathy for the student and explain to them very nicely what happened, hoping that this reduction in grade scares the hell out of them and they never do this again. (They cannot, I explain, keep the same grade they would have gotten–because I devised that grade under the assumption that all of the writing was the student’s. Obviously, if that’s false, the grade should be lowered.)
Doing this also allows me to reserve all wrath for intentional plagiarists. It sounds like the student in question here did indeed intentionally plagiarize, knew what she was doing, the whole shebang. At some universities, this kind of breach of academic ethics would result in her expulsion. If she just fails the class, I’d impress upon her how very lucky she is.
I’m probably naive, because I’ve never suffered through this, but I would freaking love to be sued by a student when I have such direct evidence against them. I’d like to see the look on her lawyer’s face when he or she is shown, in black and white, indisputably, that this student cheated and hasn’t a leg on which to stand. I’d like to watch this student lose the lawsuit in a grand fashion, and I’d like to tell all of my future students about it so that none of them get any smart ideas. And then I’d like to write a humorous article about it and sell that article to a fairly intelligent mainstream publication.
But like I said, I’ve never been sued by a student before, so I’m probably somewhat naive about how well it will turn out.
By: Adam on Monday, December 17, 2007
at 4:09 pm
So after giving it some thought, here’s what I would do if I were you.
Fail the little cheater. Sit and wait for any sort of fight back from daddy or whoever she cries to, and show your case. Especially if you can really prove that you’re right.
And if the department or school won’t back you up, it’s not a place you should be teaching anyway. Universities are for education, they’re not diploma factories.
By: cheesetype57 on Monday, December 17, 2007
at 6:12 pm
I would report the case to the honor code council and recommend failure of the course, assuming it was a first offense. Anything more and it gets worse. I say “recommend”, because at George Mason University that is how it works. At Georgetown I would simply fail the student and make a report.
By: Mark Stoneman on Monday, December 17, 2007
at 11:21 pm
I appreciate all the comments.
However, I want to point out that the situation was resolved at the level of the chair, and it’s over with. Further recommendations about “what I should do about it” would be most productive if geared toward the future… as in TurnItIn and so forth. In fact we have it, it’s part of our Blackboard system, and I am using it next semester with my 85 student class — all students will be required to use TurnItIn so that I don’t have to check 85 5-page papers by hand.
As for the past, the student’s been warned. Her subsequent unrepentant and even accusatory behavior (she literally accused the other prof of trying to “trick” her into cheating on my paper) lost her any sympathy I might have had for her, and I certainly don’t buy that she didn’t “know” what plagiarism was (as she tried to say).
However, at that point it was in the chair’s hands, and I have to go with the chair’s decision, which was based on the larger scheme of things. We cannot defend to the dean disciplining student A but not B for the same offense, and making an example of student N when we have let A, B, C, and D go with lesser punishments is also not fair. The policy needs to be formalized and followed by everyone, and the students need to be informed ahead of time.
Also, by school policy technically I have no authority to do anything with plagiarism… Even not grading the paper was technically incorrect. I’m supposed to do nothing at all but submit the evidence to the chair, and the chair decides if the evidence warrants submission to the dean. If so, the dean decides what to do, if anything. It’s 100% out of my hands as an instructor.
I did not realize this, as that is not how things worked when I was a TA at other institutions — there the policy was, you get a 0, or whatever punishment the teacher decides, and it only goes to the administration if the student escalates. The risk of expulsion or additional reprimands usually prevented students from daring the escalation process, so we were good to go (though in at least one place, if escalation happened the administration ALWAYS caved… this just was not known because students didn’t try it).
So, part of the problem is that I didn’t follow the procedures because I didn’t know them. Now I do. This spring I’m using TurnItIn, and if it catches plagiarism I’ll just turn the evidence over to the chair and let her deal with it.
Again thanks for the comments.
C
By: Chessack on Saturday, January 5, 2008
at 12:12 am