I just caught my first piece of plagiarism. On a throw-away 10 point assignment that required students to write only 2 sentences. That the student in question copied directly from Wikipedia. How dare they!
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Alice Pawley is an assistant professor of engineering education at Purdue University. She blogs at the intersection of women's studies and engineering, a pretty empty space but with potential to grow. She wants to be a feminist-but-tenured professor when she grows up.
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« December's goals: finishing up, getting ahead, and finding peace | Main | Girls sweep science competition. Aren't you tired of these headlines? »
Aw, damn.
Category: teaching
Posted on: December 5, 2007 11:17 AM, by ScienceWoman
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Comments
Aargh!
I suppose the positive side of this is since it's not a huge assignment, you can use this as a "teaching opportunity" to explain to them the seriousness of plagiarism.
Unfortunately if Mystery U is like pretty much any other college out there, this will be the first of many....
Posted by: Dave Munger | December 5, 2007 11:34 AM
maybe they wrote the wikipedia entry? not likely, but possible. can you determine who wrote the wiki entry at all? not sure about that.
Posted by: bruin | December 5, 2007 11:42 AM
Idiocy squared. First, to risk one's grade in a course on such an unimportant assignment. It would have been far, far better to take a '0' on the assignment. Second, to rely on a source so accessible that the plagiarism could be easily detected. If it's any consolation, I'm waiting to hear back from the Dean of Students' office on the status of charges I brought against a student who lifted substantial portions of text from four different web sites and inserted it into two different reading logs submitted a week apart. She is also charged with plagiarizing in another course, so it is very likely that she will be 'sent down' for a semester.
Posted by: Elf Eye | December 5, 2007 12:14 PM
All too common, I'm afraid. It's often remarkable how stupid the plagiarism is (of course, there's also the explanation that clever plagiarism is unlikely to be caught). I see two main reasons: (1) It's the bad students who are more likely to cheat -- the good students can just complete the assignment; (2) plagiarism is often a last-minute act of desperation when the student doesn't think s/he will be able to successfully complete the assignment.
I try to put the fear of god in them early on so they won't even consider it (not that I always succeed), and then I hit them hard when I catch them. I tell them up front that plagiarism means failing the class, and if I have my way they'll be expelled. I figure we probably only catch a fraction of the cheaters, so it's more important to make the penalty harsh. We don't want them to think that a cost-benefit analysis supports plagiarism. (my 2 cents)
Posted by: Physicalist | December 5, 2007 12:45 PM
@ bruin: There was a Foxtrot comic on that theme a while back. The short answer though, is that we don't need to worry about this possibility: First, it's so unlikely, that the student would have to provide compelling evidence for having authored the web entry; the professor's default conclusion has to be plagiarism. Second, even if one has published one's work previously, one still needs to reference that earlier work when it is reproduced. (When I was younger, I had a prof. warn me against "plagiarizing myself.")
Posted by: Physicalist | December 5, 2007 12:52 PM
I gotta go with dave's comment above. I'd demonstrate how you found out about it and what it means. Sadly, I wouldn't be surprised if a portion of your class didn't know what plagarism actually is.
Posted by: drue | December 5, 2007 1:02 PM
I had exactly the same thing happen a few weeks ago. I don't check every test for plagiarism, but this one had terms and grammar that were just too good for a student in my class to have produced. So I typed in most of one sentence and blammo, the Google hit came back right off the bat.
If the student copies from a good source (in this case the wiki entry was good) you can tell right away, IMHO.
Posted by: boojieboy | December 5, 2007 1:08 PM
I think that most plagiarism is done innocently... in my experience teaching a high-level tier II writing course (it was comparative anatomy... don't ask me why the uni turned it into a writing course) students who plagiarized had no idea that they had plagiarized. They were genuinely shocked and horrified when I called them on it, even though I was always very explicit about what constitutes plagiarism and gave them lots of examples. I'd still get a few every semester. I usually just gave them a zero for the assignment and explained to them that I *could* take it to the dean, as plagiarism is grounds for expulsion... never took it that far, though.
Posted by: LM | December 5, 2007 1:57 PM
I'm curious how you knew it was plagiarism. Do you randomly check for these things?
Posted by: Jennie | December 5, 2007 3:55 PM
I dunno, Drue, as a recent undergraduate myself, I think you'd have a hard time finding a student who didn't know that copying directly from a source without citing is plagiarism. A lot of students seem to not know that paraphrasing without a cite is also considered plagiarism, but copying directly? They teach you about that in high school.
Posted by: Kathryn | December 5, 2007 4:32 PM
I'm with Kathryn; I don't buy the explanation that college students don't know that copying directly from a source without citing is plagiarism. There are other forms of plagiarism that may be less obvious to students, but this is a pretty cut and dry case.
As for how I knew it was plagiarism. The sentence contained a statement I wasn't sure was completely true, so I went to wikipedia...and found the sentence. Then I checked the other sentence, and it was in the relevant article as well. So no, I haven't been routinely checking for plagiarism (though I did try to design my assignments to make it more difficult), but I do routinely correct any science that seems to be questionable.
Posted by: ScienceWoman | December 5, 2007 5:01 PM
You and me both! I just came across two EXTREMELY well written papers by two exceedingly lazy students, again for a 10 point extra credit paper. The time I'm spending dealing with this, at the expense of writing my final exam, is completely irritating.
Posted by: another female -ologist | December 6, 2007 10:09 AM