Aw, damn.

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....

maybe they wrote the wikipedia entry? not likely, but possible. can you determine who wrote the wiki entry at all? not sure about that.

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.

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)

@ 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.")

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.

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.

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.

I'm curious how you knew it was plagiarism. Do you randomly check for these things?

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.

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.

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.