FYI

Rick Uttich

http://employees.oneonta.edu/uttichrm/

November 27, 2006

A Second Chance for Plagiarists

Students who hand in papers with text copied from the Internet: Are they unethical sneaks, or just young people confused by the wide-open nature of the Web? Often they're the latter, some experts say. Now Pima Community College is about to put that theory to the test.Instead of suspending or expelling students found guilty of plagiarism, the Arizona college will try to rehabilitate offenders by putting them through a five-step "traffic school," reports the Tucson Citizen. The program requires students to read articles about plagiarism, write a paper explaining what they did wrong, and meet with a writing tutor to learn about proper scholarly citations.That may sound lax to some professors, but it makes sense: If the Internet has proved to be a haven for term-paper mills, it has also swelled the ranks of thoughtless plagiarists -- students who copy passages from Wikipedia without paying much heed to what they're doing. --Brock Read Posted on Monday November 27, 2006 | Permalink |

Comments

1. This sounds like a refreshing and novel approach to handling both intentional and unintentional plagiarism at the undergraduate level. Although unintentional plagiarism is not considered to be an excuse, this alternative allows for a learning process to be engaged while still fulfilling the goal of specific and general deterrence.

I have run into plagiarism at the graduate level with electronic sources. What is the efficacy of this approach at the level? In this case, a student copied and pasted from websites other than Wiki. Should we deal with plagiairsm the same way at the gradate level?

— Jenn    Nov 28, 07:33 AM    #

2. I agree with both of the previous comments. I understand the need to give unintentional plagiarism the benefit of the doubt. However, I can’t help but wonder how intentional plagiarists are going to learn from this approach. The seriousness may well be lost on them. And, who shoulders the burden of this experience, especially those of us teaching in community colleges where a standard 5/5 load can be overwhelming?

On another note, we, as instructors, need to be willing to revamp our assignments to limit plagiarism. Based on my own experiences and those of my graduate cohort, one of the topics that is not constructively taught to graduate teaching assistants is how to recognize unintentional versus intentional plagiarism, how to craft creative assigments that minimize the possibilities, and how to model to our students proper source attribution and documentation. And this problem has become endemic not only among students, but also among administrators such as college presidents as well.

— Nelly    Nov 28, 08:24 AM