I Hate Plagiarizing

plainoldme teaches English

Mame is correct. Plagiarism is stealing and lying. Schools are very clear about that these days. It is considered a serious infraction at every school I know, and grounds for expulsion at some.

HAHAHA! That's great, George!

No kidding!

It didn't take long for this lame excuse to be offered,

No, I only google the suspect ones. First semester, I had a kid who made a break through on several levels and googled his. It was a process essay, describing how to repair a certain auto problem. The results were negligible . . . found lots of instructions for the process on the web but suspect it is common and done one way.

This is not creative writing but essay writing. We concentrated on definition, narration, compare and contrast, and, the most important, argument.

This is not a research project.

As my immediate supervisor says, it makes you as the teacher feel violated.

In some Asian nations, presenting the work of an established expert is considered paying homage and respect to that person. I understand that Russians have a different attitude toward plagiarism as well.

Oops!

It's not lame. This fellow is from Lebanon and his native language is Arabic. Could you transition from English to Arabic in less than a year? It is only the right of center folk that expect students to learn English instantly.

Newton and Leibniz, you boys stop that bickering, you've both failed to integrate with this class and I can't differentiate between the two of you, report to the headmistress immediately.

I spoke with my dean and with my work area chair. I wanted them to know what was going on. My work area chair is teaching two sections of the same class this summer and she had three cases of plagiarism!

Anyway, this student was late today. His younger brother is also in the class but said he did not know where his brother was. I did not believe that.

I spoke with one of the math professors today and she talked about how the syllabus has grown and expanded in our litigious era. I also spoke with my daughter who teaches high school Spanish and she feels the same way about the syllabus. Her first day of school is always devoted to discussing (that is, reading it to the students) the syllabus with her classes. I do the same thing, present them with a hard copy and post it on the class website.

While professors at this college have "complete academic freedom," they are required to submit their syllabi to their respective deans and there is a required list of topics to address. Of course, plagiarism is one of those topics. I tell them that plagiarism is subject to discipline and refer them to the relevant portions of the student handbook.

I did not return the student papers until the end of class. Now, this assignment was not successful with this group. One of my spring sections loved the argument essay and soared through it. These students did less well on this essay than on previous assignments.

This semester is this student's first in college. He is taking my class and calculus. Calculus is not an elective: one must pass a test to be able to register for it. He plans to earn an engineering degree.

My dean was curious as to what this student would say. Her note was, "If he intends to go to Worcester Polytech or MIT, he will find that plagiarism will get him expelled."

He was surprised by the photocopied material and expressed dismay at the idea that plagiarism is cheating. He said that he agreed with the article and that the person who wrote it was so much better able to express his opinion than he was.

I pointed out that the letters M.Sc. after the author's name show that this person has completed college and graduate school while he was just beginning college. I said it was his duty to learn to express himself well and that if he plagiarizes again, he will be expelled and he will not finish undergraduate school, let alone advanced work.

Now, he has spoken to me more than once about his frustrations with English and the difference between English and Arabic. Both brothers quiz their professors after receiving corrected work on what they did wrong. I do not interpret this as aggression. I think these are ambitious students who want to get on with their lives. The younger brother said to me that in Lebanon he was regarded as a good writer. I don't doubt that. These boys have logical minds and they adapted the outlining methods of one student in the class as has another foreign student from India. (The Indian wants to major in computer science.) They have a sophisticated approach to their subject matter, no matter what they write.

As this student has perfect attendance, as he has done all the work and generally at a fairly competent level, I allowed him to submit another essay with the understanding that it would be graded ten points down.

(I give students up to 20 points for grammar and syntax; 5 points for spelling; 15 points for their thesis sentence and 15 for their conclusion. They can earn up to 30 points for support. The remaining five points are awarded for style. No one has earned 100. My best student earned 92.)

I warned him that American colleges see plagiarism as a serious matter and repeated what my dean had said.

Last semester, I was not as tolerant. That student had shown up for three classes in eight weeks and had turned in two pieces of work.

Frankly, the day exhausted me. I had trouble driving home. I made a smoothie then climbed into bed and slept for two hours.

That's funny!

Six of the eight surviving students (only 12 are registered for the summer term) are non-native speakers. They are from Lebanon, India, Africa and Puerto Rico.

The Indian student was in my fall "095" or beginning writing class. He still has problems with English verbs but he had come a long way since the fall. He is now able to ask for words in English by describing what he means.

It is a challenge to teach a mix of native and non-native speakers, particularly when the non-native speakers come from many countries and traditions. They tend to spell as they hear the words. Some of the words are so far from English spellings that I can not figure out what they are. Verb tenses represent an enormous problem for many of my students. I had a very intelligent 40-year old Japanese woman who did not understand verb tenses. As a teenager and young adult, she read most of the Western Canon in translation in Japan and she was still blowing in the wind about verb tenses. Articles are a mystery to my students. The Lebanese brothers seem to put "the" everywhere they can, so that the word looks like a safety device.

One year is not enough time to learn English well enough to succeed in college. We are not doing a good job in ELL (formerly ESL) yet we have created a separate master's degree in teaching English to the non-native speakers.

Eh Beth -- When I was in Detroit, I heard a great deal about the mysterious grade 13. Originally, I heard that before college, all Canadian students took grade 13 which consisted of reading and writing for an entire year. Later, I was told that grade 13 existed in a few provinces. I was also told that only a few universities demanded grade 13. I have also been told that it no longer exists. What is the scope on grade 13?

When students are tested for reading comprehension, reading material that is 2 levels lower is used. This is so that the reading level does not get in the way of what is being tested (comprehension). You may have to accept lower level writing from these students, in terms of sentence structure and grammar. OR offer other ways for them to express themselves - art projects, music, oral presentations, video etc.

Reading high level material and then having to put it into your own words is challenging enough for even the good student. I can't imagine how challenging it would be for the foreign student.

Note: I am not excusing plagiarism. But I do understand the frustration.

The writing resources courses for science grads at U of Delaware and Princeton have a required writing course for incoming students not exposed to rigorous standards of research. One of the main connection is reasearch papers is "attribution" where there may be several lines of evidence or quotes from a list of citations.Knowing what is honorable attribution v plagiarism is often a little less clear in a summary paper about some principle in science or history.

In fact, we tech several "hour units" about grants application and using resources like "Science Citation Index"

Was this kids copying the focus of his argument? I mean did he substitute someones elses argument for hissown or did he merely bolster his argument with things that others have posed ? The first would be plagiarism while the second is attribution, and is actually endorsed as "Good" scientific writing.
One of my geology heroes was a guy named John Rodgers, he was a teacher of mine and was a prolific author of papers on the Appalachian Mountains. Much of his work was attribution writ humongous. Many of his works read like the NY phone directory (lotsa characters but little information per each attribution).

This particular course is the second offered in a series of 'developmental' writing courses at a community college. The purpose of the course is to teach writing, so other projects would be inappropriate.

Open enrollment schools test all students for placement in math and English courses.

I'm interested in your statement that students are tested with material "2 levels lower" is used. Does that mean these students are tested using 10th grade material?

When I was in elementary school, we took standardized reading and math tests twice each year, in January and June, to determine where we as students were in reading and math achievement in relation to our grade level. This information was for the parents, that year's teacher and the students only and was not part of a wider program.

we had a spate of plagiarism a few years ago when the search engines were more of a novelty. We had to quickly adapt and establish policies on how attribution from the web was actually accepted (since the web is virtually peer review- free there is a lot of real garbage parading as valid topics . Plagiarizing junk is guilt on two levels.