Faculty Plagiarism

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A faculty member at the community college where I work as a librarian assigned a detailed, multi-page literature research paper assignment that is lifted verbatim from a high school teacher's assignment on a school district homepage in another state. She gave the assignment to the librarians and to her students with a reference to a "my handouts" section which links directly to the out-of-state district homepage and the other teacher's class handouts. When questioned about the verbatim, unattributed use of the assignment, the faculty member said she has verbal permission from the teacher to use the assignment but the teacher does not want any attribution using her name on the assignment because she took the assignments from another teacher and has forgotten this teacher's name.
The professional with expertise on plagiarism on my college campus has told the faculty member that a verbal okay to use an assignment is fine, and that it can be used without attribution. Opinions please?

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Type: Question • Score: 2 • Views: 1,962 • Replies: 6

[+3] - MontereyJack - 02/01/2014Plagiarism is a concept used where someone passes off somebody else's original work as their own. It doesn't seem to me that a class assignment would generally count as being someone's original...

Plagiarism is a concept used where someone passes off somebody else's original work as their own. It doesn't seem to me that a class assignment would generally count as being someone's original work. It's kind of like copying a page of math problems from a book for students to solve. The student's work would be original and their own, and somebody could copy that work and legitimately be accused of cheating (or plagiarizing), but the problem (or in this case the assignment) is simply something to stimularte the production of an orginal work, not necessarily an original work itself. I think your school expert was right.

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Years ago, I wrote a paper including a lot of quoted material,
properly attributed so far as I knew the authors' names,
but there was a lot of other un-attributed material
whose authors' names I knew not. I avoided plagiarism
by avoiding any appearance of my name upon that paper: no by-line.

When pressed (qua later iterations) of it,
I put by: "Publius" thereby hoping to avoid plagiarism.

I cannot be accused of taking credit
for someone else 's work, if no one knows who wrote my paper.

David

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Of coursse you could also simply have said something like "Author unknown" and cited your source (e.g. in what it was published)

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@MontereyJack,

MontereyJack wrote:

Of coursse you could also simply have said something like "Author unknown"
and cited your source (e.g. in what it was published)

Sometimes u just overhear something
that 's too good to waste, disappear like an echo,
but u don t know its source. I put a lot of work
into that paper, but I had no interest in getting credit for it.

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Thanks very much to Monterey Jack and OmSigDAVID for your thoughtful responses. Your discussion helps clarifies the issues and will very useful as we discuss the case in my unit on campus. Much appreciated!

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@QuestLib,

I 'm very glad to have helped.

Let us know what thay say.

Tell them to spell fonetically.

David

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Faculty Plagiarism

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