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"Plagiarism" (PA et al., 2010)
Ballman
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I'm TAing an engineering course this semester. Today I sat down to grade semester project reports, and I ran into one paper in particular that periodically alternated between especially eloquent and barely coherent.
Sensing something off, I began to search Google for complete sentences from the well-written sections. Of course, I find that entire sections (longer than a page each) have been copied verbatim from both Wikipedia and a related journal article. Nowhere does she indicate that these are quotations. By the definition of our university cheating policies, this clearly constitutes plagiarism, which is punished pretty harshly. However, I'm pretty sure she didn't quite understand that what she did is against the rules. Some things in particular:
1) First of all, she is an international student from Taiwan. We often get grad students straight from China, Taiwan, South Korea, etc. with little-to-no exposure to the US system, so it wouldn't surprise me much if she has no idea that what she did is frowned upon here. Then again, I have no idea what attitudes toward plagiarism look like in Taiwan.
2) Perhaps most importantly, she made zero effort to mask her copying. Her bibliography included only two references, both of which she copied generously. If she knew it was wrong, why cite them? Also, as I said before, this published work was interspersed with her own barely understandable writing, and the transitions were very jarring. Finally, the sections copied from the journal article contain their own citations, for which their are no references in the bibliography. This alone is a dead giveaway that she did not generate this text herself.
3) And last of all, she has come to me several times during the semester for help. She's definitely had trouble in the class, but she has shown herself to be willing to go to great lengths to get help on the material. Why spend all of that time getting the extra help if you're just going to cheat?
So, D&D, I ask you: Do you think she meant to plagiarize? Should it even matter if she meant to do so? What influence does culture have on attitudes toward copying the work of others? I'm pretty new to the whole plagiarism thing, because in the engineering school, you see a lot more homework problems than written reports. Is it more common than I realize? I'm also interested in hearing what you think I should do about this girl, but I've pretty much decided what I'll do.
Sensing something off, I began to search Google for complete sentences from the well-written sections. Of course, I find that entire sections (longer than a page each) have been copied verbatim from both Wikipedia and a related journal article. Nowhere does she indicate that these are quotations. By the definition of our university cheating policies, this clearly constitutes plagiarism, which is punished pretty harshly. However, I'm pretty sure she didn't quite understand that what she did is against the rules. Some things in particular:
1) First of all, she is an international student from Taiwan. We often get grad students straight from China, Taiwan, South Korea, etc. with little-to-no exposure to the US system, so it wouldn't surprise me much if she has no idea that what she did is frowned upon here. Then again, I have no idea what attitudes toward plagiarism look like in Taiwan.
2) Perhaps most importantly, she made zero effort to mask her copying. Her bibliography included only two references, both of which she copied generously. If she knew it was wrong, why cite them? Also, as I said before, this published work was interspersed with her own barely understandable writing, and the transitions were very jarring. Finally, the sections copied from the journal article contain their own citations, for which their are no references in the bibliography. This alone is a dead giveaway that she did not generate this text herself.
3) And last of all, she has come to me several times during the semester for help. She's definitely had trouble in the class, but she has shown herself to be willing to go to great lengths to get help on the material. Why spend all of that time getting the extra help if you're just going to cheat?
So, D&D, I ask you: Do you think she meant to plagiarize? Should it even matter if she meant to do so? What influence does culture have on attitudes toward copying the work of others? I'm pretty new to the whole plagiarism thing, because in the engineering school, you see a lot more homework problems than written reports. Is it more common than I realize? I'm also interested in hearing what you think I should do about this girl, but I've pretty much decided what I'll do.
Ballman on
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I think you have to lean pretty far toward benefit of the doubt with ESL students.
Easier to contract out someone to write your paper for you though - which is a bit harder to trace.
But I can understand the "give her a second chance" arguments, particularly if she's a foreign student. It's not necessarily her fault that the school admitted someone (on a graduate level?) that may or may not be qualified to do the expected coursework.
But no matter, plagiarizing others is not okay and even if you let her slide, the next person won't. Absolutely discuss it with her one-on-one. I don't know how lenient you want to be, but maybe you could at least offer some sort of extra credit in a non-written task if you decide to fail this paper without a rewrite?
Although it's not really your job to teach her how to write...hopefully your university offers some sort of writing help (for example, we had a writing center at my school's library) that she might not be taking the full advantage of.
What pushes me in favor of a second chance is the fact that she's asked for all the help she has. She wants to do it right. She's proven that. If they show that kind of commitment, you help them out as best you can. That's the kind of student you really root for to do well. Make out a style guide, give her all the notes she needs on how to do it right.
After the how-to-properly-cite lesson, though, if it happens again to anywhere near that kind of extent, not much you can do for her.
Plagiarism is also not well policed at many universities. Here's an anecdote that, as I see it, is not unrepresentative: the university I work at, like many colleges, has an academic honesty board that is tasked with policing cases of academic dishonesty. Given the size of the university, it's likely that there are around a thousand instances of plagiarism per year. A few years ago, every single case the review board heard one semester came from a single professor who taught two 40-person classes. Out of his 80 students, he reported something like 15 of them.
Since you're a TA, this is something you need to discuss with the professor you're working under. But if it were me, I'd say you should at least make this girl rewrite the assignment, preferably with some sort of grade penalty. And you should also find out if there is some university-wide reporting system that you can make a record of this case in: since we created such a system a couple years ago, we discovered a number of serial plagiarizers who plagiarized in every single class across several years. Apparently they assumed that they could just plead ignorance to anyone who actually caught them, claiming that each case was "the first time they'd ever done this."
I've never written or seen a paper where sections that are longer than a page are copied and cited and I really can't imagine how it would even be your paper at that point unless the paper in question is ridiculously long. For the OP, we don't know the rules for your university or the guidelines the professor set, but given that you're a TA I would think that you don't even have the authority to decide what to do and should just hand it over the professor along with what you told us about the writing and the student.
I've had students hand in a 5-page paper where over 60% of the paper is a cut-and-paste job from the assigned reading.
Got through Native American Relgions like that. Pass-Fail like a motherfucker.
Every professor I know with students from China or Taiwan complains about this; they're not really taught to do, they're taught to know. There's no emphasis on discussion in classes, etc. It's a leftover cultural trait from Confucian-style education. It's one reason why Chinese corporations send their engineers, researchers and scientists to western universities for training, because at a Chinese university they won't be taught to create their own ideas, just reflect back the ideas of respected experts.
She almost certainly has no idea how strongly that sort of thing is frowned upon in the west.
Not even limited to the east. One of the books I've got laying around, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman (suggested by someone on the boards; thanks to whoever that was), talked about how Feynman went down to Brazil once to see what kind of education system they had, and he said they weren't even teaching. The professor would just read off a term right out of the textbook, the students would repeat it in their notes word for word, memorize the exact phrase and that's it. All it took was the same factoid rephrased into a differently-worded sentence to utterly stifle them. They could tell you for instance, 'Water is made up of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom', but they could not tell you 'Two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom combine to form water'.
I'm not up on how Brazil has gotten on since then, but the point is it can literally get to those lengths.
EDIT: ...and five seconds of Googling says Brazil hasn't progressed from that. And, more pertinent to your case, Ballman, India is much the same way.
Even though student’s caught cheating willfully or unknowingly can be expelled, my school at least for my student’s has given them a zero for the particular assignment and made the students sit through a meeting with the assistant dean of the faculty.
I can understand the empathy, I’ve had it myself for students that try really hard and may have unknowingly screwed up which is somewhat understandable for citations as many majors never tell students anything about how to properly cite.
Due to your looking the things up online I’m just curious if your school has a policy in regards to Turnitin.com. I’ve never used it myself but all my classes mention it in the course outline, with almost every teacher discussing it in the first lecture and several making students sign waivers for every assignment.
I don't know about you, but here the policy for TAs is always to take it to the prof and let him/her deal with it. If I were the prof though, I'd just let her rewrite it, because to get a heavily penalized mark in a graduate course would basically be the equivalent of failing. (Or at least, up here in Canada it would be.)
I'm a little reminded of Feynman's description of Brazil's educational system in his first autobiography, though. I believe he described a situation where he asked some students to explain a phenomenon, knowing that the answer involved exactly what they'd been studying. He marveled at how no one could answer it--though of course they had mastered the relevant equations and could recall them immediately.
It's weird, though, because to me this is the very antithesis of engineering. There's no use whatsoever in memorizing something you don't understand; everything you design as an engineer will be at least a little bit new (and all the best jobs involve working on completely new things).
I had classmates who thought in this way, too, and they generally kicked my ass on the exams. I sometimes wished I could do that, but as strange as it may sound I (an engineer) have no mind for figures and equations. I can't even remember the quadratic formula. I had to formulate everything in terms of relationships and "what does this tell me about the world" rather than symbols. An equation I didn't understand intuitively would fall right out of my head three minutes after I saw it.
Mostly this sucked, although I can remember one time when I managed to solve an exam problem in a way completely unrelated to what we had been studying without even realizing it. The next day the professor put it up on the board and walked everyone through the problem the way I'd solved it.
[Edit: Beat'd on the Feynman.]
Strong medicine for China's journals
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He did it because you don't need fractions to get a passing grade in earlier years, if I can pass without one piece of knowledge, why should I get that piece?
I’m ashamed to admit that I only learned, or was forced to learn, the difference between their, there and they’re on this forum at the age of 25, I’m pretty sure it was there somewhere in my mid-school books, I just didn’t bother.
Added: A good meassure used to gauge a university's competence is to count the times papers from that university have been cited, this way you know that someone found that paper to be useful.
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And coming from an english major, sometimes that shit be tough to remember.
Definitely take it to the prof.
Can you plagiarize yourself?
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I'm no engineer but as an academic tutor I run into this constantly. PC Basics is required for every single associates degree at the college I'm going to and very few students want to learn, they just have me read them the instructions in the book step by step to get the assignments in. The problem is that when they end becoming accountants or nurses or whatever if they can't work a program as basic as Excel, they're going to be in a world of shit.
I've been in 2 classes so far where memorization was key, and thankfully only two, because how is that valued at all? You've just wasted your time in class, not learned anything.
When memorization was the only way you could often guarantee your hanging on to a particular factoid, sure, you needed it. It still is in a lot of less-developed countries where storytelling has historically been a way to pass down knowledge (what other way did they have?) Here, now? Everyone on this board has the exact same Internet as a source and we all know it. We need to remember something, we just pop in a couple of search terms and scroll down until we see something familiar.
Yes you can. The issue here isn't trying to pass off someone else's work as your own, but trying to pass off old work as new.
Although it would make "publish or perish" much easier to survive if you could just copy-n-paste the same paper a dozen different times.
It gets a little worse than that; the reason such systems persist is that you are actively penalized if you diverge from simply reproducing notes. Examinations test for the ability to quote from an extremely broad set of reading while under time pressure; because this is an effective (if dubiously useful) test for diligence and discipline, it is relied on very heavily for university entrance. This signal thus becomes self-perpetuating: because it is relied on so heavily for university entrance, students invest their effort in training themselves to quote from memory extensively. Because students do so, there is no need for universities to even consider applications from students who put effort toward other things instead.
And because that is how the system is, pre-university and high school teachers will penalize students for irrelevance if they wander off the well-beaten trail. It's not their fault, the vast majority of their students will go to local universities which don't want students who can't rapidly memorize and then cite from memory.
Okay. All this said, I had five years of students from the PRC handing me essays and asking for editing. From my anecdotal experience: (1) the jarring transitions going quoting-badgrammar-quoting-badgrammar are common. My completely evidence-free speculation is that this is because Chinese and English are sufficiently different that the (non-native-speaking) reader's sense that something is wrong and qualitatively different just misfires; I know I certainly ended up do the quoting thing when writing Chinese essays. And getting back an essay covered in red ???? scribbled everywhere, because the end result was well and truly incoherent, even if I didn't realize it at all when writing. You see a few words you recognize from what little you've learnt, and then your mind fills in the gaps of what you think the other words say, and you don't know how to rephrase the ideas so you quote, and when you start quoting extensively from a misunderstanding, the end result just becomes ????.
(2) the liberal use of copypasta tends to suggest understanding but an inability to express it in English. At least, it did for the people who came to me for translation. If you have time, consider asking some probing questions about the essay matter. Even in Chinese traditional education, quoting badly is not considered desirable.
This. This exactly.
I've tutored/edited the papers of ESL college students and...yeah. I've seen some extremely intelligent students just learning English not "get" the way our papers are meant to be written. To be honest, sometimes the citation syntax is confusing to me, and I've been writing papers since 1852.
I can empathize with the mindset of "it's the student's responsibility to learn what is expected of the student" but if it's a choice between torching an ESL student's career or giving them the benefit of the doubt and using the opportunity to guide them for future papers, perhaps even pointing them toward some of the college's resources or recommending a tutor, I'd go with the latter
and academic institutions actively utilize searchable databases and the internet in general to make sure students do not plagiarize work
inevitably, it will be impossible to not plagiarize on some subjects.
the more narrow an assigned paper's question or subject or thesis is, the more it becomes likely that students will simply run out of new ways to say things that have already been said.
I think it's unlikely they'll ever reproduce more than a sentence or two in terms of text, and so long as the ideas are original, there's no problem.
On contrast, that class you took in Russian Literature during the Revolution is only going to be useful for arguments on the internet, so having to look it up won't be a huge deal. It will still be there, it just won't be as fully networked and you'll have to be able to come at it from a certain angle to really remember it.
The information age just takes good old Information Processing Theory and expands the definition of weak networking to include things we can google.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
This isn't the case of a citation that has the wrong syntax or messing up how to quote something.
Forgive, but don't forget. Prepare an official letter describing the event and what you told the student, sign it, and have the student sign it. Have it added to her file. Tell your prof and department chair (informally) about the event. If the student is honest, it won't happen again and that's that. If she is not, next time she plagiarizes she'll get caught, and with a signed letter confirming that she did it before, knew it was wrong and was given a chance to never do it again, she'll be out and will deserve it.
Since you're only a TA, the first thing you have to make sure is that you have authority when it comes to plagiarism. There's a chance whatever prof is in charge of you is supposed to deal with those. If he isn't, you still want to tell him about it before taking any action.
Second, plagiarism is widespread in term papers. You should expect to catch several every semester or there's a good chance there's plagiarism sneaking by you.
On to the meat of this topic. Unfortunately many "innocent" plagiarizers will continue this behavior course after course, which is why we need the record keeping. Every school policy I'm familiar with has a graduated penalty system because of that. Usually a variety of the following:
1st offence: 0 on assignment.
2nd offence: 0 in course.
3rd offence: expulsion.
If so, I advise you to report. If the student hasn't plagiarized before, she'll receive an appropriate punishment and more importantly be on record. If she has plagiarized before and been officially reprimanded, then she's got it coming.
If on the other hand you're at a "zero tolerance" (1st offence = expulsion) school, I would advise sweeping it under the rug. Have the student come to your office hours and have The Talk. Then assign a make-up paper twice in length and be done with it.