[edi581] Plagiarism article
- From: "Deb Helberg" <debs3_98@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: edi581@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2003 18:54:02 +0000
Hi everyone!
As I was reading through the articles that were on Angel about plagiarism, I
guess I had never really thought about this issue in such depth. One of my
examples is similar to Kelly's. There was a girl in my senior year methods
courses in college who was in a group with me on a project we were working
on. We worked really hard on this assignment, it had taken us forever to
finish. Later on in the semester for another course we had an assingment due
that we had to work on individually. She took a whole chunk of our project
and handed it in as her own. It was all the same information, in the same
order and everything. I ended up saying something to someone else in our
class about it and somehow the professor for the course found out and she
had to do her assignment again, for less credit. Initially I felt bad about
it but she did copy right from our project and passed it off as her own.
This is a violation of copyright restrictions because she handed in work
that wasn't hers and passed it off as her own.
Another example I saw while substitute teaching. A student was working on a
research project and even after both the teacher and myself had made it VERY
clear that anything they found on line in their research needed to be put in
their own words, he copied and pasted onto a blank document. Then he handed
it in as his own work. I took his paper from the stack of sheets and left a
little note on the paper explaining what I had seen him do. He denied it at
first but eventually fessed up and had to do the paper again. Obviously
copying and pasting information from a source and then handing it in as your
own is against the copyright laws.
Both of these situations could have been easily avoided. All these people
had to do was put information in their own words and not taken the easy way
out. I think a lot of times students want the easy way out so they just
think it will be easier to cut and paste. I don't think they realize that
inevitably they are going to get caught and punished for what they did. A
little more work on their part and they wouldn't have had a problem.
In order to minimize the amount of plagiarism that occurs in the classroom,
I would first do a lesson on what it means to plagiarize and the
conseguences if someone is caught doing it. Then while the students are
doing research, I will monitor them as well as I can. I would also encourage
the students to use a variety of sources, not just the internet. Personally
I think it's much harder to plagiarize from a book because there is more
writing involved...I would much rather write the information in my own words
(shorter).
Obviously there are going to be students who copy things and try to pass
them off as their own but we, as teachers, need to find ways to discourage
this practice.
-Deb
P.S. Hope everyone has a wonderful and safe Thanksgiving!!
"Some love lasts a lifetime. True love lasts forever."
-Author Unknown
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