Here's a little tid-bit.
I caught one of my students plagiarising this week. She is an enthusiastic C student who always participates, always turns in work, and usually contributes positively to class discussions. Some of her skills are below average (whatever that means), but I was sad to find that she had cut-and-pasted half of her essay from something she found online. It was painfully obvious, and I found the essay (using Dogpile) in about 90 seconds.
On the recommendation of my more compassionate master-teacher, I printed a copy of the entire essay, stapled it to the student's paper, wrote "see me" on the front, and handed it back to her in class with the other students' papers. I let her consider the "see me" for most of the class, and once I had broken the class into groups to work on a project, I called her outside. She was obviously scared. I asked her if she knew what this was about. She said yes. I asked her if she knew that I could give her an F for the grading period and call her parents. She said yes. I told her that I was extremely disappointed and that I expected much more from her, but that since she had never done anything like this before, I would give her a chance. I told her to write a new paper, turn it in on Monday for 75% credit.
Was I too soft?
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2 comments:
Were you too soft? Maybe you were, but the truth is I'd probably end up doing something similar. Yes, plagiarism is serious, and there should be consequences. In this case the consequence was that she'll lose 25% of her grade when she actually completes the assignment. That seems like it could be a fair bargain depending on how much you would normally deduct for a standard late assignment.
I would have given the student another chance to complete assignment also. For me, what's more important is whether or not a student is developing the skills necessary to do an assignment. 25% off seems like enough to teach the student not to plagiarise (in your class at least). Perhaps having the student write a letter to her parents informing them of the poor decision she made would be an additional consequence you could add on to the 25% off. Maybe even notifying the student's other teachers of something like this would be effective.
I really wonder what other people think about this.
I agree largely with the above comment, particularly the part about speaking to her parents about it.
I once had a professor remark that plagiarism is the highest crime in academia. Not only because you are stealing ideas from another, when there were so little ways for those ideas to be protected, but mainly, that if everyone is stealing ideas from one another, there is no force for new ideas.
Too soft, I don't think so. Considering the philosophy above, you did the perfect thing. To simply give her a zero would instill her with the fear of doing it again, sure. But it would sacrifice the assignment in question from ever forcing her to truely analyze what you were having them look at in the first place.
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