Ok, I had a kid plagiarise hard core. The whole first page of his paper is blatantly not his work. I spent a while freaking out because I *hate* dealing with this kind of thing.
I asked the kid to stay in during break and said, “So… what is your favorite work by D.H. Lawrence? Kate Millett?” because he had referenced them in the first page. He said he didn’t know who they were. I asked him where he did his research then and he said, “Oh! Wikipedia! I wanted to make sure I wrote a good background on the literary criticism before I got into this book.” *face palm* I explained to him that large scale quoting of other work is plagiarism and illegal and that he has to fail this assignment. He nodded and just said ok.
I can’t give him a zero. He’s an idiot, but it doesn’t look like he meant to be doing something bad. I’ll give him a 50% and call his mother to explain.
Called mom. She understands and is being very supportive. Yay!
There was a deal in the news a year or two back where it turned out that a HS student who had won a major prize for a paper had plagiarized most of it. And the interesting part was that she claimed she had no idea that you weren’t supposed to do it that way. Someone had explained to her about doing research, and she’d looked up a bunch of interesting stuff and compiled it, and she’d somehow never gotten the message about integrating it and restating it in your own words with your own opinions.
It might not have been intentional malfeasance. He might just not know that you’re supposed to do it differently.
Interesting. I’m now especially confused at why Google didn’t find more of his phrases.
maybe, in the future, you should start the year with a unit on plagarism, where the students have to tell you, in their own words, what it is and why it’s wrong.
A couple of random thoughts, while I take a break from studying for my finals:
re: Wikipedia – you might want to generally let your kids know that some universities have begun instituting a policy against allowing Wikipedia as a direct resource for papers. While the relative merits of the information on Wikipedia is at question, you could point out that there are often links and reference lists at the bottom of Wikipedia entries that give good hints at resources for accepted research and reference material.
re: plagiarism detection – one of my grad school professors requires that all our case studies be submitting via a site called TurnItIn. (www.turnitin.com) If you check out that site, you can see a little about how it works. From my experience, colleges and universities are using it, more than secondary education schools. Preparing kids for facing something like this might not be a bad idea.
re: plagiarism policies – GGU’s “Avoiding Plagiarism” document:
http://www.ggu.edu/university_library/research/citing_sources/avoiding_plagiarism
It includes an example of an unacceptable paraphrasing attempt, and its acceptable version. (And provides its own references at the bottom.)
This is a pdf from GGU on “Academy Integrity”:
http://www.ggu.edu/student_services/classroom_guidance_student_resources/attachment/Student+Guide+to+Academic+Integrity.pdf
And finally, this is what they provide to students for help in citing their sources:
http://www.ggu.edu/university_library/research/citing_sources
Those all provided if you thought it would be good to give your students examples of how a local university views the subject. Just sharing what’s at my fingertips. Now, back to work.
starting with plagiarism sounds like a good idea, followed by a good talk on how at least part of what they read on-line is simply made-up stuff.
back before cut and paste it was easier to just make shit up instead of copying it out of someplace else.
everyone seems to think what the see on-line is true. even “grown-ups” get fooled into thinking lies are real. the skill of critical reading is so important.