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Vent! Did you know this is plagiarism?
It's paper grading season.
I never thought I'd have to teach this concept. I just assumed they knew it. It's something I learned in the 5th grade but my students, for some reason, haven't. In fact, after I taught this, a full third of my senior level college students admitted that they'd be unintentionally plagiarizing their entire college careers---an no one had ever said anything to them about it!
OK- let's say that Jones, 2010, said "The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain."
My students will copy and paste, add a citation, then just change 1-2 words of an entire paragraph or two (not putting it in direct quotes) and assume they're good. So, for the above, they'd write:
The rain in Spain falls predominantly on the plain (Jones, 2010).
That's not writing a paper---that's copying and pasting a paper and then changing a word or two and passing the rest of the words off as your own.You can't do that (and that's not just my weird rule---that's a general plagiarism rule and what Cooks' Illustrated just got in trouble for doing.)
Did you know you couldn't do that? If so, how/when did you learn that? If not, are you shocked that you can't do that (some of my students are) I feel badly for my students who have been doing this for years. Some of them feel like (rightly so) THEY'VE been cheated out of an education. Now they're seniors, they realize they've never actually written a paper, which has to be pretty disheartening.
Re: Vent! Did you know this is plagiarism?
Yes, I knew you couldn't do that. I've always known that you needed to write things in your own words or cite them.
I once had a student write a practice editorial for me for journalism class. She copied and pasted things directly from the internet. For an opinion piece.
She copied and pasted things directly from the internet. For an opinion piece.
Ugh. Seriously? I know opinion pieces can be a challenge to write, but to do so you should at least have...I don't know...an opinion!
My personal favorite was my "Jesus made me cheat." student. When I was a TA, my students had a dumb kind of throw-away 5 point assignment. They had to name a group they were a member of, then tell us 5 terms that are used by group members as an illustration of how language can be a symbol blahblahblah.
Not only did she not do the assignment- she just copied and pasted the mission statement from a pro-life website onto a page, then handed it in. When I confronted her, she said, "Of course it's the same as the website. Jesus hates abortion, so it's not surprising that he put the same divinely inspired words into my fingers and through my keyboard that he did to the author of that website" (except she said it like a petulant 3rd grader, complete with foot stomping.) When she saw that wasn't working, she said, "Well maybe I'll just have to report you then because it's clear that you're persecuting me because of my religious and political beliefs!" I just laughed and told her, 1., I could care less what group she chose- just do the assignment and 2., don't presume to know my belief system.
Thankfully the professor backed me 100% and, as she herself was a strong Christian, she gave the girl a serious (professional) chewing out for daring to use religion as an excuse for plagiarising (essentially blaspheming to cover a lie or something like that.)
Or maybe we were both wrong, and Jesus did make her cheat.
I was taught the difference between when you need to use a direct quote and cite it vs when you paraphrase the source and cite it at least by freshman year of high school, if not in grade school. I can't believe seniors in college didn't know that.
Looking on the bright side, at least your students knew they had to cite the original source. If they're using multiple sources, they still have to decide what ideas (of other people) to blend together to coherently support their argument, instead of just copying paragraphs will-nilly.
Sadly, this is a foreign concept for many of them, too (especially the blending part.) Only my very best students know how to do this, though some of them are really good at it.
While it's frustrating some times, I do like that I get to teach them how to do these things in addition to teaching content. Although they may curse me for my class being so "difficult" (learning content and process) at least I know they leave my classroom better prepared for whatever they'll be doing next (other classes, work, etc.). Plus, I have to hand it to them---most really are willing to try very hard to learn this stuff and do get much better over the course of the semester, so I'm pretty proud of them
We learned about plagairism in 6th grade. My teacher that year [I was in a junior high/high school system, so 6th grade was still elementary] was really strict about it, and it stuck with me. Going through AP English too, my teachers stressed the importance of using your own words and citing every direct quote. Thinking about that gives me a headache. :P