You Know Who You Are

 

[Note:  Identifying information has been omitted/altered.  Much as you may deserve it, I do not now purpose to embarrass you any further.]

Not all learning is accomplished through the formal education process.

It is axiomatic that students are expected to read and understand the Syllabus document of the course, handed out on the first day of the semester.   Some of my colleagues do not go into the detail that I do when they prepare their course syllabi, but the fact that my Syllabus is in fact so detailed should be a very strong indication that I mean business.  You are expected to read -- and heed -- the information in the Syllabus (and in any other course handouts distributed by the professor).  For my part, I am expected to deliver on the representations I make in the Syllabus.

And it is no less axiomatic that you, as a student, are obligated to conform to the College Policy on Academic Integrity.  The Policy is printed at length in the College Bulletin; the fact that my course Syllabus gives the URL link to the Policy makes your failure to adhere to it all the less excusable.

In addition to the foregoing, my course Syllabus explicitly and plainly states (and I quote):

"Students who turn in a plagiarized Term Paper are subject to a failing grade of "F" for the semester."

That is why your final grade was "F."  You submitted a plagiarized Term Paper.  I have some very damning well nigh incontrovertible evidence that the Term Paper you submitted originated at one of those term paper mill websites.

So now, you come to me with all of your sob stories about how you had to deal with some pressures from various sources, how you had a family emergency that required you to go back to your country, and how you will now need to retake a course, even though you marched in your gown and mortarboard at the graduation ceremony a few days ago.

But you made a decision to submit a plagiarized work, and I caught you.  Understand that you have insulted my intelligence.  Understand that, notwithstanding the anonymity of the process, I now need to impose the promised sanction upon you or else I will be a smacked toochas with no credibility in future semesters.  And understand that you, and you alone, placed me into a situation where I am now compelled to take this action against you.

In addition to your failing grade, I can now pursue disciplinary charges against you.  I'll forgo that option, however, because it would only consume my time and yours and that of the College Judicial Officer; time that could be better spent by me in my scholarly research or my law practice, and better spent by you studying for the course you will need to retake.

I have made my decision.  You have the right to appeal it to the Assistant Department Chair in the first instance, and from thence to the Scholastic Standards Committee, but, as I have said, the documentary evidence against you is overwhelming.  [And if you elect to play the race card, I am prepared to demonstrate that the penalty I am now imposing upon you is identical to the penalty I imposed upon a student a year ago, in a similar incident where the student was of my own ethnic background.  I am quite evenhanded about these things.].

And so, you have nobody but yourself to blame for your current predicament.

Inspiration or Plagiarism?

Because the courses I teach are designated as "Writing-Intensive," the Term Paper requirement is unavoidable, for both student and professor.

So, having assigned the Term Papers, I now have about a week remaining to grade them before the grade submissions deadline arrives. [Actually, it is less than a week because our great holiday of Shavuot, commemorating our receipt of G-d's Torah at Mount Sinai, will soon be upon us.]. This, therefore, will be my project for today and tomorrow (and possibly Wednesday).

The premise of Western Civilization is that we are part of a great continuum, whereby all we have is derived from those who preceded us, and, likewise, what we do will be the basis of those who will follow us. For this reason, proper scholarship dictates that the intellectual ideas and precedents we apply be acknowledged and cited. Indeed, the law review article of mine that was published a few weeks ago cites sources going back to King Hammurabi.

It is a bit of a stretch to expect law review level scholarship from undergraduate level students. Nevertheless, I do require my students to give proper citation in their Term Papers, and citational errors are viewed with greater concern than some misapplications of the spelling and grammar conventions which greatly alarmed the battleaxes who were my junior and senior high school English teachers.

Of course, I take a very strident attitude to the outright plagiarism involved in purchased term papers. These are the ones where a sentence placed in the Google search engine hits some verbatim documents. I had graded all of four Term Papers and found yet another Internet term paper vendor (whose name will not be noted in this posting, lest the site be given free advertising).

Sometimes you just know when a Term Paper is not kosher. A few years ago, I read a sentence which used the word "bulwark." The word did not strike me as one typical of the vocabulary of today's undergraduate students in America, so I googled just a 4-word fragment from the sentence and immediately found verbatim term papers on 3 different Internet sites.

Approximately one-third of my students do not speak English as their first language. It has come to the point where spelling and grammatical errors are encouraging signs because such butchering of the English language indicates that the work is the students' own. A perfectly-written Term Paper by one who was not drilled with the English spelling and grammar in the manner typical for my Baby Boomer generation in America is a waving red flag.

And, of course, I spot-check the actual citations. Some of them are ill-written, but at least I can find them. Some of the citations cite secondary and tertiary sources when they should be citing primary sources (e.g., the cited article from the New York Times discusses IRS Notice 2008-83, when the student should go to the IRS website and access Notice 2008-83 directly).

Some of the students just string together direct quotations from their sources. I can't gig them for plagiarism because they cite the sources from which the quotes were derived. It isn't very creative writing, but at least it is honest writing.


Query: Just where is that fuzzy demarcation of where inspiration ends and plagiarism begins? Does stringing together a bunch of quotes constitute a creative inspiration? Does changing a few words here and there in the quotation constitute a new work?

Along such lines, listen to the popular Neapolitan song "O Sole Mio" and compare it with Elvis Presley's "It's Now or Never."

Was "O Sole Mio" inspiration for Elvis, or did Elvis plagiarize the melody?