1. Give students this and two minutes to decide in groups or pairs if the kid below is guily of plagiarism:
My kid's sentence:2. Inform students that this is clearly plagiarism and ask them to determine an appropriate punishment in their groups.
He intentionally heightened the implausibility when the characters contradict each other a myriad of times making it even harder to identify the difference between perception and realitySparkNotes:
He intentionally heightens this impossibility when his characters contradict themselves several times in the collection of stories, rendering the truth of any statement suspect.My kid claims he didnt plagiarize - what do you think?
3. Tell them about the true punishment in an American high school - the student got a zero for the entire 2.5 page paper even though that was the only offending sentence. Students need to know that this is standard in American high schools. Ask a few students to comment on this.
4. Tell students that in university the consequences for the same offense would be far more severe. Here are some actual quotes, advice people gave the kid's dad (I used copy and paste, so check the spelling before composing a handout for your students):
Talk to him and explain about citing information and how important it is. My friend got suspended for three semesters up at Dartmouth for not citing an idea. He's lucky he got caught now. The penalties are much worse in college.Teacher needs to discuss the last one. It came from a lawyer who actually suggested suing the school district! Tell students the argument won't work with you because you are teaching them right now: Plagiarize one sentence and you get a zero. Do it twice and fail the course (or whatever your rules are).This will teach him a great lesson and he's lucky he got caught early. My friend got caught plagarizing at UCLA and he got thrown out.
He is being done a favor, being taught what is plagerism early on. That he denies it is plagarism is troubling. You need to have a serious talk with him that what he did is completely unacceptable, even if he got away with it many times in the past. Once he gets to college, the consequences will be much more severe.
He should be made to understand that changing a few words doesn't make the sentence his own.
Your son plagiarized. I hope this doesn't affect his college admissions. He really has no other choice but to admit it and try to make amends with the teacher. Hopefully colleges don't need to hear about this offense.
The only argument I can see that might save your son, is that this teacher failed to properly instruct the class what constitutes plagiarism. Your son was left to fend for himself,did the best he could with such limited instruction and the school should consider reprimanding this delinquent teacher.
Well this must be the first good post you've written in well over a year. If you start writing better posts like this one, your blog might actually become popular instead of being a page rank booster for eslgo
Posted by: your mama at June 1, 2006 1:22 AMMama, you confuse me. If every post is bad why have you been reading for the past year?
As for popularity, This site is almost as popular as ESL go. ESL go sees around 1,500 unique visitors/day while this blog gets a little more than 1,000/day.
Anyway, thanks for the backhanded compliment, a classy move (for you anyway).
Posted by: James Trotta at June 2, 2006 4:26 PMSelling links on your blog is pretty crappy. Now it really is clear that you are not really interested in blogging
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=8648
Posted by: your mama at June 4, 2006 7:00 AMActually, I think taking on advertisers proves that I am very serious about blogging. This is certainly more than a hobby for me.
Posted by: James Trotta at June 8, 2006 9:35 AMGood posting James.
This is an issue that I've encountered numerous times in my courses. I hate to even waste class time addressing this (grad students), but I also know that if I don't I will end up returning someone's final assignment and giving them an incomplete until they "fix" it.
The following link is a tutorial that is rather long and involved, but it does a good job at probing the grey areas in this topic. It could also be used as a launching pad for further discussion.
By the way, at Indiana University the general policy is failure of the course (only the course) for plagiarism. However, I have found that many instructors just make students redo the assignment with some sort of penalty. I think that this is much more reasonable.
Keep up the good work.
Posted by: Dan at June 12, 2006 9:27 PMIt would have helped if I actually provided the link that I promised :)
http://www.indiana.edu/%7Eistd/overview.html
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