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August 28, 2004
Plagiarism
Mark Steen is, of course, the god of catching plagiarists in our department. However, after teaching a summer session of 191, I have a rather unique case. I assigned two papers for the six week course: the first was a very specific question on an ethical issue and the second was a question related to an ethical theory covered. In the case of two student athletes I noticed a discernable difference in the quality of their first and second papers. The first student wrote first an eloquent paper on abortion with well-documented footnotes and excellent philosophic and stylistic content. His second paper was a shoddy attempt at discussing utilitarianism. The language was much more informal and gone were the footnotes. The second student also wrote a thoughtful first paper on abortion, but then wrote a paper of much lower quality for the second assignment. The difference was more marked in the case of the first student, but still noticeable in the case of the second. In both cases I mined the papers extensively looking for signs of plagiarism. However, I couldn't find any. These weren't papers that contained anything google could find, and there weren't abrupt sylistic changes, changes in footnotes, or anything else that would indicate they had been taken from a paper mill or been tailored from some other paper. So, I began to wonder if this was a case of the first papers being written by the students' tutors, or something else. And then I began to wonder if anyone else has run into cases like this, and what sort of response would be appropriate for future findings. Usually, when I teach over the course of the semester, the papers aren't a big surprise. Like Mark suggests, when you know your students, you can often tell (especially over the course of a few assignments) what their works is like. But, in teaching such a short course, I was a bit baffled at first and wondered if the intensity coupled with the athletic schedule had led them to turn in lower quality work, or if it was something else.
Posted by jwollam at August 28, 2004 2:56 PM
Comments
Proposed solution:
If possible under the rules and within deadlines, ask your students to remake their poor essays. Say you are giving them a new chance.
Posted by: Tony Marmo at August 29, 2004 10:00 AM
In the future, when you have any suspicions about an athlete plagiarizing you should contact the student's academic advisor. They will be on your side when it comes to these issues.
In this case, I'm sure it wasn't the tutor, since I was the only one tutoring athletes in your class, and no one I was tutoring wrote on abortion while I was around. I think this might have been a genuine case of old-fashioned plagiarism, with a paper that isn't online but was either purchased an old-fashioned way or was passed down from team member to team member. Email me if you want to discuss this further.
They football team has no athletic schedule during the first half of the summer. That's why they encourage them to take two courses at once and then spend half the day every day in the computer lab or study lounge doing work with the aid of a tutor. The other teams have less support and structure, but I don't think they have any athletic commitments. I think it was just someone who didn't want to do the work.
Posted by: Jeremy Pierce at August 29, 2004 7:10 PM
Tony, in my experience most students who are given a chance to redo a bad paper will not do it, especially in a summer course when everything is so compact. The only way it works is if you refuse to give it a grade, and I think that would only be possible if it is below passing as it is. I didn't get the sense from her description that it was.
Posted by: Jeremy Pierce at August 29, 2004 7:16 PM
I have given one generic suggestion, for I do not know the case concretely. But usually you can uncover one cheater by making him/her to re-write an essay. The point is if he/she has made a good work once, he/she is in theory able to make another good work. If you get one good and one bad work, with a radical quality difference like the one described, from the same student and if he/she does not transform the bad into a good one, then you have exposed the whole dishonesty.
The main point is, methinks, to show that not only the students performed badly, but they still have not developed the capacity to distinguish the quality of the one essay and the other. If they could at least see it, they obviously would not deliver a second and significantly inferior essay. They would either make the second not so inferior to the first work, or buy two works from the same ghost writer.
Posted by: Tony Marmo at August 29, 2004 9:29 PM