Plagiarism in real life

[jnbmoore]

http://www.thekansascitychannel.com/...28-170131.html

Students Plagerize
Teacher gives them Zeros
"My darling child doesn't even know what plagerism is"
School raises kids grades
Teacher quits

I'm glad she stood her ground, but what did the kids learn? Steal and the person who catches you loses???

Bridgette

[jenninca]

I'm not even going to comment. I could go off about this one for a while.

Cindy
who is seeing red and muttering about some parents today

[jnbmoore]

Found a fuller story

She said, `Mom, I don't think I am an A student. I did that (project) the same way I did everything my whole school career.

No wonder there is so much of this on Epinions. No one will admit this is a problem

looks like they lost a great teacher


Bridgette

[rich2003dm]

My initial reaction was to be incensed at the acceptance of plagiarism by these students.

Then I remembered that I'm a Dad, and I recalled some of the experiences I've had with my kids and their homework assignments and projects.

Did the article say how old or what grade these kids were in? I don't recall and I'm too damned old and lazy to go back and check.

If the kids are still young, there is a fine line between research and plagiarism. To them, finding the right stuff and understanding it is the whole battle. Paraphrasing what they found seems needless and kind of silly.

It's not so much laziness or fraud, but the thought that the source can probably say it better than they ever could.

Rich

[jnbmoore]

First article didn't say
Second article-- High School Sophomores.. 10th graders -- 14,15 year olds

[Cynon]

Wow I say “power to her”, she is completely right in her position, and it’s too bad the school board is sending the wrong message to the students. You would think that a high school (I’m assuming it’s a high school since most school don’t have a biology classes until high school, but I guess it could be a junior high school also) would have a higher restriction when it comes to plagiarism, and what kind of high school student doesn’t know what plagiarism means? I knew what that word meant in elementary. I guess they will be forced to find out about plagiarism when they get kicked out of college for it. This is a real shame, I think the other teachers at the school should band together and get that teacher back and have the mark decision reverted back to what it once was.

Rob

[hadassahchana[$]]

Best quote from the first story:

Parents claimed that their children didn't know what plagiarism was.

I don't know whether to be more disgusted by the students, or horrified that any parent would admit in public that his or her child did not know the meaning of the word 'plagiarism' , or was unclear on the concept.

I am just gobsmacked by this one.


Cindy

[pisces]

I wrote an epinions review on this very subject sometime last year. I think there were some people who were very unhappy with my permissive attitude towards it.

The question I have is why give the kid a zero? You get a zero if you turned nothing in. Kids that don't even bother showing up get zeros. This kid turned something in. I would say at least a one or two. But not zero.

Plagiarism is so endemic these days. I don't know where half the stuff I'm seeing on the Internet is coming from.

So, you are going to have kids cutting and pasting their way to class reports and term papers from stuff they found, which in and and of itself, is of unknown origin.

Even if I really did believe that this was the most grievous sin in the world, give these kids a break. They made a mistake. If you are not going to make a mistake when you are young and in school, when are you going to be allowed to make mistakes? As an adult?

These are kids. I can accept the fact that they didn't know. You pick your battles and this Mother has decided that there are far worse things to scold an otherwise great kid for.

[theeye]

Originally posted by pisces
They made a mistake. If you are not going to make a mistake when you are young and in school, when are you going to be allowed to make mistakes? As an adult?

I don't think anyone suggested that they ought not to be "allowed to make a mistake", only that, once they make one, they ought to be held properly accountable for it.

Makes sense to me.

Just what exactly does a (non-zero) grade mean -- and why would one want one -- if one needn't do any original work for it?

[mtbat]

The district's superintendent saw the papers, agreed that they were plagiarized and that some students knew that they had plagiarized.

District officials are now considering whether one assignment should count for half of an entire grade, Antonia reported.

They knew what they were doing-they deserved the Zeros.

The school board was out of line changing the grades. The parents were idiots for defending the actions of their lying cheating children.

what's next? "oh gee officer, he didn't understand that robbing a bank and killing the teller was wrong-it's really the teller's fault for just being there"

Or "it's the guns fault"

Or "it's the Banks fault"

Cheating is cheating and no breaks should be given. I've been taught in many different classes in both High school and College how to properly quote or paraphrase information and how to give proper credit. Ignorance of the "law" is no excuse.

Fridai

[pluckyduck]

"Gobsmacked" is an awfully good way to express how I feel about this one, thank you Cindy.

Whenever I find myself going over a story, I try to back up and look at all the elements. Most people aren't plain crazy, which is what the school board and the parents look like to me...so what could possibly be going on here?

Allow me to argue the other side, which I don't support, just so I can try to understand it better.

If this is high school, and this is a college competitive crew, the effect of a bad grade in Biology could make a serious impact on which college a kid ends up in. Essentially, the kids could be paying for this mistake for many years to come. Bad grade in biology, lesser choice in colleges, possibly loss of scholarship money and chain reaction from there on out. That's a steep price for a bunch of kids who may not even be old enough to be trusted with a drivers license.

..........

.........

..........

10 minutes later. That's it. That's all I can come up with.

OFCOL! "oh for crying out loud", my new pet acronym

You know what I swear I would kill for at work? Young kids who take responsibility for their actions. Do you know how hard that is to find? They exist, and I have them, but I have to weed through a whole lot of crap to get them. The kids are being harmed far more by parents who allow them to blame shift on the teacher, of all things. What do you think those kids will be like when they come and try to work for me or any other employer?? What lesson have they learned here?

Hard_to_pleasewrote an Epinion called "I'm about to fire your child" -- one of the first Epinions I ever read as a new member, and one of the reasons I got hooked into Eps. While we never allow linking of Epinions in The Soapbox, I'm throwing that rule out of the window for just this one time, to allow Mark to join our discussion here. Any objections?

Wake up, parents! The values that you instill in your children are more important than the college they go to or any job skill they ever pick up.


Andrea
wondering how the hell we got to this point

[magenta321]

Ok, here's the non-judgemental version of what I see:

The children found appropriate sources. They were lazy. They did what children everywhere do. They cheated. I did it too. Most of you probably did it. Yes, a zero as half a grade means the best a child can get for the semester is a 50. Thus, they could quite possibly fail biology or get a very low grade for the year making them ineligable for some colleges.

Here's my judgemental view:

The parents should understand, as should their children that thisis cheating, and they did not do the work so they do not get any credit (zero). However, all kids, every where will try to get away with this if they haven't been challenged in the past. So, since it worked in 2nd grade when they found the information in the book and copied it for the teacher, they keep doing it until somone challenges them on it. They finally got called out. Good for that teacher. I bet all their teachers all the way up realized that the children were saying things which should have been quoted, or restated in their own words. It should have been caught earlier.

ANd good for this teacher for calling the students out. But, I would be nervous that I was hurting the students chances of getting into college. Personally, I would have given the students the zero, but being a nice person, I would have given them the chance to re-write the paper, knowing that I would pick through it with a fine-toothed-comb. The grade on the second paper would be averaged with the zero the student already had. That would be my solution anyway. The students still pay a big price, but are not completely ruined over one paper that they "messed up on." (It's actually more the one paper they were called-out on)

That's my two cents. This is also how they dealt with my best friend who was on full-scholarship at the college level who was caught plagerizing. He had a chance to write the paper again, and decided the second time around to plaigerize his sister's paper. "Who would ever know?" Turns out she plaigerized her whole paper too. Oops.

[pluckyduck]

Margaret -

I'll agree with you that there should be room for mercy, depending on the age of the kids. The trick is being merciful while still teaching them the important life lesson.

The way this is worded:

The teacher quit after discovering the school board changed the way the papers were graded.

gave me chills. She had to "discover" that the grades on the papers written in her class were changed?

Talk about ripping the rug out from underneath the teacher. I can see board members or district officials quietly trying to negotiate some kind of merciful yet lesson teaching alternative with the teacher, maybe one like you described. You could make the argument that the 30 kids who plagiarized will learn more by having to do the assignment from scratch, originally, and really learning how to do it right.

Clearly, that's not what they learned. They learned that the school board will support their squeaky parents, and that, yeah, the teacher was making a mountain out of a molehill with that silly originality rule.

When I worry about what the 88 students who didn't plagiarize learned from all of this , I take comfort that at least some of them learned standing up for your principles is important enough to quit your job over.

Good for the teacher.

Andrea

[hadassahchana[$]]

Andrea, that is still one of the best reviews I've read on the site. I have a copy of it in my home-schooling file, and each of my boys gets to read it at some point during his schooling.

And Margaret, please don't even consider painting everyone with the same brush. I didn't cheat in school, not even once. I was raised by strict old-fashioned parents who would have beaten me if I would have done such a thing. Thank G-d.


Cindy

[sleeper54]

Originally posted by hadassahchana
--snip--
I didn't cheat in school, not even once.
--snip--

I knew there was something 'special' about you...:-)

sleeper54

[jenninca]

[quote]Originally posted by pluckyduck
"Gobsmacked" is an awfully good way to express how I feel about this one, thank you Cindy.

Yeah, me too. I am just speechless.

You know what I swear I would kill for at work? Young kids who take responsibility for their actions. Do you know how hard that is to find? They exist, and I have them, but I have to weed through a whole lot of crap to get them. The kids are being harmed far more by parents who allow them to blame shift on the teacher, of all things. What do you think those kids will be like when they come and try to work for me or any other employer?? What lesson have they learned here?

<snip>

Wake up, parents! The values that you instill in your children are more important than the college they go to or any job skill they ever pick up.

I am getting to the point where I would kill for the same thing. More than half of my class this year refuses to take responsibility for anything. Just yesterday, the following happened:

- A boy decided to wait to do his homework until I kept him after school to do it, then didn't understand why I got upset with him. (See thread in Kids forum)

- I tell the whole class to stop talking. I tell one kid in particular to stop talking. One boy stops for a minute, then looks at me and starts again. I tell him to pull his card (our discipline system) for talking. He comes up and argues with me three different times that he wasn't talking.

- I watch one girl hit someone on the head and kick people three different times during the day. I tell her to pull a card each time. Each time, she came and argued with me that she didn't do anything.

- I have a girl who is a chronic liar. I spent 15 minutes yesterday explaining to her why I had difficulty believing her when she tells me she didn't do something. Then she turns around, steals another girl's special pen, and denies that she did.

That was all just yesterday, and just the stuff that stood out in my head.

If kids would take responsibility for their actions, my job would be twelve thousand times easier. I'm not even asking that they fix them, just that they admit that they did it.

Cindy

[pluckyduck]

Speaking of life lessons, this thread prompted me to have a little lesson with my 7 year old a few minutes ago. He had an assignment to turn in today - find two facts about pet care and write them in his journal.

We did some research on the Internet, and I printed out a *long* webpage for him to distill facts from. I was very proud of how he read it, picked out good facts and wrote them up. Did I pay attention to how much he was copying verbatim? Nope, he's 7. Just the fact that he could read and interpet the words was good enough for me.



Well, I just had a little talk with him. We cited the source and included a copy of the web page with his work.

I'm sure he'll be the only seven year old in class today with footnotes.

Andrea

[mshawpyle]

Originally posted by pluckyduck
Most people aren't plain crazy, which is what the school board and the parents look like to me...so what could possibly be going on here?

No, but at least a strong minority are idiots, halfwits, and damned fools. (And I'm actually a quart low on misanthropy and vitriol today. Haven't been re-reading as much Twain lately....)

[vania]

Speaking as a teacher, this is a perfect example of the paradigm shift which has occured in schools over the past decade or so.

When I was growing up, students were more or less held accountable for their actions, and parents-- for the most part--supported the teachers.

These days, TEACHERS are held accountable for their STUDENTS' actions, and parents support the students.

It's not fair, and it doesn't make any sense, but that's the way it is. Very frustrating.

As for plagiarism, the internet and all its possibilities for cutting and pasting has created all kinds of problems for English teachers. The bottom line is that the students know what they are doing is wrong, and should expect to fail when they are turning in essentially someone else's work.

v.

[nicholmere]

Originally posted by vania
The bottom line is that the students know what they are doing is wrong, and should expect to fail when they are turning in essentially someone else's work.

I agree.

At least these students will learn that lesson.Simon Fraser accuses 47 students of cheating

[jnbmoore]

Okay I was hot

I tell you all I found another link

and then didn't share it

http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansas...ws/2561083.htm fuller story

http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansas...al/2566984.htm commentary

[nicholmere]

From the first link:

"Rooney said that the handbook does not specifically address plagiarism, and that the board has no policy on it. He said he expected the board would address that in the near future."

The school board has no policy on plagiarism? Maybe they can get a copy of another board's policy and use it for their own?