3 - Grappling with Student Plagiarism

Summary

Some years ago, I was grading final papers for a seminar I teach on the psychology of prejudice, and I noticed an usually eloquent passage from a student who was not an especially strong writer. At first I was impressed with the poetic quality of the passage, but the more I thought about it, the less sure I was that this particular student could have written it, so I searched the web and found that the student had used a professional writer’s material without attribution – a clear instance of plagiarism.

In the case study that follows, I’ll describe my three-part response and conclude with a few words about why my response fell short of a comprehensive solution.

Part 1: The student. After discovering the act of plagiarism, I promptly emailed the student, pointing out that sections of her paper matched unattributed sources verbatim and constituted plagiarism . I then asked her to email me a list of all passages taken directly from other people’s work, along with a citation or web address for each original source. I also wrote that even though I had provisionally given her a score of zero for the paper, I hoped that there was a simple explanation for what I found, and I assured her that I was fully committed to handling the problem as fairly as possible.