... Besides that, boy do I have something to share.
One student, who've I've worked with last Friday and just this Monday when she have requested to come see me again, I have caught her plagiarizing her paper. I didn't catch it right away, only when I read more of her paper aloud did I notice it used words in a way that wasn't like the student's for whatever I read previously. Now, I didn't want to jump into any conclusions just yet. I asked her if she could show me her sources, which she did. It turns out I was right. She directly ripped off a few sentences from Wikipedia and pasted it right onto her paper. Unsurprisingly, she could tell I was upset by this by the way I looked at her.
This was my first time ever dealing with a client who has plagiarized. How are you supposed to take care of a situation like this? I asked her if she knows this won't fly and that should could get into a lot of trouble if she were caught committing the act, suspended or even put on academic probation. She said yes. It boggled my mind when I heard her answer; if you know you'll get in trouble for it, why would you do it anyway? It was then I asked her if there are any other parts of her paper that she took directly from her sources and that we needed to clean that up and reword it. It wasn't as if I would have given her a choice, I made sure we did: putting quotes where they belonged and sandwiching them from her own interpretations of the quotes.
Perhaps she didn't understand the severe consequences of her actions, but I am glad I had caught this before she had sent it to her professor. I hope for her future papers that this student would not do this again.
I think your post is great, if ya want my opinion. I don't even know how I would handle a situation like that, but I can imagine in was uncomfortable. And interesting...
ReplyDeleteWow, Karishma! You did a great job with this student! I don't want to say that "this is what the writing center is for," but I am glad that you caught it and not her teacher. I will tell you that, as a writing professor, I have come across many, many students who plagiarize for all kinds of reasons. Laziness, procrastination, etc. However, and I'm not excusing anyone here, some students plagiarize because they lack confidence in their own ability to complete an assignment correctly. Others do it because they genuinely don't know how to quote and cite sources appropriately.
ReplyDeleteI think you were right to react the way you did, and you hopefully hit it home that this kind of behavior is not acceptable in college. I think that focusing on quote sandwiches was a great strategy -- you give the student a useful and productive way to address something that she didn't know how to address when she came into the center.