wrongly accused of plagiarism ?

This is not a problem of mine & I'm not sure if it fit into this "Teachers' lounge" but my elder sister who just graduated from high school and entered university for almost year. Got wrongly accused of plagiarism not long ago, got her grades severely affected & is really upset about it. It's a team project with 4 members. 2 girls in the team plagiarised without telling the rest & they got caught and all team members are punished.

While my sister did do some basic checks to see if team members had plagiarised. Like taking a certain amount of text and enclose it with " " and did a search on the search engine, she did not found anything. The plagiarised text is found in some printed books by the school.

So I'm just asking you teachers if it is right for schools to punish everyone in the team just because of 1 or 2 team members being the culplit. Can't there be better ways where team members put their names beside the portion of the work they are doing and punish those particular members that had their work identified as 'copied' instead ?

I would like to see you teachers views on this and are there any suggestions to make the punishments more fair and by the way, I'm not really sure about what is plagarism actually other than copying exactly the same text.
[ June 09, 2006: Message edited by: Chris Lan ]

I also hate group working in university
[ November 08, 2008: Message edited by: Reza Rawassizadeh ]

In college, you're supposed to be treated as an adult, and you're supposed to act as such. On being accused of something like this, you make appointments to see the professor, the department chair, and the dean, in that order, or you appear before an academic review board of some kind, and you state your case. If you do so in a sensible and respectful manner, it's very likely that you'll be listened to.

Reza, That really sad.

Ernest, thanks for your advice, but I guess it's a little too late for my sister since about 2-3 months had passed already. I shall remember it for myself then if I get the chance to enter a university in the future.

I do doubt about the part of , "make appointments to see the.....it's very likely that you'll be listened to." Could it really be done so easily ?

Purposely making appointments to clear your name might be seen by project mates as betraying or something. So I would just let it past as I value the relationships of my friends. Unless it's a serious case that might led to expulsion.

Plus from my personal experience here, teachers rarely listen to students. A typical senario I saw in school is, a student try to prove her points, get ignored by teachers and a parent is often needed to get the talk going.

I heard certain schools had anti-plagarism rules like many other schools but didn't apply the rules in reality due to the overwhelming numbers of students plagarising there. The teachers there use an alternative approach where the teacher will ask lots of questions to test the students understanding of the topic. Then grade the indiviual students of the team based on it. For the presentation, bonus marks get awarded to all team members for non-plagarism.

I kinda like this approach. Nobody get 'punished*' and you get rewarded some points for non plagarism.

* I know.. depend on how you look at it. At least it is phrased in a way that look like it is a reward of bonus points for non-plagarism rather than a punishment of bonus points deducted for plagarism.
[ June 09, 2006: Message edited by: Chris Lan ]

Plus from my personal experience here, teachers rarely listen to students. A typical senario I saw in school is, a student try to prove her points, get ignored by teachers and a parent is often needed to get the talk going

That is school. Things are different in a college/university (for the reason Ernest has already stated)
[ June 09, 2006: Message edited by: Paul Sturrock ]

Purposely making appointments to clear your name might be seen by project mates as betraying or something. So I would just let it past as I value the relationships of my friends.

This has nothing to do with betrayal. You can't let other people thrash your reputation. If they do that, then they're certainly not your friends.

Fine too Ulf. It's just something I visualise I will be doing if this were to happen to me, knowing myself who value friendship alot.

I wouldn't know what will I actually do when the real thing happened some years later. My thinking might change then.

All the talk here were like posting about it's me being the victim of being wrongly accused. With all those 'you' words.I find it awkward to answer back.

It's my sis, not me.

If this were university in this country she'd have to either clear her name or be forever branded.
There's a central registry of people caught out on plagiarism and those on it can say their academic careers goodbye, noone will ever publish any of their work again (and most departments won't have anything to do with them, so no employment and no further education).

As a team member she's in part responsible for the actions of her teammates.
That's a taste of the future. When a project fails in a company the board will likely take it out on the entire team as well. When a scapegoat is chosen it's rarely the person most responsible for the failure but the one with the least political connections in the company or someone whose contract is running out anyway.

So she has to stand up for herself, though you may be able to help her.
If her teammates had been friends they'd not have caused her to get into this debacle, they'd have come forward and exonerated her from their plagiarism even if it meant harsher penalties for themselves.

Ok, obviously I'm ticked off. My teacher has wrongly accused me of plagiarism on an in-class essay. She only gave me half credit on my essays, which she said we're superb, as I am a great writer, other than the fact that she says they're plagiarized. How do you plagiarize on an in class essay? And why would I even try if I already have an A on the exam and I'm a top student? I'm sorry, but I graduated in the top quarter of my h.s. class, got a 29 on my ACT, won all kinds of essay contests, was originally an English major, and love to write. I can't help it if I'm just that damn good. Geez! Heck, one of the websites she said one of my paragraphs came directly from I'd never even heard of, this essay was in History class, and that was an astronomy website. RIDICULOUS. Any idea in what I should do? A couple sentences out of 2 whole essays are very similar to a few sentences in one of my sources. However, 90% of the sentence is made up of factual information, like names, places, and dates. Ugh! Again, so ticked!

. Any advice you have or suggestions is greatly appreciated. Thanx!

Originally posted by Chris Lan:
Purposely making appointments to clear your name might be seen by project mates as betraying or something. So I would just let it past as I value the relationships of my friends. Unless it's a serious case that might led to expulsion.

Plus from my personal experience here, teachers rarely listen to students. A typical senario I saw in school is, a student try to prove her points, get ignored by teachers and a parent is often needed to get the talk going.

If it were me and those were my friends, I would get new friends. I can not value a friendship where the other person is disrespectful enough to put my grades and integrity at risk because of their own laziness.

My experience is that teachers rarely listen to irate students. The calm, civilized students get listened to and don't need to bring mommy and daddy into the situation (although adult tantrums are soooo much more convincing to teachers). As EFH said, if the teacher won't listen to a student, even when the student is being rational and fair, the student should take it up with the next level of authority.

Originally posted by CC Ball:
Ok, obviously I'm ticked off. My teacher has wrongly accused me of plagiarism on an in-class essay. She only gave me half credit on my essays, which she said we're superb, as I am a great writer, other than the fact that she says they're plagiarized. How do you plagiarize on an in class essay? And why would I even try if I already have an A on the exam and I'm a top student? I'm sorry, but I graduated in the top quarter of my h.s. class, got a 29 on my ACT, won all kinds of essay contests, was originally an English major, and love to write. I can't help it if I'm just that damn good. Geez! Heck, one of the websites she said one of my paragraphs came directly from I'd never even heard of, this essay was in History class, and that was an astronomy website. RIDICULOUS. Any idea in what I should do? A couple sentences out of 2 whole essays are very similar to a few sentences in one of my sources. However, 90% of the sentence is made up of factual information, like names, places, and dates. Ugh! Again, so ticked! . Any advice you have or suggestions is greatly appreciated. Thanx!

if that's your normal style and your essays are good enough to get you a top score in English classes I would (were I your teacher) also be extremely suspicious of possible plagiarism.

Talking about plagiarism; I once used some code snippets from a text book for one of my projects, the instructor pulled up the book from the internet and showed me the code, and for that reason I never saw my grade on that project, he claimed I plagiarised; Is this issue of plagiarism subjective or what? I know with some instructors one gets away with such; how does one practice code reuse if code from texts are considered plagiarism; where does it all stop? I guess I should have commented boldly on the code that this portion is from a test book. What advice do you people have for students in this scenerio?

It all depends on the amount you use, and whether you give credit.

If you use a few lines of code or a few sentences and give credit where credit is due noone is going to make trouble.
If you reuse large sections you're in deep s**t and should be.

Of course for code it also depends on the book. Some authors specifically state you can reuse their code and will list conditions, others require you to ask them first, and yet others prohibit it.

When doing work for school you should always do your own work anyway, instead of trying to cheat your way to a higher grade by taking the work of others and trying to pass it off as your own.
I fully agree with your teacher in that if he failed you hard.

Based on my statistics, obtained from www.plagiarismdetection.org, over 40% of students plagiarize on a regular basis. It is a horrifying number!
<a href="http://www.plagiarismdetection.org">PlagiarismDetection.org</a>

Geoffrey Blackberry wrote:Based on my statistics, obtained from www.plagiarismdetection.org, over 40% of students plagiarize on a regular basis. It is a horrifying number!
<a href="http://www.plagiarismdetection.org">PlagiarismDetection.org</a>

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