Thank you all for your comments and suggestions. I have been grading papers nonstop for several days now (with a brief recess for graduation). Generally, what I am finding is that my C and D students are the ones who are stringing together sentences that are not their own. I start reading a paper that is grammatically poor, maybe started with the phrase "In this paper I am going to talk about..." and then suddenly shifts to a beautiful, fully-formed sentence or set of sentences. Of course I Google it immediately and sometimes have some luck, other times it doesn't come up. If I am still suspicious, I go to the database and look up the original article. Students sometimes reference the article, although there have been some who have omitted references. Sometimes I find entire paragraphs taken verbatim, other times I find phrases here and there, interspersed with other phrases lifted from other articles. I believe the student could not figure out a way to rephrase what the article said, and took the lazy (and deceitful) way out. I would rather have a poorly written paper(poor from a grammatical standpoint) than one in which the student made no attempt to understand the material. One the other hand, I had one student who wrote her paper on stroke because both her sister and father had strokes and she wanted to understand what happened in each case. She told me that one of her articles was too difficult and she was going to find an article that she could understand. I respect that. I believe if I repeat this assignment, I am going to have all students complete a plagiarism tutorial before handing in their papers, and as Tim mentioned, I'm not going to wait until the end of the semester to collect the papers. I can't remember which school has the excellent plagiarism tutorial--one of the Indiana Schools?
Thanks again, I appreciate your collective insight. If nothing else, I'm learning a great deal (though becoming somewhat more cynical as I do). Carol Carol L. DeVolder, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology Chair, Department of Psychology St. Ambrose University 518 West Locust Street Davenport, Iowa 52803 Phone: 563-333-6482 e-mail: [email protected] web: http://web.sau.edu/psychology/psychfaculty/cdevolder.htm The contents of this message are confidential and may not be shared with anyone without permission of the sender. --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([email protected])
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