Today I handed back my first assignments, which means the first group of plagiarizers was informed that they had been caught and were being punished accordingly. I got some weird excuses, but I generally always do.
First, someone told me that she didn’t think it was plagiarism if you copied from a book or other source, only if you copied off of a fellow student. I informed her that this was incorrect. Another student told me that she just thought it was a really good sentence. Actually, two students told me that the sentence they copied was just “really good” so that’s why they wrote it down. I tried to communicate that what was most important to me was that they did their own work, not that what they wrote was particularly good or interesting. I am not sure how much of that got through.
One of the students asked if she could make up the assignment, and I said no. Philosophically, I am not opposed to the idea of making up assignments, but logistically, it would be difficult to keep track of such things. Also, I feel that if a person failed the assignment on account of plagiarism and was allowed to make it up, then students who just made mistakes should be allowed to make it up, too. This would create a mountain of grading and papers from all sorts of sources, and over all it would make it very difficult for me to keep track of anything. So, this is something I am going to try to make clear in my syllabus next year: no copying, and no making up assignments. We’ll see how that goes.
2 comments:
Yes. The idea of plagiarism is pretty much non-existent in pre-graduate school education in China. Just like now, I am in independent study with Wei Laoshi. We would read these fantastically-written short stories by Taiwanese authors. A way for the vocabulary and sentence structures to become our own is for us to copy some of what they say into our own stories that we have to write for class. She keeps telling us over and over again to use what they say. So, I think it's so much a part of the Chinese way of learning that it's going to take your students a while to get used to. Getting a very poor grade (or no grade at all) should be able to drive the idea home I think.
It is totally true that the Chinese style of writing is quite different from the American style. I just wish I knew how to communicate what is different and why it is different in a way that would reach all my students the first time. Of course, even in the US where people know the drill cold there are plenty of people who take the easy way out. It's just that I would never think of copying some Chinese sentences off-line to turn them into Wei Laoshi! For one thing, she'd figure it out right away, for another thing I would learn anything from it.
Hopefully the punishment of a poor grade will be enough of a deterrent.
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