Saturday, December 12, 2009

Another surge in the war on plagiarism

In my American Presidency class I have had to fail four students out of twenty for multiple cases of plagiarism so far. In my own department, International and Comparative Politics, I have not found any cases of plagiarism so far this semester. It appears that the ICP department has become a plagiarism free zone, but the rest of the university lags seriously behind.

3 comments:

WR said...

Some student is either suing or threatening to sue our college over a plagiarism accusation. Then the new president approached the Faculty Council and asked them to suspend the policy, which was being rewritten at the time. Money over integrity!

J. Otto Pohl said...

Walt I used to be able to fail students from a class for one case of plagiarism. Then the administration instituted a school wide policy requiring two confirmed cases to fail a student from a class. We have as yet never expelled a student from the university for plagiarism. Until that happens it will continue to be a problem.

WR said...

I remember when I taught at USC in the early '90s and caught somebody the administration practically begged me to fail the guy for the course. Our current president seems like a good guy too, so there's been some major culture shift in the past 15 years that's making the administrators look at these things differently.