How to penalize students who copy each other but don't realize they have plagiarized?

Question

I gave my students an opportunity to rewrite one of their papers for extra points. As I was grading, I realized that two papers were almost identical. They had a similar structure, organization, and presented ideas in a similar manner. I asked the students about plagiarism but they denied it. Since it was a rewrite, I told them that I wouldn't add any points to their grades and they should never do this again.

One of the students, however, emailed me stating that she is worried their final assignments might look similar as well. She was trying to convince me that her paper is her original work and the second student "worked really hard to make sure their papers don't look alike!".

She included screen shots of their fb conversation as evidence. In FB conversation the one with the original work is telling her friend to use her paper as a basis but change the sentences and examples so it won't look like plagiarism.

This is a clear case of plagiarism. Correct? I am not sure how to handle it. I know they are not realizing that's plagiarism, otherwise they wouldn't have shared those fb conversations. So I don't want to report to the school (yet!). But I am also not sure how to penalize them? Give a zero for the assignment? What do you recommend? Should I give zeros to both of them?

Answer 1

This isn't just plagarism - it's out and out cheating - and both students are guilty and one of them has kindly produced proof of their guilt. I would escalate to whatever process is usually undertaken for cheating students.

That they apparently have failed to grasp the concept doesn't make them any less guilty of the infringement and it simply doesn't matter whether they "meant to cheat" - they did.

The appropriate way to deal with cheating students is to escalate it to the system for dealing with cheating students. You should trust that this process will take their ignorance into account while (a) being fair to other students and (b) expressing the appropriate level of opprobrium for their actions.

Answer 2

Learn about your school's policy. Learn about whether your school has an honor code, defines plagiarism in its catalog, or requires mandatory training such as an online orientation. Many schools have specific rules about what kind of punishments are allowed, and these rules may be based on their own interpretations of local laws or their past experiences with lawsuits. For example, my school's policy specifically tells us that we are not allowed to give a student a failing grade in the course for dishonesty, and it also spells out different levels of consequences for a first and second offense.

Look at your own syllabus to see what you said about plagiarism; usually administrators will support you on anything that's laid out clearly in your syllabus.

Don't assume that administrators will support you. Their priorities may be very, very different from yours.

Once you have done all your homework, talk to your dean and propose how you want to handle the issue. Make sure your dean is on board with what you plan to do. Consider "soft" penalties such as forcing the students to meet with the dean.

Answer 3

This is a matter of education. Some students think plagiarism is only copy and pasting from one another. They also think placing a citation is a license to copy. Some also define it as ok if software, eg turnitin, cannot detect it.

In my case I make it clear. If they steal one sentence it is an automatic zero. It is also a zero if they steal the structure of a paragraph or section. These need to be emphasized multiple times until they eject their old ways out of their system.

Answer 4

This is a clear case of plagiarism. Correct? I am not sure how to handle it. I know they are not realizing that's plagiarism, otherwise they wouldn't have shared those fb conversations. So I don't want to report to the school (yet!). But I am also not sure how to penalize them? Give a zero for the assignment? What do you recommend? Should I give zeros to both of them?

I'm going to disagree with Ben Crowell's answer, despite it being well-written and mostly sensible except for one crucial detail. The students have perhaps committed what we technically define as plagiarism (or more precisely, as StrongBad commented, one of them committed plagiarism and the other allowed her work to be used), but the element of mens rea, the "guilty mind" that we consider morally necessary to inflict punishment, is clearly lacking. So my verdict is not guilty.

The bottom line is, it doesn't matter how much we educators wring our hands about "kids these days". If someone clearly doesn't know that a behavior is wrong then it is foolish and harmful to penalize them for it. It is our job to educate students about what constitutes plagiarism and what are the standards we expect of them for independent work and citation of sources. All the things that Ben Crowell's answer lists are basically irrelevant, since if a student is showing you a facebook conversation proving that they did not realize what they were doing is plagiarism, that means your institution has failed to properly educate the students about this subject, whether it's written in the catalog or not.

I should add that in my opinion part of the problem with this common misunderstanding of plagiarism by students is that plagiarism is in fact quite a subtle concept, and that our expectations of how fast and easily students can understand and adapt to it are simply unrealistic. To criminalize a behavior that can result from a misunderstanding or lack of sophistication that is very common among students entering university is very problematic, and can backfire in all sorts of unexpected ways. (On the other hand, of course plagiarism is a real problem that needs to be dealt with; I don't have all the answers about what is the correct approach or balance to strike, and a detailed discussion of this topic is in any case beyond the scope of this question.)

To summarize, in my opinion it would be wrong to penalize the students in this case. You can and should use this as a teaching opportunity, and it would be reasonable to require the plagiarizing student to submit a revised paper that satisfies your standards for academic writing, after very clearly and carefully explaining to her what those standards are. This is also an opportunity for all of us to reflect on what we are trying to achieve with various "zero tolerance" policies that impose an unrealistically high standard of behavior on students who may not be adequately prepared to be capable of satisfying those lofty standards.

Edit: thanks to all the commenters for their lively and intelligent discussion and criticism of my answer. You have persuaded me that the answer is perhaps more subjective than I thought. I am willing to tone down my recommendation and say that the plagiarizing student may be deserving of punishment. I think ultimately it would all depend on specific details about the facebook conversation and other evidence that we do not have. At the same time, given the information presented in the question I still think an educational, rather than punitive, approach, would be the most appropriate one in this case. The key question that needs to be answered in my opinion is whether the student "knew what she was doing" in the sense that she had an understanding that basing her paper off of another student's paper was wrong. It doesn't sound like she did, but I'm only speculating and am open to changing my mind about this if presented with new information.

Answer 5

Some students, myself in particular, get taught incorrectly in the early years of education that "putting something in your own words" is how to avoid plagiarism. This is of course, overly simplistic and wrong of course. If you give both students the benefit of the doubt, that neither know what plagiarism is, I don't think they should be penalized for this naivety.

I think you should probably invite the students to your office to teach them or send around the school's academic honesty guide to all your students (it should be pretty small and thoroughly define the terms it uses). If this is happening to one pair, it is likely happening to others or these two students are doing similar in other courses. Example: Jill reads something online and simply rewords it for the report while maintaining the structure and flow of the original material.

Answer 6

Honestly, I have been a bit irritated by the two of them throughout the quarter, especially the one who copied the work. They kept challenging me on their grades constantly. The one who copied the work emailed me saying "if it will make you feel better, I will write the essay again!"

It sounds like you have a student who is eager to learn how to do the right thing and get it right, even if she isn't doing so right now. This is a good thing because you have a much stronger opportunity for a teachable moment where the teaching is more likely to be effective, than a student whose attitude is "I'll try this minimum that I think might scrape by, and in the unlikely event someone is paying enough attention to catch it, oh well, that'll just be the end result." Further, you have students who care about their grades, and you control at least one of those, so you have some leverage that seems likely to be effective.

How about having that student write the essay - or a similar one on the same topic or another topic still related to your course - in a supervised environment* where she would have no access to classmates' work? If network-isolated, you might have to provide some printed reference material, but (a) it might be a good thing for students to get at least one experience writing in that way and (b) this exercise/test is focusing more on the student's ability to critically analyze content and discuss the material with some potentially original insights, than on breadth of a background literature search.

You do apparently need to teach the distinction between copyright infringement (which involves copying the particular expression of ideas, and for which paraphrasing all the content is a valid way around), plagiarism (which relates more to passing off another person's ideas as one's own), and failing to write original content/ideas (which may involve proper citation of the others' ideas and is honest, but may not meet the course requirements for a top grade). It appears the students in question are confusing the first two, and those in the third sentence of Prof. Santa Claus's answer ("They also think placing a citation is a license to copy") are confusing the latter two. These distinctions are not obvious and the ethics of each are not universal. It does take teaching them, and it might be worth you having a conversation with the dean to try to make sure this gets into the curriculum in a first semester writing course or something like that.

Here, your students at least seem willing to learn. Good luck making the most of the teaching opportunity!

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(*): Where there are more people present than just you and the student, in case the student would otherwise come up with false accusations against you should she receive a poor course grade.

Answer 7

When my mom was a TA back in the day, she had a similar situation where one student thought she was helping her friend by letting her see the paper, but the second student was straight-up copying. My mom and the TA of the other student came up with this idea: Grade the paper as though it were submitted singularly. Then, go to both students and let them decide how they want to split the points. For instance, if it were worth 80 points, they could do a 40-40 split, or the original writer could take all, or whatever else.