The Online Reflector

Cheating may be an age-old practice, but theft of intellectual property made easy by the World Wide Web has caused many professors to widen their search for academic misconduct in the last decade. What many students fail to realize is that the repercussions for plagiarism can not only affect a grade on a paper, but it can affect a grade in a class, standing on a team, standing in an educational institution and, if the work is published, it can cause run-ins with the law.

The athletic department recently held a life skills program with Associate Professor of History and Political Science, Ted Frantz, discussing the different manners of academic misconduct. The program topic was based on a needs assessment survey filled out by athletes.

“[Frantz] is a prior student-athlete so it kind of made it easier for him to understand what they [student-athletes] are faced with,” said Assistant Director of Athletics, Daryl Gibbs.

Although handled on a case-by-case basis, reports of plagiarism are usually met with harsher penalties by the athletic department than university sanctions.

“If the university says that this student has been accused of plagiarism, that student then is pretty much banned from games,” Gibbs said. “It’s entirely up to the coach’s discretion. Usually, until that person is cleared, you don’t want to have a player out there representing the institution when they might have done something as heinous as plagiarism.”

Because coursework is heavy on research and writing papers, the English department discovers about a half dozen cases of plagiarism every semester, according to Professor and Faculty Department Chair, Bill Dynes.

“As a department we’ve become much more conscious of it, and we’re much more likely to share that it’s happening,” Dynes said. “Ten years ago, maybe, if I caught someone plagiarizing, I’d handle it between myself and the student so that nobody else would be aware of it. I couldn’t say that it’s happening more frequently now, but I think we’re much more aware of it.”

Many professors, including those in the English department, are now utilizing tools such as turnitin.com to not only detect plagiarism, but to teach students about the issue.

“[Turnitin.com] has really been helpful in helping us teach students what plagiarism is,” Dynes said. “One of the things I really like about turnitin.com is that it will flag both very small and very large examples of plagiarism. So, it becomes much easier in class to talk about when borrowing becomes plagiarism.”

Cultural differences may blur the lines among some students between what is and is not acceptable.

“Some international students have had a harder time adjusting to American standards of responsibility, but at least the students in our department have made really good strides and it has made us, as teachers, more careful about articulating what the standards are,” Dynes said. “The only pattern that I really see is that it tends to happen more clustered around mid-terms and final exams.”

Most professors blatantly state in their syllabuses their own policies regarding plagiarism and other forms of academic misconduct.

“The ultimate sanction is failure in the course,” said Professor and Chair of the anthropology department, Gregory Reinhardt. “It could be as simple as ‘don’t do it again’ or failing the assignment or having to redo the assignment or having to do additional work, but I stated on my syllabuses that you can’t cheat or plagiarize. If you do, I’ll fail you in the course. So I make it clear that I will push for the ultimate sanction.”

Reinhardt, who was at the forefront of crafting relatively new policies regarding accusations of plagiarism and the ability for students to withdraw from the class to avoid a failing grade, runs into plagiarism issues each semester.

“If it’s a really minor thing—a sentence—I’m not going to do anything about it, just tell the student,” Reinhardt said. “In fact, in a case like that, I probably wouldn’t even report it. If it were something more extensive, I’d report it and I would also notify the student that, formally, I was proceeding to fail him or her in the course.”

Reinhardt said he would seriously advise the student to make an appeal.

“I’m willing to listen to an appeal, but feel obligated having made my statement that I have to stand by what I said,” Reinhardt said.

The 2009-10 student handbook explicitly states the options students have when accused of plagiarism. A student may appeal the sanction given by the professor for alleged plagiarism on the grounds of innocence, extenuating circumstances or unfair treatment.

The student must submit a letter to the provost within five days after receiving notice of the sanction. The provost can discuss the issue with the student as well as the accusing professor and, if the case proceeds to appeal, a panel with a faculty and a student representative will listen to both parties and come to a decision. If they feel it necessary, the panel can decide that the sanction for the student was too severe or not severe enough.

“I think there are some times when there are students who sincerely don’t even know what it is,” said Associate Provost and Dean of the School for Adult Learning, Patricia Jefferson. “I think there are times when students don’t realize they have to put quotation marks around specific, word-for-word quotes.”

In such cases, the panel may recommend that the student redo the paper and take a tutorial and subsequent quiz on plagiarism. Repeat offenders or more deliberate acts of plagiarism, such as purchasing papers online, will not be received as lightly.

Jefferson said she is familiar with a case where an individual was accused of plagiarizing and the professor asked the student to redo the paper, as a learning experience.

“The paper was redone and it was plagiarized the second time. So the professor said ‘I’m going to fail you on this paper,’ and then this student came back in another class and refused to turn a paper in electronically because she didn’t want to use turnitin.com because this paper was substantially plagiarized,” Jefferson said. “So, now we have three cases in one semester with the same student and even though the individual professor said ‘I’m going to let you redo the assignment’ or ‘I’m going to fail you on the assignment,’ the dean in the particular school said, ‘this is three times, maybe it’s a good idea if you don’t major in the department.’”

Such repeat offenders are not common, however, and most cases of plagiarism are isolated incidents. In fact, Jefferson has been filing reported cases of plagiarism for approximately four years now, and most of the cases don’t amount to an appeals process.

She guessed that in three-and-a-half years, only six cases have gone through appeal. Jefferson cannot remember a case severe enough to warrant expulsion from the university, though she did say that if a professor finds plagiarism in a paper written by a student who has already graduated, that professor is legally allowed to fail the student in the class. Thus, plagiarism can jeopardize the ability of a student to obtain his or her degree. According to Jefferson, there have been times when a student has already gone through commencement,  was accused of cheating and wasn’t able to graduate.

“It’s antithetical to everything that the university stands for,” Dynes said. “If we’re trying to help students learn to think and articulate their ideas, doing that by copying something from Wikipedia doesn’t really fly.”