IH Plagiarism Report

The IH program is instituting a new program, a  report listing plagiarism incidents. The idea is to gather information about the incidents of plagiarism in your courses. The goals of the police blotter are (1) to help individual faculty members reduce incidents of plagiarism by designing assignments that make plagiarism difficult; (2) to help faculty members learn new methods of detecting plagiarism; and (3) to create some consensus in the program about appropriate penalties for different kinds of plagiarism. In addition, the information we gather will enable us to develop new program-wide initiatives to deal with plagiarism.

So, what we would like all of you to do is to report any incidents of plagiarism in your classes to me. I will post them to the web. The report should, of course, not mention the name of the student. Your name will not be used in what I put on the web. And once I copy the information in your email, I will delete it so that the case cannot be traced back to you.

The information we would like you to report is as follows. Please send an email containing this information to MarcStier@stier.net.

1 Assignment (This information may help us discover if certain kinds of assignments are more likely to encourage or allow for plagiarism.)

2. Place of Assignment in course (Did the assignment come at the beginning, middle or end of the course-you might simply give the date in answering this question.)

3. Weight of Assignment in course (Roughly what proportion of the final grade is determined by the grade on this assignment?)

4. Motivation of student, if known. (For example: Was the student carrying a particularly heavy course schedule? Did he or she have a heavy work schedule? Did the student have problems speaking or writing English?)

5. Details of the plagiarism (For example: Did the student copy whole passages from a book or the web? Did the student receive unacknowledged or inappropriate assistance from others?)

6. How was the plagiarism detected? (For example, did you find a passage on the web with Google or AltaVista?)

7. Penalty

8. Student Reaction (For example: Did the student admit to the plagiarism? What excuses did the student offer?)

We are well into the semester. Still, it would be useful if you all take some time in the next week or so and fill one of these forms for each incidence of plagiarism you have dealt with this semester.