Thursday, February 21, 2008
Plagiarism : When should students be punished?
Reading Howard’s essay on plagiarism and our school’s definition of plagiarism showed just how vague the definition of plagiarism actually is. In her essay, Howard shows how different people have different definitions on plagiarism, some requiring intent as an important prerequisite for it to be called plagiarism and some not. High school teacher Hildegarde Bender identifies five types of plagiarism and yet says that they should all be given F’s. This definitely doesn’t seem fair because this means that someone that intentionally plagiarizes is treated the same as someone who accidently left out a citation. Therefore I think intent should be considered when determining if a student should be punished for plagiarism. If the student left out a citation by accident or because he or she didn’t know the rules, he/she should be informed and educated about the rules rather than punished. What is the point of going to school when we aren’t educated about our mistakes? Punishing the student by giving him a failing grade would be unfair in this case, to say the least. It would be very careless to do so because rather than taking the time and effort to properly educate the student, the instructor or school has instead chosen to punish him.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
6 comments:
I definitely agree with the fact that intentional plagiarism is way worse and should therefore be punished more than accidental plagiarism BUT...in some cases a student might say, "Oh, oops, I forgot" when in fact they did it on purpose.
But of course, plagairising a whole paragraph or paper would be way worse than just not citing a quote (whether on purpose or not)!
I also agree. I believe there need to be different punishments for different levels of plagiarism. A student who accidentally leaves out a citation should not receive the same punishment as a student who plagiarizes an entire paper. However, Bridgette brings up a good point. How does a teacher really know that the citation left out was really accidentally done so?
I would agree that it's pretty bourgeois to punish a student who doesn't know he/she is plagiarizing. However, in law ignorance is not a sufficient defense of a crime. The same should ring true for plagiarism since it can be described as a crime, depending on the degree. I think the punishment should fit the degree to which the plagiarism took, not the intent.
Completely agree with you. However, I think it gets too messy with trying to deal with it case by case. As much as we would like to have different sets of punishments for different crimes of plagiarism, it's just too hard to enforce and be fair to everyone. Having a general punishment makes it easy for the university and when you have 40,000+ in attendance, there has to be a line drawn somewhere to keep order. I also believe that most people know or at least understand what plagiarism is at college level.
I agree completely that there need to be varying degrees of punishment for the different types of plagiarism. Plagiarizing with intent is far worse than accidentally missing a citation or two because of not knowing the rules. Punishing these violations would be the same as charging a murderer and a thief the same(if the thief is already going to get life, he will attempt to eliminate the witness), if the punishment is going to be equally harsh, it makes sense to escalate to the worse crime. If you are punished the same for intent or mistake it becomes logical to plagiarize with intent and avoid getting caught. It is hard to deal with everything on a case by case situation but it is essential. Like you said, we are in school to be taught, if we are simply going to be punished for our mistakes and never find out what we did wrong to avoid it in the future, what is the point?
For me when they are proven that they committed the crime, they should be punished whether they plagiarised research paper.
Post a Comment