Well Angloesque, I gotta say, maybe I should've taken your class earlier.

I think my responses are more in response to the righteousness of folks like SuperBaby. Perhaps I pointed fingers at you that I shouldn't have. I'm not sure what response would be reasonable here. As far as I can see, the commentary here is dizzyingly self-righteous and almost giddy with eager excitement about this girl being punished. My feeling was that somewhere between expulsion and laughing the whole thing off there was a middle ground. I still feel this way. This girl gets expelled - rightfully so - and now what? Sure she paid the price for her actions, as all the folks here seem to see, but does she see it? Will she find herself at some other school plagiarizing more carefully? SuperBaby, don't bother responding, I know your black and white view all too well.

Perhaps a follow-up assignment, twice as large, that must have at least five separate references per page. Maybe a paper on plagiarism?

Matt, I like your ideas. Were it inadvertant plagiarism, I might do something like that. I agree about the levels of plagiarism and I've seen them all. Blatant is what I fail people for; inadvertant is where an in-class punishment (and not an easy one) is more advisable. At the same time, though, prevention is key, and I hope I adequately warn my students about it.

Solitair, you make a great point. I hate regurgitation and hopefully my students are learning not to. On our final assignment I purposely discussed the text very little and the concepts very broadly so they could assign their own value to the literature. And as they go on through college, ideally this analysis will become more automatic; I don't think freshmen, whom I teach, should have to analyze as thoroughly as seniors, but they'd better start learning how to do so. That tool is probably one of the most important things students learn in college. Good point.

Also, I've thought about it, and maybe it's not wise to fail students for plagiarism. Just fail them on the assignment. That would have definitely compelled me to plagiarize on assignments I procrastinated on. At least I would have had a chance to receive a good grade, and if I was caught, it wouldn't be any worse than not doing the assignment at all.

Addendum: I caught another plagiarizer today. Same assignment. Same stupid cut and paste.

-T.

Well, they didn't plagiarize the same material--same copy and paste method, I mean. I kid you not, I've had one student turn in a poem she liked, then plagiarized it again when it came time to write her own. I have a hard time feeling bad about that one.

You really break the "thou shalt not steal commandment" when plagiarism and therefore you will very likely face God's wrath on judgement day and might even be sent to eternal damnation (in other words the pit down in the center of the earth)!

One day my mum (then an English teacher) brought home a piece of coursework she found suspiciously good for me to have a look at. I studied it for a minute or so, reached over to my shelf and handed her a book. Case closed.

The book? The Warcraft II manual.

The guy had copied the entire Orc back-story word for word.

I will confess to times of plagiarism when I was in high school. But I at least did it creatively.

When I found a piece I liked but was too lazy to analyse it, I simply reached for my thesaurus and rewrote it. While what I did was still plagiarism, at least there was a semblance of effort to originality rather than a blatant cut and paste. Unfortunately, in the case of myself and many of my peers, many teachers actually ENCOURAGED it; hell, it was a sixth grade teacher that taught me to do it!