Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - Two UVA students in semester at sea program expelled, put off boat in Greece

levite · 08-30-2010, 02:21 AM

Maybe I'm a lone voice in the wilderness, but I think the UVA reaction was insane overkill.

I am a teacher, and no friend to cheaters or plagiarists among my students. And I have caught students doing so, and confronted them accordingly.

But at least in my experience as a student (college, grad school, rabbinical school), plagiarism is confined to text or ideas that are distinctive, or represent more than a few consecutive words in a phrase. Leaving aside for a moment the depressingly frequent use of wikipedia as a source, the three phrases for which this girl was expelled (not one of which is even a complete sentence) represent no style, content, or phrasing unique or distinctive to one author: they are mere factual notations, that could just as easily have been cribbed from the Encyclopedia Britannica articles on those events, or from any decent professor's lectures on the subjects.

If a student hands me an essay on Marie Curie, and it contains the short sentence, "Radium, atomic number 88, is an alkaline earth metal which is intensely radioactive;" I can't possibly see charging that student with plagiarism even if every third science textbook in America has the exact same sentence. Whereas, if the essay contained the sentence, "Radium, atomic number 88, was discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie, the nineteenth-century scientific couple brought together-- ironically-- by a mutual interest in magnetism; but unfortunately, the alkaline earth metal proved intensely radioactive;" I would charge plagiarism. This latter sentence, while conveying the same information, does so in a very distinctive style, it appends additional content, and is cast in a very specific mode of phrasing. Although even in the first case, if the student handed me an essay with not one sentence, but a small paragraph of sentences similarly plain, dry, and factual, all drawn from a science textbook, I might well charge plagiarism also.

But, really, we're at a point where a girl can be expelled from college for borrowing an isolated clause of a sentence, conveying nothing but dry historical fact, for part of an assignment to summarize and synthesize a movie? How is that not just craziness? It's like firing a productive, long-term employee because they accidentally walked home with a mostly-worn-down pencil from work tucked in their pocket. For wholesale stealing of office supplies-- sure, fire them. But for a pencil? And not even a whole one?

I'm sorry, but in my book, judgment without tolerance is just petty tyranny.

08-30-2010, 02:21 AM	#27 (permalink)
levite Minion of Joss Location: The Windy City	Maybe I'm a lone voice in the wilderness, but I think the UVA reaction was insane overkill. I am a teacher, and no friend to cheaters or plagiarists among my students. And I have caught students doing so, and confronted them accordingly. But at least in my experience as a student (college, grad school, rabbinical school), plagiarism is confined to text or ideas that are distinctive, or represent more than a few consecutive words in a phrase. Leaving aside for a moment the depressingly frequent use of wikipedia as a source, the three phrases for which this girl was expelled (not one of which is even a complete sentence) represent no style, content, or phrasing unique or distinctive to one author: they are mere factual notations, that could just as easily have been cribbed from the Encyclopedia Britannica articles on those events, or from any decent professor's lectures on the subjects. If a student hands me an essay on Marie Curie, and it contains the short sentence, "Radium, atomic number 88, is an alkaline earth metal which is intensely radioactive;" I can't possibly see charging that student with plagiarism even if every third science textbook in America has the exact same sentence. Whereas, if the essay contained the sentence, "Radium, atomic number 88, was discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie, the nineteenth-century scientific couple brought together-- ironically-- by a mutual interest in magnetism; but unfortunately, the alkaline earth metal proved intensely radioactive;" I would charge plagiarism. This latter sentence, while conveying the same information, does so in a very distinctive style, it appends additional content, and is cast in a very specific mode of phrasing. Although even in the first case, if the student handed me an essay with not one sentence, but a small paragraph of sentences similarly plain, dry, and factual, all drawn from a science textbook, I might well charge plagiarism also. But, really, we're at a point where a girl can be expelled from college for borrowing an isolated clause of a sentence, conveying nothing but dry historical fact, for part of an assignment to summarize and synthesize a movie? How is that not just craziness? It's like firing a productive, long-term employee because they accidentally walked home with a mostly-worn-down pencil from work tucked in their pocket. For wholesale stealing of office supplies-- sure, fire them. But for a pencil? And not even a whole one? I'm sorry, but in my book, judgment without tolerance is just petty tyranny. __________________ Dull sublunary lovers love, Whose soul is sense, cannot admit Absence, because it doth remove That thing which elemented it. (From "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne)