Somewhere deep down inside, you know this is true, even if you cannot bring yourself to fully admit this. And here is the straight truth on this point — your professor knows this too. The plagiarism report that was attached to the email you were sent from your instructor was likely from turnitin. While these applications can sometimes make mistakes, most of the time they do not. And if you have borrowed a bunch of material from a website and then stuck it into your paper without properly citing, the plagiarism programs pick it up easy!
This is another lame excuse that you do not want to give your professor after getting busted for plagiarism. While it is true that you may struggle with basic elements of APA , we both know you are lying when you claim you do not know how to cite.
Common sense should tell you that if you are using the work of others, including synthesizing , you need to demonstrate in some way that you tried to offer credit to the original author.
Some may consider this point a bit murky but I am speaking directly to college students who basically know they stole work from others and tried to pass it off as their own. Using this particular excuse will likely cause your professor to take further action and force you to be enrolled in a writing workshop or course specifically focused on avoiding plagiarism.
Do you want to have to deal with this time waster? Keep in mind that this article is specifically designed for online students who have intentionally plagiarized. You know who you are. It will likely cause a bad situation to become worse and pretty much guarantee your paper will be sent to administration. Please — do not do this.
Instead, follow the next tip. This point is key and one that you will want to read carefully! When you respond to your professor, use a non-defensive, humble tone that speaks from a place of contrition. While I am not suggesting that you actually admit in writing that you have intentionally plagiarized, I am suggesting that you offer something that demonstrates your awareness of the seriousness of the situation.
I received such an email from a student and it swayed me in a powerful way to effectively make the problem go away for the learner.
Always err on the side of caution, and when in doubt, please contact the law schools or professional schools for clarification on their questions. You may request at any time a letter from the chair of the Board of Academic Integrity that explains Villanova's policy, the emphasis on an educational approach to violations of the university's code and affirming your good character, because you reported the violation.
Villanova University was founded in by the Order of St. Office of the Provost. I've Been Accused My teacher has just accused me of an academic integrity violation, I have a lot of questions. What will happen to me now? What happens next? I just got a letter about an academic integrity violation.
What do I do now? What will happen to me if I sign the letter? Will I be expelled from Villanova? Will there be something about this on my transcript? I feel that if I sign this paper I am admitting that I am a cheater, which I am not. Should I still sign? I admit that I violated the academic integrity code, but I was sick, under a lot of personal stress, and dealing with problems at home.
I feel that if I sign the letter no one will understand what was going on in my life. I feel that I did not do what I am accused of doing. What should I do? I am not sure whether to appeal or not. When is it appropriate to appeal?
Suppose I do appeal, what will happen? Will I see all the evidence before the hearing? Those who argue they didn't cheat and have no explanation as to how their assignment matches another's work are almost always found guilty of academic misconduct since they are not willing to help us create a case for poor academic practice.
More often than not they receive a 0 since we have no evidence that mitigates the penalty. For students who admit what they did, we often consider poor academic practice as an outcome since they describe what they did and realize it was wrong. Sometimes the offense is too blatant to let off without a reduction, but generally saying what you did wrong and how you will not let it happen again reduces the penalty. Depending on the response, you could punish subsequent lies. If someone cheats, gets a punishment.
When confronted about that, if they recognize it, you don't take further action. But, if they give you a blatantly false explanation, they may get punished for it. A sadly real case example: one student submitted exactly the same report than a previous one. When confronted about it, he claimed that he had done it, but when generating the PDF, it was somehow transformed in the other student's report, with only the name changed. This is being caught in a lie and try to avoid it treating the instructor as stupid.
Adding some research: Wikipedia links a paper where some subjects were falsely accused of academic cheating and offer a lenient punishment if they recognised the fact.
Here is a criminal justice perspective I have not had to deal with such egregious situations in the classroom. The US's penal law system is based on retribution; that is you've committed a wrong against society, and it is societies duty to exact a punishment somehow equivalent to that wrong.
My experience is people tend to frame the motivation for punishment de facto in retributive terms, even if it is not really appropriate for the situation. All institutions I have been associated with have official committees that evaluate student misconduct - and cheating is their main calling.
Assuming such a committee exists in your school, you should report the students behavior and it should be clear in your syllabus that is the consequence of cheating. It is likely the said committee will cover any retributive actions necessary to fulfill any harms to society, so the question then becomes what do you do to the students in response to the behavior?
This depends on your goals of the punishment to begin with. If you even have discretion at this point beyond your schools official policy for cheating. Studies in criminal justice tend to find that the severity of punishment is only weakly linked to deterrence - the probability of being caught is a much stronger influence on whether the student will commit the behavior.
Pretty much any sort of note to the individual student that you caught them cheating will likely prevent future cheating. Even absent of punishment, this is a strong signal that their probability of being caught is high. My limited experience just letting students know "Your homework looks an awfully lot like the student who sits next to you. So you need not be worried about "letting them off the hook" especially if they have been referred to the student misconduct panel.
Punishments oriented towards these perspectives often go hand in hand. One immediate example that comes to mind is to have the offending students lead a classroom discussion on the material they cheated on this would be better for only one or two students though.
Others may be extra-curricular activities, especially those that give back to the rest of the class e. Public shaming is an incredibly strong deterrent, e. Restorative justice on its face may seem awkward since it is a victimless crime, but that doesn't make the potential punishments I suggest here any less reasonable.
Anyway it is preferable that in the future to be very specific in your syllabus about what will happen. Otherwise it appears ad-hoc and can be construed as prejudiced toward any particular student. In terms of relation to "admitting a wrong" - this philosophically should not have any bearing on the punishment that the offender receives. It is unfortunate a few conflations are being presented here in terms of plea bargaining - which is really a negative externality of the criminal justice system and the need to triage.
When you plea bargain you concede to receiving a punishment for a lesser crime - you don't even have to admit you did anything wrong e. The significance of admitting a wrong though is often placed on the other end of the system.
It is often a requirement of parole that the offender admit their wrongdoing in front of the board before they are granted parole. In terms of restorative justice a key event is often just placing the offender in front of the victim and having the offender admit their wrong-doing. Cooperation tends to be higher for offenders than you might expect - typically victims have a lower rate of cooperation. I don't like this practice for two reasons. These concerns are based on my experience serving on an academic honesty committee; for reasons of confidentiality, I will not go into further detail about this experience.
You are creating an incentive for an innocent student to falsely confess, if they believe that they will be found guilty in any event. False confessions are much more common than most people believe, and a student in an academic investigation is under pressures similar to a suspect being interrogated by police.
You raise the question of whether you are taking the confession into account in a fair way. If students contest your actions, the issue of whether all cheaters were treated equally will arise; each factor you consider in making your decision will make this more complicated.
You need to be absolutely sure who the parties are and exactly what their involvement is. Having two or more identical papers is often not enough to know who cheated.
Further, sometimes the shame involved is not enough for someone to confess in order to try again. Finally, as we've learned from other areas, sometimes people will confess to things they never did just to try and get past the problem.
Call each student in for a review. This should be back to back, but behind closed doors. Preferably where each student didn't know the others were also there; although that may be difficult. I'd recommend having two people present during the review in order to try and be unbiased in the analysis. Take notes and discuss after you have heard everyone. For anyone that was successful in defending the work, I'd give them normal marks. For anyone that was unsuccessful I'd give them a zero and a warning.
I wouldn't ask any of them if they cheated. However, if during the course of the review someone confessed then I'd ask for the full details. If they attempted to blame others, it would still be a zero. If it ever occurred again then I'd escalate it per university guidelines. That's a really good question, that I generally often wonder about myself when dealing with plagiarism. As such, I don't have a fully fledged answer, just some thoughts.
AFAIK, most courts are supposed to lower the punishment if you plead guilty of a crime, so there is certainly precedence for this. That being said, looking at court practice also gives a feeling of the downside of this. In general, people accused of a crime tend to plead Not Guilty as long as they see a reasonable chance of getting away, and plead Guilty if it is clear that they will be sentenced anyway.
Pretty much the same thing also tends to happen for plagiarising students - they will deny until presented with sufficient evidence, at which point they own up. I don't know. The honesty thing basically flew out the window when they were trying to cheat the first time, right? I don't see a huge difference in honesty levels between either of the three cases.
As discussed above, I don't consider somebody smart enough to recognise a lost case as significantly more honest than somebody who has a strategy of denial. It's also not clear to me what the relative different in penalties should be, if there is one. The basic expectation in every class is that whatever you write will be your own words , generated from your own understanding. Therefore it is acceptable to incorporate someone else's words in your paper only if you clearly indicate the words are someone else's.
It is also possible to plagiarize other forms of expression -- someone else's computer code, mathematical expressions, technical designs, artistic works, etc.
Here we are concentrating on plagiarism of words. The important part of a writing assignment is the opportunity to learn and grow. What's wrong with plagiarism?
First, plagiarism defeats the purpose of writing assignments. When you substitute someone else's understanding or expression for your own, you avoid the work of using and improving your own expressive ability. Therefore, plagiarism also defeats the university's goal of teaching students to write, not just copy. Second, plagiarism is a form of lying , because the professor is expecting to read your words, not someone else's.
Plagiarism destroys the mutual respect that should exist between professor and student. Many professors take plagiarism very personally. If you have ever taken your time to teach someone something you consider valuable and then found that your time was wasted, you will understand the feeling.
Third, plagiarism defeats the purpose of scholarship. Thus it is unacceptable from all scholars, not just students. The goal of scholarship is to discover, understand, and create.
That purpose is defeated when old knowledge is fraudulently presented as original and new. For the same reason plagiarism is also unacceptable in many nonacademic professional fields such as journalism and creative writing. Exceptions in certain fields do not extend to students. There are certainly some times in industry and the professions where originality and authorship are not important and it is appropriate to take other people's words without citing them.
For example, an executive might copy text for a business plan without being expected to cite the source, or a lawyer might copy language from one contract to another. However, even if you are training for such a profession, you are a student who is still learning the craft. Whatever the conventions are in the "real world" of employment, in the real world of teaching and learning you are expected to do your own writing and avoid plagiarism no matter what class you are in.
Sometimes plagiarism is described as a form of stealing or copyright infringement. It can be. However, it is always unacceptable to plagiarize, even if the author of the work says you can use it.
How do I avoid plagiarism? Plagiarism defeats the University's goal of teaching students to write, not just copy. There are three things you need to do to avoid plagiarism: Think, Write, and Signal. Think about your paper topic and the research you have done. Make sure you have actually thought about everything in your paper well enough to explain it in your own words. Make sure you start the assignment soon enough to think and understand, not just research and type.
Generate your own words to express your own understanding. If you cannot get started, or if you think your words are just too clumsy or inadequate, get help from your professor or the Writing Center. Other people's words should always be a supplement, not a substitute, for your own writing. Clearly signal whenever you are using someone else's words, whether you are using them by direct quotation or paraphrase.
Any direct quotation must be indicated by two things: "quotation marks" or else "block quotation" plus a "reference" also called a "citation" to the source. A reference alone is not sufficient to signal a direct quotation. In addition, when you are writing your own words you will naturally tend to signal a quotation with an indication in your paper, in your own words, about where the quotation comes from and why you included it -- perhaps because it is well-known, or was written by an expert, or even that it expresses an idea that is particularly mistaken or silly.
How do quotation marks, block quotations, and references work?
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