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Pittsburg State University
1701 South Broadway
Pittsburg KS 66762
Don Judd
WAC Coordinator
English
Phone: (620) 235-4697
Janet Zepernick
Assistant WAC Coordinator
English
Phone: (620) 235-4705
Cynthia Woodburn
Assistant WAC Coordinator
Mathematics
Phone: (620) 235-4490
Bruce Shields
WAC Graduate Assistant
English
Phone: (620) 235-4686
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How can I respond to plagiarism?
To respond to plagiarism, first you have to detect it. In a Writing to Learn course, this should
be relatively easy to do, because you will have come to know your students' voices through their
in-class, informal writing. Recognizing when a student is stealing someone else's voice should not
be hard, through simple comparison. An easy way to detect plagiarism is to see if the essay
stays on topic or if it goes off into something that has not come up in class. Essays students
get off the internet or elsewhere will not have the kind of focus you can expect from papers
written for your course specifically.
Just as plagiarizing is easier due to the internet, finding the original source is easier, too.
Find a phrase that seems clearly not to be your student's own and type it word for word into
Google (Advanced Search -- this allows you to type an exact phrase). The search engine looks
for that phrase anywhere on the internet, and if the paper was taken from an internet source,
that paper will come up. See these links for detecting plagiarism:
http://flightline.highline.edu/wac/online_resources_plagiar.htm (Highline Community College)
http://alexia.lis.uiuc.edu/~janicke/plagiary.htm (University of Illinois)
On your syllabus, you should have a statement regarding what constitutes plagiarism in your
course, and the consequences of it. Once you have proven that plagiarism exists -- and have
decided whether it is intentional or unintentional -- you can follow your own rules as to
the result. In some cases, talking to the student will resolve the issue, usually with a
failing grade for the assignment. In more serious cases, you might drop the student from
your course (but that should be spelled out on the syllabus). See your departmental policy
on plagiarism for the steps you need to take. To see the university policy on plagiarism,
go to the
PSU Code of Student Rights and Responsibilities
on this website.
The discussion you have with your students about what plagiarism is in your course
(as an act of prevention) should also make the consequences of plagiarism clear.
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