Spring '08: Third Tips for Teachers Meeting

In our most recent Tips for Teachers meeting, we discussed, based on the piece, "Academic Integrity at Princeton", which can be found at

http://www.princeton.edu/pr/pub/integrity/pages/discipline.html, the challenging concepts of Plagiarism and Academic Integrity. We started our discussion by stating that The Targum had recently published an article that plagiarism was more rampant than known about, as often it went unreported. Additionally, there is a lack of communication between departments, so that if a student is caught plagiarizing in one department, it might be documented, but generally stays within that department itself.

We then went on to talk about instances of plagiarism we have witnessed or known about. One teacher present talked of a student she had who lifted his paper from a model paper displayed on the website, only making minor adjustments to paragraphs. She happened to have recently looked at that very paper on the website, so recognized it immediately, and when she spoke with the student about it, he apologized, explaining that he was frustrated with the course as he had been working hard, yet only received a C+.

Another case known about was a student who had taken the course before with a different teacher, but one who had used the same first sequence. Although the assignment questions were therefore a little different, the authors were the same, and the student simply handed in papers from the previous semester, without even remembering to change the date! We laughed at how students are often not very good at covering up their tracks.

In yet another case, a student self plagiarized, by using half of what he had written in Paper 5 in Paper 6. He had been doing well up until then, and when confronted with what he had done, he said he was tired and could not redo it, which lowered his course grade, but he did not fail the course.

We also discussed students who are friends in the dorm or from the same class, handing in an almost identical paper, perhaps with the order of paragraphs changed.

A fascinating revelation was the increased scope to plagiarise in the Hybrid course, as it is simple to copy and paste, but what was completely unexpected was the fact that a student plagiarized a response in the Discussion Forum, by pasting in comments from Wikipedia as his own, as he did not acknowledge the source. Even though this is not plagiarism in an essay, which is the usual location of plagiarism, we decided that it was still plagiarism, none-the-less, and as such the student should be asked about it, and should confess.

We talked about whether, if students had to sign an oath that their work was their own, plagiarism would decrease, and one teacher present said it would.

We moved then to the question of the narrow dividing line between collaboration and plagiarism, and looked at, whereas it is clearly not acceptable to use someone else’s words without citing the source, whether it is acceptable to use someone else’s ideas without acknowledgment. Here we were quite divided, as some felt that a class is all about the mutual construction of ideas and knowledge-building, and that ideas function as important exemplars for teaching and learning. Furthermore one teacher thought it would be impossible to police and keep track as to who contributed each idea. But there were others who felt ideas and inspirations should be acknowledged as respect to the individual and independent thinker, and one teacher talked about the analogy with patents. We then started to tie this in to not only prestige of being the originator of an idea, but also wealth associated with invention.

But certainly discussions of plagiarism are not always straight forward. What do we do, for example, with “common knowledge”? Does everyone know it, or is it culture and time dependent, in which case should the source be acknowledged? And what should happen in the instances where a professor perhaps plagiarises from his or her graduate students? Furthermore, what if someone feels she is contributing an original thought, only to find that it has been discovered and discussed before? Are there, in fact, a finite number of ideas, and just many variations on the same theme? Or would it be fair to say that two students might, as a starting point, share similar ideas about a connection or topic, but might, in the execution, write what ultimately looks very different?

Spring 08 - 2nd Tips for teachers Meeting

We read “Diversity and Complexity in the Classroom: Considerations of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender” by Barbara Gross Davis, and started with a discussion about cultural difference by considering the impact of reading Abu-Lughod or Nafisi if we have women wearing head scarves in the class. One teacher present said that she did have a student who wore a head scarf who did not come to class on the day that this reading was being discussed. However, in contrast, another teacher present said that when he did this reading, a woman in a head scarf provided lots of extra information completely voluntarily.

The question then arose as to whether we can ask our students to tell us about cultural differences, or whether we should wait to see if they volunteer. It seemed to us that it depended on the country of origin, as one British person present said she thought nothing of it when her son was in kindergarten and the class was studying England, and the teacher asked her to come in and tell the class about the country.

One teacher suggested that the suitability of asking a minority student about a particular issue perhaps depended on the number of students in that particular group who were in the class, and if there was only one student a direct question should be avoided, but if there was a significant number of the group, such as a fairly large number of Indian students in a 201 class about The Family, then it was fine to ask them questions about arranged marriage.

We talked further about the cultural diversity in our classrooms, and the important difference between using the word ‘tolerate’ (meaning there is still a problem but I’ll put up with it) and ‘accept’, which is a more whole scale embrace. One teacher mentioned how the readings in The New Humanities Reader were not all diverse.

We also discussed how the teacher her or himself might be from a minority group, and we wondered, therefore, how the students read us. It was agreed that successful students adapt to each professor they have, and in general, it is the teacher’s aim to try to establish rapport.

We went on to mention how the act of writing is a very personal one, so that if a paper is criticized, it feels to the student that he or she is the object of criticism. This led to a fruitful discussion about commenting on student papers, and how, since our comments to students are mostly in writing, we have to be exceptionally careful that we are not being misinterpreted.

We also mentioned the importance of not giving an excessive number of comments, as the students might not read them and might feel overwhelmed, and how instead we should perhaps try to identify patterns of error, as well as using pens of different colours (one for mechanical errors and the other for content).

Not only should we be careful with our written comments, but also with comments in class discussion as well. The article discusses how sometimes the best intentioned teachers, if giving special privileges to minority groups, might be interpreted as being demeaning to them. For example, some teachers might unwittingly say, “We Americans treat immigrants well”, and this we/they divide automatically can be problematic. The same could be said to be true for the I/you divide of some teachers, rather than saying 'we’ to encompass everyone in the class, including the teacher.

One teacher also pointed out how she took offense at a student complaining about the course and the particular reading, and said she was going to write back straight away. However, she prevented herself from writing an e-mail while in a ‘hot state’ and allowed some time to pass. Then she wrote asking him to explain his comments, and found to her surprise that he was not meaning to criticize her, but that he had taken a previous course and had not liked it. She realized, therefore, that he was giving a criticism about the reading, and not about her. This shows the importance of really trying to find out about a situation, rather than making assumptions.