Plagiarism workshops showing up in classes

By Jackie Womack
The Collegian

Students may be plagiarizing for their class work and not even know it.

“I think maybe people have a general idea of what [plagiarism] is but don’t know the specifics of what it is,” said Ida Jones, a Fresno State professor of business law.

It is because of this and the plagiarism that they were seeing in their own classes that Jones and Judith Scott, a communications professor, teamed up to create a plagiarism workshop that shows exactly what it is.

“I saw random plagiarism here and there but last year was the first one that I decided to check every paper,” Scott said.

She said she found about 50 percent of her class had plagiarized. She said that she had to explain to many of them they had plagiarized.

This led to research and ultimately, the collaboration on the workshops with Jones.

One thing Scott learned in her research was the three-word-rule many universities subscribe to: if there are more than three words in a row taken from a source then it deserves quotes and a source citation.

Scott said the rule makes sense.

“If you’re conscious of the three words in a row [rule], you’re not going to plagiarize,” she said.

She said students don’t seem to understand a couple of issues: rearranging words or adding a few isn’t paraphrasing and that they can’t turn in term papers from previous classes for current classes unless they have permission from both teachers.

Robert Hernandez, the executive director for Federal Program and Judicial Affairs at Fresno State, said he knows just how big a problem plagiarism is.

“Of 20,000 plus students last year, I had 117 incidents reported to me of plagiarism and cheating — and most of those were plagiarism,” he said. “That was an all-time high.”

He said punishment starts first with the teacher, who can give the student a zero for the project or an F for the class. The teacher then has the option of asking for further action from Hernandez.

Punishments range from a written warning to expulsion from the university, which would mean expulsion from the entire CSU system.

The key to the level of punishment is intent, according to Hernandez.

“Was this really intentional or accidental?” he said. “Sometimes the student tries to cite but doesn’t use quote marks. It’s the intent that makes the difference.”

The university is increasing its emphasis on academic integrity and the workshops are a great start, according to Dennis Nef, the dean of undergraduate studies.

“What happened to really get this started is the academic code of integrity,” he said.

Nef said the university had strengthened its code and had also purchased and made available Endnote software, which allows students to keep track of where they got material from and even puts it in the notation style that the student needs.

The software is available at https://help.csufresno.edu.

Nef said consequences of plagiarism can be severe:one Ohio university is taking back the master’s degrees of students who plagiarized years after they graduated.

Martha Fimbres, an international business major, said she had personallyexperienced an incident of cheating.

“I had a situation like that where a guy didn’t do anything on the group project — he just edited and turned it in,” she said.

She said the group kicked him out and told the teacher. Fimbres, who took the plagiarism workshop as part of a criminology class, saidshe learned from the workshop.

“I learned that even when you word it different, you still have to quote it,” she said.

Candice Skrapec, the criminology professor who asked to have the workshop given in her class, said the issue of plagiarism had struck home recently when she discovered a graduate student of hers had turned in the same paper for her class that the student had used for an earlier class.

“It was especially difficult because it was a student I had really worked with,” Skrapec said. “Ultimately, the student was expelled from the graduate program and from the university.”

Scott, who gave the workshop in Skrapec’s class, said the program is about honesty in academics.

“Everyone’s degree should have integrity attached to it,” she said.

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