My tutee has plagiarised my work! AIBU to have sent this email?

[DissertationDrama]

I have been privately tutoring a third year university student through the dissertation process. This has included face to face sessions and proofreading. Some months ago I gave this student a copy of my (first class) undergraduate dissertation with the express instruction not to copy it, to use it purely for structuring guidance. During my degree my university provided every student with copies of ex-students' dissertations to use for the same purpose, so I assumed this was a generous, but fairly normal action on my part. How I regret it now! This evening the student has sent me the latest chapter of their dissertation, and it is identical to the same chapter of my dissertation, with perhaps one word in every twenty changed to match the topic their dissertation concerns. WIBU to have sent the following email?

Dear Student,

This is is plagiarism.

You have completely copied my X chapter, changing odd words to make it relevant to your topic. On a personal level this is unfair, but from an academic point of view this is completely unacceptable. You absolutely must not submit this - you will be caught. Your university will scan every piece of work submitted for plagiarism and this will definitely be picked up, particularly because it was originally written by a student of this university only twelve months ago. If you are caught you could loose your degree, there are also consequences for me as the original author of the work. Again, I will reiterate: you absolutely cannot submitthis as part of your dissertation.

I sent you a copy of my work as guidance, in the same way that the university gave everyone copies of previous students' work last year. It's fine to follow the rough structure of another person's work, but I did not and do not give you permission to copy it.

As you haven't actually attempted to submit my work as your own (only sent it to me) I'm going to give you a chance to change this. For reasurance I want to see a completely new version of this chapter that bares no resemblance to my work by X date. If you send this to me by then, then I'll continue to look at your subsequent work if you still want me to. We all make mistakes after all. However, if you don't send me a totally new methods chapter, I will be forced to report this to the university to protect both of us.

Let me know which it is going to be.

From,
Dissertation Drama.

i'm a very mature student at University right now and am so shocked at the cheating that goes on. A student actually asked me if they could cheat in an exam (because they were sitting it in their small classroom and wondered if they could peer over, because I'm part time i did the exam last year and we were sat very far away from each other so no we couldn't) . Some students keep their phones on them during exams, despite being told it is an offense, they then go to the toilets during the exam. Some have been found with notes on them. I've also had some who during group work have just copied and pasted work that isn't theirs, it then needs to be redone by someone else in the group as they clearly can't manage and if it isn't done we all get marked down. I've also had one recently ask if they can find a paper someone else has done and use that. At my Uni we have a huge amount of students with very poor English skills, it's no wonder some of them can't cope- though grammar is not marked down

BTW my course is Masters level and they have just dropped the required grade for 2018, was a 2.1 when I started, now a 2.2. It's all about the money.

I'd have changed the "loose" to "lose" before you sent it though....

One of the things I hate about plagiarism is that Turnitin is, for serious offenders, a dead issue.

Sure, the pathetic kids who are behind with their work and steal a chunk from something vaguely relevant, they get caught. But most of the cases I've seen are as much welfare cases as academic, and they're as I saw more often sad than bad.

But the contract cheaters, who pay someone to write a report or essauy for them de novo? They don't get caught. A few do because the contract cheater themselves plagiarised the work (there is no honour amongst thieves, apparently) and sometimes the marker notices the jump in standards or some stuff which is obviously from another course, but my gut feel is it works.

And, worse, Turnitin is an oracle. You can pay Turnitin to allow you to submit your work to get the same report your institution will, and do it several times. So you learn in seconds which bits of your work are suspicious, and you can focus your re-writing on those bits, and try again a few times, until you have a version which just slides through the process. That's appalling.

So someone who sets out to defraud the process can: we don't catch contract cheaters, at least not the good ones, and Turnitin is trivially gamed by anyone with $50. It's terrible.

I think you are being pretty kind by not just reporting this to the university straight away. As pp have said, it would be picked up and it would be heavily penalised.

The standards at my uni were so low that there were workshops on writing and structuring essays during the second year, and constantly having to go over how to quote and do a bibliography as students couldn't get to grips with it.

I thought that email was excellent, and I think the university would thank you for making abundantly clear how serious plagiarism is.

Why do we say plagiarism / academic misconduct ...erm because you can commit academic misconduct without plagiarising and vice versa. They are not synonyms.
Exactly. It is important to be able to convey precision in academic settings. Calling plagiarism something that is copied from another piece not protected by intellectual property rights does not enter the category. The idea of 'self-plagiarism' also mentioned in this thread is even more ridiculous. You need to copy from someone else. However, it can still be academic misconduct to use the same work for two different assessments.

Bluelampshades that’s definitely been my experience of studying, and it’s blatant. Guy sitting in one exam taking ‘tissues’ out repeatly to blow his nose... I could see the ink three rows back. People talking about phones stuffed in their socks or bras. I took one exam in an assisted room as I had broken my wrist, and saw a guy opening his wallet over and over again. He had written notes on the back of business cards. The invigilators don’t care, they’re often retirees and they don’t want to do the paperwork.

I agree with whoever said the worse offenders are difficult to catch unless you have a small group, know your teaching subject very well and recognise immediately a submission that it is not written by a student. The only way of dealing with it is organising a viva. This means at least 3 academics involved/possible appeals, etc. I am sure many escape.

I witnessed cheating too once in an exam, the girl was wearing a dress with over the knee socks. She kept pulling down the socks.. she'd written all over her legs

I agree with whoever said the worse offenders are difficult to catch unless you have a small group, know your teaching subject very well and recognise immediately a submission that it is not written by a student.

Like one student I had who "wrote" a beautiful introduction but an unintelligible results section.

Or the other whose work looked like a jumble of sentences. It was.

The idea of 'self-plagiarism' also mentioned in this thread is even more ridiculous. You need to copy from someone else.

You'd think so. But no. It exists.

When I did my masters (3 years ago) I was told one of my fellow students failed her final year and therefore the degree for self- plagiarism. She had written one outstanding essay in our first year (it was a three year Masters) and never done as well again so for our final submission she tweaked that essay slightly and resubmitted it. I heard It was failed for not being an original piece of work.

I'd contact the university yourself to be honest. Your email is ideal.

I don’t think you need to contact the university, he hasn’t submitted it. Just keep a copy of your email, and make sure the student sends you the new chapter and you’re sure he’s changed it. You sound very kind, and probably sympathetic to the tutee because it sounds like they’ve had some other issues too. Hopefully they’ve listened and are changing it like they’ve said they have.

Like one student I had who "wrote" a beautiful introduction but an unintelligible results section. hmm

Or the other whose work looked like a jumble of sentences. It was.*

Lweji, these cases are many times related to the use of Google translate. It works very well for some sections and not for others (or well with some languages/disciplines and not others). It is a nightmare to keep an eye on the many offenders.

By the way, I would not contact the University either. Unless he has submitted he has done nothing wrong. It is a draft.

I'm a lecturer and have lent my supervisees some of my work to look at for tips on structuring and particularly things to include in the methods. I thought that was fine. Now I've read this thread I won't sleep ! Please someone tell me it's not a bad thing to let students see your work? (Mines freely available by googling me anyway?)

@reddressblueshoes A lot of universities use a system called Turnitin which compares other students work submitted to other universities around the country and compares it for similarities so even if the OP’s work hasn’t been published it will be stored in Turnitin’s system for comparison

To be fair, if your undergraduate dissertation wasn't published - and you don't say it was - I imagine that it wouldn't be picked up using plagiarism software

Absolute bullshit. Not quite sure where you got that information from but at the very least since 2015, universities have detailed databases for plagiarism which does include the work of alumni and current students. They would be stupid not to surely? The OP’s tutee would have definitely triggered TurnItIn upon submission.

Certain phrases or quotes for some submissions will give a high plagiarism result (same studies, quotes and references resulting in similar wording etc) but the university will disregard them as with certain submissions, it can be expected - a whole class could come out with a minor plagiarism detection percentage. However that is clearly NOT the case with OP’s tutee. Really it’s just idiotic on their behalf as it is their degree in jeopardy after all.

I used to work at a Univerity department that made all Masters dissertations and Ph.D. theses available online (very into Creative Commons). We did discover that some enterprising soul was printing them off and selling them on Ebay! Luckily we caught it early on and reported them.

Well written. Good balance. But yeah, it's madness that someone feels like they have to resort to such a thing. Makes you wonder why they wanted to go uni in the first place!

My experience is with secondary school pupils. Some were giving in 'essays' with sizeable chunks copied wholesale from texts. I tried to discover the reason and got the response 'Well, we know it's right' which I found sad.

So far there is no harm done. The student has been found out before the dissertation has been submitted. I would hope he/she will have been sufficiently shocked to avoid such cheating in future. Make sure your work hasn’t been shared with others in the department and then let it be. The damage has been avoided, your email was perfect and the student will be left in no doubt of their dishonesty and stupidity and of your ability to share this with those in authority if further evidence of cheating comes to light.