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.

Lweji, these cases are many times related to the use of Google translate.

That was not the case there.
But definitely relates to a whole other list of examples.

Cheeky fuck

I think the earlier advice of still informing the relevant university people is sound. Also to strongly consider ceasing your work with them.

As long as you keep that email you sent, I would think you’d be fine, but informing them would be good I think.

OP did they reply?

The one time I have ever snitched on someone was during a uni exam, when two people were cheating together. I had studied for months for the test and I just thought "fuck this shit". Cheating/plagiarism are completely unacceptable and unfair on others.

I would be tempted to give a heads up to the university too. The student hasn't actually done anything wrong yet, but they obviously need reminding about what plagiarism is, how to avoid it etc.

It’s unfair to contact the University. The student is still learning and has a chance to learn from your advice and correct what they’ve done. They won’t have time to worry about drafts and should have procedures in place to pick up plagiarism for submitted work.
However it’s worrying that the student got to year 3, with extra tuition, without realising that if they submitted that work it would be classed as plagiarism.
Speaking as someone who works in malpractice administration, if they had submitted the work, it’s very unlikely that you’d be dragged in as you evidently submitted your work a year earlier at a different university. If you both submitted the same work for the same course at the same time, that would be a different matter, and you would both be pulled in to ascertain what had happened.

I agree not to contact the university. They have not submitted plagiarized work (yet) and the uni will not be concerned with monitoring private tuition that isn't in their contract. You are effectively teaching them what plagiarism is, which is obviously a learning curve for this student (!) It is not your business to report them for this off campus.

Bit long winded but what an idiot it was lucky it was caught before submission. I learned a valuable lesson in my first year at college when I got an F for work submitted as had one paragraph almost the same as one of the key books from the course. I was so green I genuinely didn't realise how obvious it was & how literally I'd taken it. Luckily it was just 1st yr & was just 30% of total results. I was mortified. You'd think by dissertation time though they'd have known this they could have failed their finals as a result!!

I worked on a project (as a PostDoc) and gave an internal presentation, after the talk someone asked for the powerpoint. A few months later I heard someone had presented something very similar to my work. Went and tracked it down and it was my work/powerpoint that they had presented at a national level conference. Not only that they won an award too for the work 'they did' since they were a postgrad it was a fairly small amount but still. Tracked down their supervisor and they were made to return the money and issue an apology to me and the organising committee. That was the end of it as far I was concerned.

Camaleon
The idea of 'self-plagiarism' also mentioned in this thread is even more ridiculous. You need to copy from someone else. You need to copy from someone else. However, it can still be academic misconduct to use the same work for two different assessments.

Self-plagiarism is absolutely not ridiculous. I was not using the same work for two different assessments, as you put it, I was referring to resluts gathered from an action research project previously carried out by me as they were relevant to my dissertation. In order to avoid seklf-plagiarism, I had to reference my own action research report in exactly the same way as any other source of evidence.

Caaarl,

'Self- plagriarism' can be a manner of speaking, but cannot be compared with taking the words of someone else and passing them as your own, because they were always yours.

I don't have enough details to comment much one way or another about your dissertation. If you were using the results of former research, either you repeat all the original references or you just make reference to your own research. If you are copy/pasting yourself, it may raise uses of originality or bad referencing. It is not 'self-taking someone else's work and passing it as my own' i.e. self-plagiarism.