Help please - Plagiarism

[DizzIzz]

Hi, please can I ask for advice especially from any uni tutors etc....
DD has today received an email from uni asking her to attend a meeting in 3 weeks time about 2 pieces of her work, where she will have to confirm if she has or has not attempted to plagiarise.

She is in her first year and is absolutely distraught. She has read the guidelines and the module in question is not her main subject. She has referenced the percentage of work required but had not included quotation marks, as in her main subject she does not include quotation marks, just reference and footnotes. Surely they will be able to see that the fact she has all of the referencing, she is hardly trying to pass it as her own?

Any idea what the outcome is likely to be? Thanks.

At my institution if all sources were referenced but direct quotes were not properly acknowledged she would get a stern telling off and be required to resubmit the offending coursework.

You should be able to access the uni's plagiarism policy online. If not she should make sure she gets hold of a copy of the policy and and available guidance for students ASAP. Her tutor should provide these prior to the meeting.

If she has told you the whole story then she will be fine :)

Ok, thanks, we will try and get hold of the guidelines.

She's misunderstood. If she's quoting directly she needs to use quotation marks, no matter what the subject. If she's put the references I'm sure they will see she wasn't trying to plagiarism, but I expect they're concerned she didn't understand.

I really hope so, we are so worried and 3 weeks is a long time to overthink. I have read the uni guidelines as suggested by Kemmo and it reads as though she may well receive a ticking off, be asked to resubmit or lose credits whereas I am going to the extremes of her being expelled / having to redo the whole of first year.
I am trying to reassure all of us that they are hopefully there to help and support her as well.

Get her to email her personal tutor.

If it is as you say I cannot imagine she would be asked to redo the first year, let alone be expelled.

Plagiarism is taken very seriously at an academic level, so of your DD has not referenced her work according to the uni guidelines then this is potentially very serious. However, she is in her first year and the uni may be a little more lenient to transgressions from this rule. Many universities don't count the marks for the first year in the final degree results, so even if she is penalised, it may not affect her overall result when it comes to it. However, if she quotes or paraphrases from anything in the future she must acknowledge the source. It is hard, but the more you do it the easier it becomes. If in doubt, reference it! A really good book that might help her is 'Cite Them Right' which explains what to reference and how to do it. If she is using footnotes, as many Arts subjects do, then the MHRA referencing guidelines are freely available to download.

She is going to speak to her academic tutor on Monday, couldn't get him today. She managed to speak to her tutor today of the module in question and he said that he has not flagged anything up but cannot discuss it further as it could hinder her case.

She has referenced the percentage of work required but had not included quotation marks, as in her main subject she does not include quotation marks, just reference and footnotes

Technically, she's plagiarised. The university is likely to have put her essay through something like Turnitin, which will identify the percentage of acknowledged and unacknowledged use of others people's words/work.

If she quoted another person's words, without indicating that they were other people's words, then yes, technically she has plagiarised. She needs to know how not to do this in future, and I would hope that the meeting she will have will be about ensuring she understands this. It may be that they will go through this with her, show her where she made her mistakes, and tell her never to do it again.

While referencing systems can look confusing, they are not rocket science. You just follow the style sheet. It's about learning professional standards.

Thanks again. After reading the uni's guidelines it seems to indicate that she will probably find out in writing 5 days after the meeting what the decision / punishment is.

Does anyone know if this is normal or may she be told at the end of the meeting, sorry if it sounds like I'm asking to know the impossible.

Every meeting of this type that I've had I've given a decision verbally in the meeting and the followed up in writing.

But she's not meeting with me :)

Thanks Kemmo, also just wondered roughly how many students may be spoken to about plagiarism or is it extremely rare.

Not all that rare now that we routinely check most coursework. Hard to put a number on it. But I know some excellent students who graduated with excellent degrees who had incidents like this.

Must more rare (IME) are the cases are genuine cheating.

But fortunately it is relatively easy to tell the difference.

Assuming her account is accurate then the only long term consequence is likely to be that she will have to be obsessively careful in the future as a second offence would be taken much more seriously.

Thanks, I will try and get some sleep!!

I would strongly suggest that she goes to speak to her Students' Union. They will be well versed in the regulations, be able to advise her, and can even go along to the hearing with her. It's what they're there for - they're not just there for cheap pints.

Thanks, she is going to speak to her tutor first on Monday hopefully and may well do this afterwards.

Most universities will have a range of sanctions depending on the severity of the issue and whether or not it is a repeat offence.

At my uni these include formal warning, % of academic mark deducted, zero mark, withdrawal from the university. Which penalty is applied is set out in our policy.

If a module is failed (though poor mark or penalty) students can resit but the mark is capped at 40%. Students who fail in one module can retake in Sept.

So at my university, the worst sanction for a student who made referencing errors in one assessment in the first year would be a half-mark for that piece of work. If it caused them to fail the module they would have a Sept resit and, assuming nothing else was wrong, they could carry on as usual from the second year.

Thanks, do you think there would be any chance of having the meeting brought forward, as 3 weeks is such a long time and unfortunately I am going to be out of the country on the scheduled date. I understand that they are very busy but she is not coping very well with this.

Her tutors may be busy, they may have other teaching, they may have a further checking procedure, the senior person for the meeting may have a very full diary all sorts of things. I know my Dean, for example, who can sometimes be involved in cheating cases, is often away for 10 days at a time visiting partner universities in India, or wherever. My diary is pretty full for the next 2 weeks if this came up for me in the essays I'm marking all this weekend (I started at 6am this morning), I'd need to schedule it for about 10 days' hence.

So, there could be many reasons.

Frankly, it's not your call. And I'm not sure that you being away at the time the appointment is scheduled is something the university is likely to take note of.

Your daughter is seeing her tutor, and that tutorial should be helpful. What you can do to help is to advise her to seek guidance on referencing, and not to panic about it I sometimes think students' anxieties about the essay itself get projected onto referencing, as if that's the hardest thing about the essay whereas actually, it really is the easiest thing!

Academics are professionals. We know what we're doing, and we can be trusted to deal with this sort of thing without being unfair. We have procedures, and your daughter will not have not been told about plagiarism.

I'm afraid your daughter has contravened one of the most important professional principles in a university: not acknowledging the use of someone else's ideas and/or words. Even if it is not malicious or malingering or deliberate, I'm afraid she has to take the consequences. Most students in most universities have to sign a declaration that their work is not plagiarised.

Let's hope it's a rap over the knuckles. It sounds as though she'll take that seriously, and be much more aware of appropriate professional behaviour in future. Focus on helping her to learn from this experience, as difficult as it is for her.

Unlikely that the date will change. Apart from anything else, the time between notification and hearing is there to allow the student time to prepare a defence.

Is your DD in touch with the student's union advice centre? Usually they will help prepare a defence and can accompany a student to the hearing. Even if it was a genuine mistake, it is worth getting them involved as they know the system and will have experience in supporting students through this.

It is important to remember that tutors can't really support students in cases like this as they are often 'witnesses' to the offence.

She can ask - but I'd guess the date will be something like when the Chair of the Exam Board is next free. It won't have been set so far ahead for no good reason.

We're just like Creamteas - the most stringent penalty we'd impose on a student who made a good faith error in referencing in an assessment would be demanding a resubmission (we don't have the rule about halving the marks but since marks of 80+ are pretty much unheard of and the passmark is 40 it would make little difference). And we do have discretion to apply more lenient penalties where appropriate.

If we thought it was full-on naughty cheating and the student denied all it would get referred to an external committee who can do anything up to suspending the student and fining them. But this happens rarely and tends to involve people doing amazingly complex things with mobile phones in the toilets during exams, or trying to buy entire dissertations online.

Good faith errors are common especially amongst first years. Please don't worry that they will throw the book at her for a first offence. The fact she is taking this so seriously would be a good sign from our point of view.

Yeah, like I said, I understand they are busy, it's just something that crossed my mind. At the end of the day, she has referenced the work but has missed the quotation marks, let's just hope that common sense prevails.

I've been to a plagiarism hearing at uni, supporting a friend.

Her personal tutor couldn't discuss it beforehand. We went to the hearing, there were 2 or 3 people I think. They'd told her what they thought she'd done. She explained what she thought she'd done, apologised, convinced them it was a mistake, etc.

We had to leave the room for ten minutes and then got called back in. They gave her a warning and she had to redo the assignment. Think she was only allowed a 40% pass for that assignment.

Ok, thanks beaver, that's reassuring. Was it quite a quick meeting?

Yes. Ten mins max.

Thanks again.