The singular anomaly, the freshman plagiarist (they'd none of them be missed, they'd none of them be missed)

As a first-time grader, one of the potential problems that most concerned me was the issue of plagiarism - both how to recognize it and how to deal with it.

I really didn't expect to encounter it on the very first brief I graded.

I decided to tackle one of the Extended Studies assignments since the Brief #1's were only just trickling in, and they wouldn't provide much grading challenge anyway. The assignment I drew was about evaluating sources: examining the credentials of the author and the publication as well as the validity of the content.

The student had evaluated two sources. After my first read-through, my impression was that the student hadn't fully followed the directions, though he or she had done an exceptional job of listing the first author's credentials.

So exceptional that I had to give it another look. A quick Google search confirmed that the three biographical sentences had been lifted verbatim from the end of a book review.

Unfortunately, the flagging system is still being retooled, so I couldn't send it back to the instructor, and I had already saved my comments, so I couldn't return it to the top of the queue and grade something else. I finished my comments, included a link to the plagiarized article, and issued a stern warning about plagiarism. Then I docked the student severely in the final grade.

But I wasn't certain if I had quite handled the grade correctly. A few possibilities had occurred to me - give a zero for the assignment. Take fifty points off the top - a zero for the first evaluation. Take twenty-five points off the top - half credit for the first evaluation. In the end, I took the last option, which may have been too nice. With the rest of the assignment's flaws, it would have been mid-to-low-C range if it had been all the student's work; the penalty dropped it squarely to a failing grade.

Since I'm just starting out, I'm sure I'm going to make plenty of mistakes. But my goal is to learn from them. In any other class, those three sentences would have been enough to award the student a zero and an after-class conference; if they appeared in a final paper, the consequences could be even worse. But ostensibly one of the skills we're teaching in 1301 and 1302 is how to synthesize information from a variety of sources without plagiarizing. In which case it may not have been a conscious attempt to cheat - it may be just another error, albeit a serious one, but an error like a comma splice or a sentence fragment.

I would be inclined to give a student the benefit of the doubt, especially when the rest of the assignment shows evidence of less-than-stellar compositional skills. And then still level a stiff penalty to show the student that we really mean business. They need to understand that turning in their own bad work is infinitely better than turning in someone else's.

So here I'm asking for other people's input. Was I too nice by dropping what would have been a 69 to a 44? Should it have gone down to a 19 or a zero? Or, confronted with such a clear case of plagiarism, should I have waited to be sure the flag system was working or until I had contacted Dr. Lang to ask her advice?

I eagerly await your responses.

First, an introduction.

My name is Andrew Kibelbek, and I am beginning the first semester of my master's studies in technical communication. I was born in Pennsylvania, moved to Ohio with my family in 1998, received my B.A. at Cedarville University in central Ohio, and am now joining Texas Tech from the Cincinnati area. I love movie soundtracks, reading and writing science fiction, and watching football - I am a fanatical Pittsburgh Steelers fan.

My undergraduate work was in electronic media with an emphasis on audio. I also have a lifelong interest in writing, which is primarily what sparked my interest in technical communication. In a lot of ways I feel I am entering unfamiliar territory, since I am very new to the field, but I'm eager to find points of contact between my rather eclectic body of undergraduate study, which, as well as E-Media, included creative writing, music, drama, and a smattering of philosophy and aesthetics, and the equally eclectic field of tech comm.

I'm approaching my GPTI responsibilities with some apprehension, since I've never been so directly responsible for other students' grades before. Then there's also the prospect of facing a potentially unhealthy volume of freshman-quality writing. But after orientation, I find myself looking forward to the challenge of meeting students wherever they are and, hopefully, helping them to improve their verbal skills. I'm certain it will involve a substantial learning curve for me, and I'm hopeful that the comments I receive in this blog, along with the posts I read in my classmates' blogs, will be a valuable resource as I tackle my duties as a document instructor.