I had not been following this thread, then I started grading an assignment
for my students in the Introduction to Psychology Laboratory and had an
experience that is very much like Paul Smith's (below).
In my Intro lab we do an experiment one week. I summarize the group data on
a web page and the students turn in a written assignment the next week. This
is the first time in this semester that I asked these students to try
writing in APA style. Up until now I have been using more informal writing
assignments. To prepare them for this assignment (the first of four). I
wrote a sample APA style write-up of an earlier experiment, took a day to
talk about it and how I tried to use two or three different styles in that
write-up so that they could see several ways that they could write the same
material.
Most of the 54 students did fine. But a small group of them did not even
bother to paraphrase the prose from my web page or the sample write up, they
simply copied (cut and paste?) my own prose back into the work they asked me
to grade. Some of these were weak students but most of the them were average
and a few are strong. Like Paul, I am puzzled at what they thought the
purpose of the assignment was.
Paul thanks for the great page on assessing authorship! I went back and
found the URL in the TIPS archive and gave it to my students. Now if they
only read it.
Good luck to all of you with your own papers.
Dennis
Dennis M. Goff
Dept. of Psychology
Randolph-Macon Woman's College
Lynchburg, VA 24503
-----Original Message-----
From: Paul C. Smith [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Tuesday, November 30, 1999 2:21 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: RE: Plagiarism/ack!
I guess I didn't make the context clear enough. This was the
student's
response to a question on my Authorship Assessment, in which _I provide_ the
source paragraph, and she is to paraphrase it. There are three source
paragraphs, printed on the assessment, which they are to paraphrase. The
very point of the assignment is solely to learn to properly paraphrase a
source material, so she _knew_ I would compare her writing with the
original. That's what makes her response so intriguing. Did she really
believe that one of her college-level assignments was to copy a couple of
sentences from a handout to another sheet of paper? What did she think the
purpose of the assignment was? I'm baffled.
Paul Smith
Alverno College
Milwaukee
