One of Many Cases

1. One of Many Cases • Senior honors student is admitted to a special accelerated program allowing graduate courses • Enrolls in public policy course; 80% of the grade comes from two papers that are assigned and collected (no instruction) • One is a lit. review (15-20 pages); student has never produced one • Chooses self-regulation; researches it thoroughly

2. Case, Continued • Student is accused of plagiarism and fails • Teacher has submitted the paper to turnitin.com and finds that 13% of the paper is direct quotations • Student has placed a parenthetical reference after each quotation and full ref. in bibliography • But she has left off the quotation marks • After multiple appeals, she has hired an attorney but has already been dropped from the program

3. What the Case Reveals • Lack of administrative clarity in conceptions of plagiarism • Reliance on methods of plagiarism detection that are not sensitive to context • Denial of pedagogical responsibility

4. The WPA Statement http://www.wpacouncil.org

5. Main Components 1. Definition 2. Causes 3. Shared Responsibilities Students: integrity Administrators: support Faculty: teaching/mentoring 4. Best Practices

6. Best Practices: Innovate • Create unique assignments • creative angles and topics • hybrid genres • multi-modal assignments • episodic or multi-staged tasks • cases and scenarios

7. Best Practices: Work from Goals • Create class-specific assignments • ask students to incorporate material from class discussions/lectures • provide additional readings/materials for writing • design assignments from course material

8. Best Practices: Play with Audience • Create specific audiences (or self-reflection) for assignments • Consider asking students to write the same text for different audiences and/or purposes • Ask for “parallel texts” in which students reflect on their papers and processes

9. Best Practices: Use Portfolios • Create portfolios (collections of work around a specific topic or several topics) • Student portfolios provide a collection of work that documents progress over time • Portfolios can contain both primary documents (the “artifacts” of assignments) and secondary documents (reflections and commentary) • Students take ownership of and responsibility for their portfolios

10. Best Practices: Work With Sources • Examples for discussion • Puzzling cases • Multiple options for integrating material • Problems in “common knowledge” • Brief practice activities • Rhetorical purposes of citation • Questions of how much to cite and why • Variations in citation practices across/within fields • Source sequence

11. Best Practices: Teach Ethics of Attribution • Explore the ethical dimensions of attribution. • When is it appropriate to use language and information without attribution? • What governs the use of information from electronic sources? • How does attribution vary across contexts? • Use mini-cases or vignettes to focus on borderline cases

12. The CWSP Can Help www2.chass.ncsu.edu/cwsp • Workshops • Faculty Seminar • Brown Bag sessions • Individual consultations • Web resources