Carbondale Bytelife

The committee tasked with drawing up the new guidelines for SIUC's plagerism policy has been accused of, wait for it, no not yet, almost, yes plagiarism.

Labels: ethics, plagiarism, siuc

It's the gift that keeps on giving. The new proposed plagiarism policy for SIUC is out now and the DE focuses on one particular part, the provision allowing the president's office to punish those who bring plagiarism charges deemed frivolous or malicious.

I find it amusing that this section follows one prohibiting retaliation against an individual who makes complaints or allegations of a violation of the plagiarism policy. Also, interestingly, the proposed policy ONLY applies to the Offices of the President and Chancellor. All other cases will be handled by the individual academic unit. You can read the entire 7 page draft here.


In a follow-up in today's DE, one of the principals in the plagiarism investigation, associate professor Gerald Nelms, commented that, under these guidelines, the allegations against President Poshard would have been considered worthy of investigation. However, Professor Nelms felt that his comments to the DE were taken out of context and he has written a very lengthy explanation of his reasoning in the article comments.

Labels: Glenn Poshard, plagiarism, siuc

SIUE's Faculty Senate voted yesterday to call for President Poshard to step down as the leader of SIU, 45-5. Meanwhile, the Southern continues to call for healing and reconciliation, while its readers call for some action to be taken to show that the university cares about plagiarisms. Meanwhile, the Tribune weighs in again.

Labels: plagiarism

From what I've read, one of the problems that led to to the plagiarisms problem was the BOT's reliance on the use of Turnitin to test Pres. Poshard's dissertation. For those not familiar with Turnitin, it has become a fairly standard method of checking papers for plagiarism. Basically, you upload the paper in question to Turnitin, the program checks the paper against other papers in its database and reports what percentage of the paper appears copied from other papers in the database and where the papers in question can be found. Once a paper is submitted, it becomes part of the database for future searches. I know of instructors who routinely have all students run their papers through Turnitin before submitting them.

A downside to the program is what appears to have happened in this case. If papers or books aren't in the database or online, Turnitin can't check against them so returns a result of no plagiarism present. The materials in question are old and obscure enough that no one has put them online, ergo they are not accessible for comparison by Turnitin.

I have used Turnitin to catch plagiarized materials in class. A group of students turned in a term paper incorporating concepts more appropriate to a graduate level than an undergraduate class. When I ran it through Turnitin, it showed 90% of the paper had come from another source, specifically a paper from the Wharton School of Business website. If you're going to steal, steal from the best, says I.

Labels: ethics, plagiarism