Possible plagiarism

[frazier melissa]

Dear colleagues,

I wanted to thank all of you for responding to my plagiarism problem -- you
have helped me enormously.  I also wanted to let you know what happened.

As many of you advised, and as my Dean suggested, I called the student in
for a discussion of sources/notes etc.  This was actually not hard, as one
of the more ridiculous aspects of this whole thing was that the paper was
produced for what at Sarah Lawrence is called "conference work."  Most
seminars here have a conference component which involves regular one-on-one
meetings with the professor over the course of the semester or year as
students develop an independent project.  It is because of this conference
system that I knew exactly where the student was with his work the week
before (that is, nowhere) and I just let him know that I felt we had
skipped a few steps in the process and would like him to retrace for me the
writing of this paper -- that, after all, is what we had been supposed to
be doing all semester.  In the meantime I had been able to locate Feuer
(thanks to those of you who gave me the Dunlop citation) and felt confident
in saying that his failure to cite her with regard at least three of his
main points was plagiarism.  Despite your help, however, I was unable to
locate the source for his large statements about the Russian tradition,
Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn's contemporaries, etc.-- a number of you suggested
the same paper for sale on the Internet which I suspect but didn't buy.

In our meeting, the student brought in exactly one page of notes and
demonstrated little knowledge of his sources and none at all of the Russian
tradition, Dostoevsky, S's contemporaries, etc.  Still, as many you warned,
he continued to brazenly insist that the paper was his own work -- I won't
go into it, but many of his statements were simply outrageous.  He did
grant that he needed to cite Feuer but had a ready excuse -- absurdly
enough, this paper was supposed to be a first draft, and he said that he
had certainly intended to clean that sort of thing up in the final paper.
(I should add that we had already agreed that the final draft would be due
in January, after the break, which reflects another oddity of Sarah
Lawrence:  because it's a full-year class I actually don't have to give
grades at this point and because he is a first-semester freshman although
he missed the deadline I gave him this chance to still get in the paper and
receive full credit for the course).

And my final solution then also derives from the peculiarities of my
institution.  After reporting the results of our conversation to the Dean,
I met with the student again very briefly this morning and told him that if
I was not accusing him of plagiarism (although clearly proven in the case
of Feuer) it was only because I didn't have to -- this was, after all, a
draft, and the problem he would need to address in the final paper was its
intellectual dishonesty.  I gave him written guidelines for the revision
which involved things like removing references to authors/books he has not
read/could not explain (and I listed them)-- which will in fact mean
changing the focus of the paper entirely; identifying ideas taken from his
secondary sources and citing them appropriately -- and I warned him that
once he had done that there wouldn't be much left to the paper and so he
would need to add his own original thought; and producing and attaching to
the paper the missing notes, in particular 1-2 pp. summaries of every work
listed on the bibliography. In conclusion, I told him that whatever he
might think, I wasn't stupid and that I would be watching him like a hawk
-- I actually happen to be his academic advisor.  We will see what I get in
January.

I hope I'm not burdening the list with too long a note, but I felt I owed
you the end of the story.  Again I am so grateful for your support.  My
student violated my sense of intellectual community -- you restored it.


Thank you,

Melissa Frazier