Your various articles on plagiarism reminded me of how diverse can be the consequences of catching a student plagiarist.
In a human resources management course in the College of Business in the 1990s, I found that a student had plagiarized his entire term paper, which was assigned to be a critique of any article on personnel administration/human resources management in a journal that carried such articles. On the first day of class each student received a single page handout from me that gave all of the course policies which included that a student caught plagiarizing on class assignments would receive an F for the course.
That was Spring Quarter and a student turned in an assignment that I easily judged to be plagiarized, given that my assessment of his writing ability from quizzes and exams was well below that shown by his paper.
I spent 6 hours in the library locating his source and discovered that he plagiarized every word, including one grammatical and two punctuation errors in the original article, which otherwise was quite well written. In response to his complaint about his F for the course, I took copies of the journal article, his paper, and a copy of class assignments (to prove he had received them) to the judiciaries committee meeting on his case. Though a member of the judiciaries committee mumbled something about the severity of the penalty, no further action was taken. His F for the course was to stand unchanged.
A week later, I got a call from his father, a lawyer whose practice was in Boston, Mass. He complained of the severity of the penalty, especially since his son had been accepted by a law school in San Diego. I told him that perhaps his son learned something from this penalty and offered no further comments, though he reached a shouting level before I hung up.
About 10 minutes later, I received another call about the young man. This time it was a nice lady who complained that I had ruined her grandson's career, and that if I were older like her, I might better understand what this meant to her grandson.
I figured out that his father had sent his own mother to persuade me to change the grade. When I asked how old she was and explained to her that I was older, she gave up (I was 69 at the time). I heard no more about the case from his family.
A couple weeks later, however, I learned from our department secretary that this wasn't the end of his father's campaign. He had flown down here and tried to get my department chairman to get me to change the grade or do it himself. It didn't work. He evidently worked his way up through our dean and President Charlie Ping, who, to their everlasting credit, sent him back to Boston empty-handed.
I have often wondered if the student now follows the rule of law or if he is a legal scofflaw.
-James Lee is a professor emeritus in the College of Business. Send him an e-mail at jamesalee@earthlink.net.
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Letter to the Editor
