This letter is regarding the Feb. 27 plagiarism editorial, Public Enemy No. 1.
Perhaps one reason the problem continues is because faculty find that enforcing their rules for plagiarism for regular class work too tedious and troublesome to bother with.
My last experience with plagiarism before retiring from teaching at Ohio University was like this: The first day of class all students were given a sheet describing course policies. It contained a very specific rule against plagiarism or cheating on exams or quizzes. (Such a practice) would result in an F for the course.
On an assignment to write a critique of any article in any of several Human Resources journals being published, one student copied an article that was a critique of a previous article that had appeared in the journal. His copy was complete, including punctuation errors. I spent six hours in the library before I could locate the article he had copied his paper from. I gave copies of his paper and the article from which he had copied it to someone in the office that could get them to the judiciaries committee. I never heard from them.
The student came to me to complain and try to negotiate his F away. No deal. A few days later, his father called me from Boston and tried the same thing. Also, no deal. The father got rather nasty in the end, complaining that I was ruining his son's career because the course was required for his graduation and that he had been accepted to a law school in San Diego. I thought at the time that we could do without lawyers who were cheats.
A half hour after we hung up, I got a call from a nice sounding lady, at first, who said that she was his grandmother - his father's mother - who began the same argument about destroying his career. When I gave no hint that I would change his F to a passing grade, she said that she was much older and better understood her grandson's situation than I.
I asked her how old she was. She said 65. I told her that I was 69.
Weeks later I learned that the student's father had flown down (to Athens) to meet with my department chairman, Art Marinelli, who, to his credit, offered no help. I was later told that he visited with my dean, John Stinson, who offered no help - as did then OU President Charles Ping when his father visited him before returning to Boston.
- James Lee is a former professor emeritus in the College of Business.
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Letter to the Editor
