Recently, my students had to turn in a one-page paper covering a particular topic related to the class. Unfortunately, one of my students decided to blatantly copy from two sources without any citations.
This isn't the first time that plagiarism has been an issue for one of my undergrads. My first year here, four out of 100 of my students failed another general science class because they improperly cited sources. In their case, each had directly taken text out of a source and then cited it, but omitted the quotation marks. All claimed that they were taught that that was okay in high school.
Now freshmen I can sort of understand. But upper level students? The problem with LargeU (and likely many other "R1" type schools) is that the science undergrads often leave their humanities courses (not that they have to take that many) until their last two semesters, and the science classes have very few, if any, written assignments--even some of the laboratory courses don't require written lab reports!
Coming from TinyCollege, which is a little-known liberal arts school, I find this shocking. Even my crappy science courses at TinyCollege required various written reports, summaries of current literature, etc. Hell, the tests often had short answer / essay questions requiring a demonstration of actual thought!
At any rate, I took this recent plagiarism issue as an opportunity to meet with the student and go over proper citations, etc. I could have filed paperwork to get a note in his file, fail him, etc., but I think the tears that welled in his eyes (and came very close to spilling over...UGH!) throughout our 30 minute meeting was punishment enough.
Is plagiarism an issue at your school? Do you think science majors get enough experience writing at these research institutions, that supposedly have stronger science programs than small liberal arts schools?
