Scenario
Please read the following scenario, and after doing so, think about which students committed plagiarism, and what factors may have led them to do so. If you’ve been asked by your professor to complete a quiz along with reading this module, you can do so by navigating back to the Canvas page you started from.
As you read, pay attention to how students made decisions around submitting their assignments. Would you have made the same decisions as these students. Why or why not?
A group of four friends, Alexandria, Jason, Kai, and May, are in the same Writing Intensive course and have formed a group meant to keep each other accountable on the writing assignments they have throughout the semester. For one particular assignment, a nine page paper they have three weeks to work on, Alexandria, Kai, and May do a really good job at starting to work on the assignment. They lay out a timeline, set expectations for when they’ll have their research done, develop their thesis statement, draft half the paper, finish a full draft, and other benchmarks. The three spend their hour freewriting about the topic to try and find an angle that they’re interested in. On the other hand, Jason just isn’t interested in the assignment; he doesn’t think there’s any way he could be interested, and decides that he’d rather spend his Sundays studying for a different class.
By the end of the second week, Alexandria and Kai are still on track, having done seven pages each. Unfortunately, May’s fallen a bit behind; she only has three pages done, still needs to do more research, and is starting to really stress out. Jason’s living his best life, forgetting that he only has one week to research enough content for, and then write, nine pages. By the middle of the third week, Kai’s actually finished his paper a bit earlier than he planned, and is ready to be done with it. He scans a few sentences over once and then submits it. Alexandria’s largely done, but is really struggling with writing a conclusion, and so takes her paper to the Writing Center. A tutor helps her realize what she needs to accomplish with her conclusion, and they also point out that she’s missing citations for a few of their quotes. She’s able to finish her paper by Thursday, the day before it’s due. Compared to these two, May and Jason are in a more perilous place.
On Thursday evening, Jason claims he hasn’t started writing it yet, but says he’ll be ok. To literally everyone’s shock, he submits his paper on-time. May, unlike Jason, is freaking out. It’s noon on Friday, and the paper’s due in 3 hours. She has two pages to write, and she needs another source. She’s been Googling for a week, but can’t find anything. Wanting to help her out, Jason says she should just use ChatGPT to come up with the rest of what she needs; she can just rewrite whatever it spews out and she’ll be fine. May doesn’t know if this is right, but decides she has no other choice and does it. All four friends have submitted their papers on time.
Two weeks later, when the professor has released the grades, only two of the four friends got their grades back. Alexandria received a 91, and Jason, who it turns out bought his assignment from a paper mill, got a 0. Both Kai and May received feedback asking them to reach out to their professor. Kai forgot to add in-text citations. They talk with the professor who decides to give Kai another chance, inviting them to add the citations back in before resubmitting. On the other hand, May needs to have a longer conversation with her professor, who looked into one of her sources provided by ChatGPT, and noticed that it doesn’t actually exist. The professor wants to talk about why May used ChatGPT for only a small section of her paper before deciding what action to take.
What do you think about the professor’s actions? Are the consequences for plagiarism appropriate here? What might the students have done instead to ensure the academic integrity of their work?