By William J. FreyPart I
Four students (Joseph, Peter, Dan, and Bill)
formed a case study group in a professional ethics class. Their responsibilities included selecting a case, analyzing the case before the class, and preparing a final written analysis.
Their
class presentation went fairly well. The written analysis was another matter. Two group members, Joseph and Peter, had lost contact with the other two, Dan and Bill, during the final exam period.
Joseph came to the professor's office twice on the due date to see if the project had been turned in. In the meantime, Dan and Bill printed out the final draft and left it in the professor's mailbox in another
office.
The final version contained material prepared by each member of the group. But it also had a section plagiarized from a commentary on the case published over the Internet.
The professor's policy on plagiarism was stated both in the syllabus and in a handout that described the case study assignment. He defined plagiarism as quoting or closely paraphrasing another
author without proper acknowledgment and then defined proper acknowledgment as using a standard mode of documentation including quotation marks to indicate passages quoted and bibliographical notes and footnotes to
attribute the material to their proper source. (He offered the MLA short form as one possible example.) The consequences for being caught plagiarizing were clearly stated in the syllabus: the student or group
would receive a zero for the assignment.
The assignment was a group assignment; every member of the group received the same grade based on an overall assessment of the group project, which included
both the presentation and the written analysis.
Part II
The professor decided to give each student an incomplete for the semester. If the students decided to resubmit the report with the
plagiarized passage removed, then he would evaluate this project and average it in with the zero given to the plagiarized version.
At the beginning of the next semester, Joseph and Peter came to
the professor's office. When informed that they had received an incomplete because part of the final report had been plagiarized, they claimed they were not responsible because the plagiarized parts had been
prepared by the other two.
Then Dan and Bill came to the professor's office. They admitted the plagiarism. However, they were quite angry when they found out about the reaction of Peter
and Joseph. Had the assignment been acceptable would Peter and Joseph have denied responsibility for this? Why should they decide to "cut and run" just when things had turned out badly?
