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March 15, 2020
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Looking for Guidance
OfflineI am looking for some guidance from others on this topic. I have 4 students in my class that are turning in eerily similar papers. For example if the assignment is to choose an organization and discuss the impact of a government agency on that organization they all choose the same organization and agency. They all make the same errors in APA formatting, have the same references and the general positions in the paper are the same. Even the order of information discussed is the same. However, they change their language and terminology so that it doesn't result in any alert in LopesWrite. I had messaged two of them the first week. One never responded. The other dropped my class but I am concerned that she just switched to a different instructor. The 4 that remain are of concern to me. I don't know if they are getting together to write their papers or perhaps getting papers from an outside source but I have never had a group of students have this level of similarity in their assignments. I am not sure if this is reportable or not but it certainly seems highly suspicious to me.
Any advice on how to address this with the individual students and/or what steps I should take?
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The fact that you had one drop the class and got no answer from the other would lead me to believe there is plagiarism involved. I would send a note to all 4 asking why their papers are so similar with an indication that you are considering turning in a code of conduct report. Ask them for a response. If you do not get one I would consider no response and admission of plagiarism. You should file a code of conduct report for the student that dropped the course as well. The University needs the information to insure the student did not just transfer to another professor there may be other instances for the same student. I just had the same thing happen. As soon as I indicated that there was Plagiarism by two of the students, copying each other's work ,one immediately dropped the class the other apologized and said it would not happen again ,then quit responding to any assignments.
Lopes write does not always pick up the similarities.
Kathleen,
I have had this happen to me about 3 years ago. Almost all of my students in this course were teaching at the same school. I reported it. To me everything was identical, although it looked as though they used the thesaurus to change key words.
Kathleen,
For backing when filing a code of conduct, you may want to ask the students for prewriting notes. I always have students do some form of prewriting in class and stamp or sign their outlines or notes for this reason. They may have some prewriting notes that do not correlate with their paper's topic; or, they may have none at all, which is a big indicator of poor time management, and potentially, plagiarism.