Job Discussion Forums

[wonderingjoesmith]

Knowledge of synonyms and varieties of grammatical structures as well as the ability to see the main points of content in English are the reasons why my students often plagiarize themselves. Further more, the local English language education does not appear to be addressing these issues, my courses do not prepare the students adequately in the areas of paraphrasing and summarizing and my criteria seem to be way too lenient toward the assessment of my students’ carbon copy work. What the guidelines call for is, to me, pretty difficult to evaluate by the standards provided. My challenge is in grading students’ content and especially the sentence structure. How to judge a cloned content is one problem; how to rate plagiarized sentences’ grammatical structure is another one.

So, if the content and grammatical structures are in your writing courses’ criteria, how do you assess your students’ replications with respect to the content and sentence structure? Do you take their plagiarism into consideration or not? If you accept copying from original texts, do you go by percentages of how much the plagiarism is present and if so then how you calculate that?

[teenoso]

Your first sentence is a real puzzler ........, but in marking I have always disregarded any copied sentences (ie. no credit at all). Just mark the rest.

If they are re-producing textbook sentence structures with different content then that should be good , right?

[Zhejiang_Man]

[wonderingjoesmith]