“Surely there is a means to distinguish between a student who deliberately appropriates material and passes it off as his own and a student who cites a source improperly.”
I bet there is. I bet a case of deliberate plagiarism and outright cheating would be treated more harshly - no offer of a nice explanation from college counselor/principal, no rewrite over the summer, and possible expulsion. Additionally, the characteristics of the incident would be detailed by the school to colleges. College adcoms are able to distinguish between various types of misconduct.
When you look at various colleges’ writings/explanations and policies on "plagiarism, " they do include citation errors.
Was she allowed to use secondary sources? In bigger writing assignments in my hs, ages ago, we were not allowed to. College policies do refer to the pitfalls in using secondary sources and confusing the attribution.
I know this is high school. But one with high standards.
@karen0 " It sounds like a large percentage of the grade had tutors help them with each step of the writing process. One mom I spoke to with older kids said this paper is impossible to do without a tutor given the workload in all the other classes. "
Do you really want your younger children in a school that is likely costing you 45k+ per year that still requires outside tutors (on your dime) to complete an assignment properly? This is beyond unconscionable to me.
So none of the other kids screwed up their paper because they had professional tutors reviewing them… No drafts are allowed to be reviewed by the school, but perfectly fine hiring your own draft reviewer. And your kid gets accused of plagurism? This is the benchmark? Please, stop feeding the beast. Get the twins graduated and find a better environment for your younger kids (IMHO).
It does sound rather non-sensical. It’s ok to hire a private tutor to help, yet mis-attributing a citation is unintentional plagerism. In my D’s private HS it was against the honor code to get any help on papers except from the teacher. Tutors were not allowed.
I do not know where people are finding definitions of “Plagiarism” which include citation errors, other than not citing a source, or citing something that another wrote as your own work. The term has a very specific definition, and anything that does not include presenting the work of another person as one’s own is not plagiarism. It is like claiming that “theft” includes yelling at somebody.
The issue seems to be that people read the definition of plagiarism, and do not fully understand what it means. When plagiarism is defined as “not properly citing a source”, it does not mean that a person is citing in a manner which implies that the information/writing/idea. etc are from a third party. It means that the person is writing the information/writing/idea, etc, as though it was their own.
Citing something as having been written by A, while it was actually written by B (so long as B is not the person who is doing the citing) is a “false citation”, and can also be considered misconduct if done purposefully. It is, however, not plagiarism.
Citing a secondary source as a primary source is sloppy, lazy work, but it is not at the level of misconduct of the previous two. However, if the school would claim that a person who does this is providing a false citation, that would be technically true.
Hello all! I am a recent hs grad and I took tons of AP courses during my time there (around 13). I took AP Lit only two years ago and I got a 5. This simple of a mistake would NOT have resulted in a disciplinary action at my school. I read above someone speaking to their daughter about this and her saying that it absolutely was plagiarism, but I cannot disagree more. I guess there are different definitions depending on high-school but I am just so surprised that such a simple mistake can completely ruin someone’s college prospects.
I am not an English major but never in my life have I heard “citing a secondary source as a primary one == plagiarism.” This isn’t even failure to cite something, its citing something slightly incorrectly! I’m not even sure my AP Lit teacher would have noticed it for crying out loud. OP, I am sorry you are going through this, I just want to make sure your daughter knows this was a harmless mistake (especially at the HS level).
Side note- if you are in a time crunch and don’t have time to read through your own work, turnitin has a student portal, where you can check citations before you submit something to a professor. It isn’t as robust as the teacher portal, but it has saved my butt a few times.
Look, this OP is dealing with her kid’s hs not anyone else’s.
Go back and read the Bowdoin link. As for “citing a secondary source as a primary one,” this is an even deeper issue. We do not know the girl’s details on this one, but it can imply (go read about it) using a secondary source writer’s thoughts (etc) in place of your own analysis. In effect, leaning too hard on a source that already did work you’re supposed to be doing/have done. Use Google to find what colleges say about this practice.
@trashception, you need to read your college’s plagiarism policy before you make the same mistake. Do not assume lax high school policies carry over to all situations-they may not, and colleges are less forgiving generally.
@roycroftmom I am not about to make the same mistake, I am solely speaking about hs right now, not college. I understand my college’s plagiarism policy. It is not a “lax policy” to not throw out a paper over a small citation error. Even at the undergraduate level, a small citation mistake would not cause disciplinary action (though a worse score on the paper would be totally understandable).
I only stated my own experiences because someone earlier was stating theirs (involving their child that goes to hs). I know OP is not dealing with my hs’s policy, I am just trying to give some additional perspective to the parents on this forum.
@karen0 I haven’t read through the whole thread but I would be in the camp of pulling your daughter after the school year and repeating the year at boarding school. I have a fair idea of the name of school and I assume someone who has been a trustee at this school has resources that are far above the average poster here. Why have your family go through this if you don’t have to? It is possible to get into boarding school very late in the admission cycle at certain schools. Being full pay helps. Having a connected educational consultant to reach out on your behalf can also open many doors that your calls alone will not.
My advice is no way prestige driven. It’s not the idea that OMG the school won’t support my kid’s app to Penn or Vandy rather it’s the idea that the school is taking upon themselves to decide for you where the kid can apply over a minor infraction that should have been settled in the grading book. You bypass all that by starting fresh and wash the “infraction” with time. My nephew just graduated from a very good but not top tier NE boarding school. The results of his class were fantastic.
@Trashception may be referring to me as the poster who said that my high school daughter’s teacher allowed her to site a secondary source rather than find the primary. This was for historical research when the original journals, logs or hand written letters are not available to public view as they are too fragile, or even just when it would be very difficult/expensive to obtain them.
Of course I can see how quoting a secondary source as if it were a primary is incorrect, and obviously schools can formulate their own rules about this. But unless the student is using the same portions of the primary source as the secondary did, to make the same points, I wouldn’t agree with calling it plagiarism.
These are nuanced concepts and if a school is going to have such a strict policy, I hope they spend a great deal of time teaching students about research citations and showing many examples.
In my opinion, kids are being asked to write as if they are college/graduate students before the majority of them are ready. My daughters are often told to do their own, unique analysis rather than use (cited) ideas from various sources to make their point. It takes an enormous amount of background reading, knowledge and time to truly formulate your own thesis and support it with original research. It often involves travel, interviewing experts, going down many dead ends, altering and refining your ideas for months . . . I don’t know how a high school student who spends 7 hours a day in school and more at EC’s is supposed to do this on their own.
@karen0 I hope that your D is bouncing back. Best wishes for her!
@Shiprock1976 But I tend to agree with the OP. It will look like the student was expelled, when she was not - which is worse. Not worth repeating a year for the same result. This kid will likely have VERY good college options.
I would absolutely pull my younger kids out before HS.
Reading between the lines just not for Penn or Vandy or their equivalents or those even higher ranked -not a minor thing. Who should get to decide where her daughter applies to college?
Maybe I am speaking from a place of ignorance here (my oldest is a rising junior in HS) but why should the high school have ANY say in where your daughter applies to college? They said they would write supportive notes about the disciplinary record; great. Apply to all the same colleges she was going to before and let the admissions offices interpret the results.
What is the worst case scenario? She’s rejected? So what? So are thousands of other kids every year.
It sounds to me like the high school wants to protect it’s “we place x% of students at Ivy’s every year” reputation. If it were me, I’d encourage my child to apply to every IVY and top school in the country; even at the risk of 100% rejection - if only just to screw with the school’s placement numbers. Karma.
"Reading between the lines just not Penn or Vandy. "
It was never indicated that the school stated they would not support her applications for those 2 schools, just that they were coming off the list. Reasons were not given so we can’t make assumptions. I’ve never heard of a private school refusing to let a student apply somewhere even when the chances of getting in are slim, fat, or none.
Also private schools do sometimes help their students by spreading around the applications- it is a helpful thing to be told that their are 6 other kids applying to Stanford in your class with better resumes, so you should rethink that restricted early app. You can ignore their advice, of course, and apply anywhere, but the counselors are pretty savvy about one’s relative rank in the application pool. In some cases it might be a better idea to spend that ED choice on a more attainable goal if Stanford has never taken 7 kids from your school.