Two Students Kicked off Semester at Sea for Plagiarism
An Ohio University student was kicked out of her Semester at Sea program and dropped off in Greece after being accused of plagiarism, according to the Post, the student-run newspaper at OU. Her expulsion, along with the dismissal of a student from California Baptist University, has put the spotlight on the strict, single-sanction honor code enforced by the University of Virginia, which sponsored the program.
OU senior Allison Routman says she was expelled for taking three sentence fragments verbatim from Wikipedia and for paraphrasing a movie synopsis from the site. According to Routman, a day before the papers in question were to be returned to students, the instructor told the class plagiarism was suspected and asked students to come forward and make a "conscientious retraction." Routman says she did not think she had done anything wrong at the time, so she did not come forward. "Had I had any idea I had done something wrong, I would have absolutely come forward," she said.
She was later confronted and expelled. The appeal she mounted was also dismissed.
She says the three phrases she had taken were "when the Germans attacked the Soviet Union during Operation Barbarossa"; "German-speaking minority outside of Germany"; and "who had just been released from a concentration camp."
In response to the incident, students on the ship mounted a letter-writing campaign in which they expressed their "disbelief" over what they called a "shocking...jaw-dropping" decision.
School officials defended the decision, saying that students were well informed about the honor code beforehand. Critics said the expulsion followed a path that was not consistent with the disciplinary system at the University of Virginia. Because of fewer resources, Routman was judged by a panel of professors, as opposed to a panel of her peers, which is the norm at Charlottesville.
Tags: students | Ohio University | University of Virginia
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Reader Comments
What else?
There is something missing in this story. Those three phrases would not cause a professor to say "I think this is plagiarized" and go searching the internet. I would love to hear the whole story from both parties. I'm also an SAS alum and I know they don't just go kicking people off left and right. It took A LOT to get kicked off my voyage, and students were for various reasons. It's a lot of money and time that these students are losing for ISE to be acting so quickly and irrationally.
What no one else has said...
Assuming the only plagiarized material is the three sentences quoted,
"when the Germans attacked the Soviet Union during Operation Barbarossa"; "German-speaking minority outside of Germany"; and "who had just been released from a concentration camp."
then there should not have even been a question of whether to cite or not. These are stock phrases that anyone writing on the subject of the Holocaust, WWII, or similar subject could be reasonably expected to construct. They are also very simple phrases that would sound awkward and probably uncollegiate (sp? word?) if
worded differently. None of these are opinions, they are either fact or a statement of fact. While this case became news because the girl got expelled, the real news here is how a college professor could find a problem with these sentences.
An even more pronounced example would be if "Vice-President Gore won the popular vote but lost the electoral college" was charged to be plagiarism because someone else had written it once. This case truly is a farce and a stain on UVA's otherwise professional academic record.
I have serious concerns for the University of Virginia's English department if they sanction not only extreme cases like expulsion but also consider "german-speaking minority outside of Germany" to be plagiarism.
TO UVA if you are reading.... get your ducks in a row in regards to what is done in your name on Semester at Sea. I would also advise you to publicly apologize to the girl expelled and swallow your pride. You messed up, deal with it.
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