We all knew this was coming...
A student who admits down-loading material from the internet for his degree plans to sue his university for negligence. Michael Gunn claims his university should have warned him his actions were against the regulations.
The Times Higher Education Supplement reports that he was told on the eve of his final exams that he would get no marks for his course work. The University of Kent at Canterbury says students are warned about plagiarism.
Michael Gunn, a 21-year-old English student, told the Times Higher: "I hold my hands up. I did plagiarise. I never dreamt it was a problem.
"I can see there is evidence I have gone against the rules, but they have taken all my money for three years and pulled me up the day before I finished.
"If they had pulled me up with my first essay at the beginning and warned me of the problems and consequences, it would be fair enough.
"But all my essays were handed back with good marks and no one spotted it."
I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around this fiasco, because three idiotic concepts are at work here. First is the issue of Gunn not realizing plagiarism was "a problem;" that statement alone should qualify him as too dense for a university degree. Second is the charge made by Gunn that it somehow shouldn't count against him that the university didn't figure out what he was doing right off the bat. Universities are becoming ever-more vigilant against internet plagiarism, but just because the university just now figured out what Gunn was doing doesn't mean his earlier bogus work gets to be "grandfathered" in somehow.
Gunn's departmental handbook states that plagiarism is unacceptable. It doesn't matter whether he realized that or how and when the university caught it. He should still be, as he is, out on his ear.
The third batty idea here is that Gunn thinks he'll be able to find a solicitor to take his case. At least, I hope that's a batty, as opposed to doable, plan.
Best Fark.com comments on the case:
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My favorite story about this. A guy in my high school english class was writing about Ray Bradbury. Well, he used the cliff notes extensively and, of course, didn't credit a damned thing. Well. It never dawned on him that our teacher was so excited about his choice of people to write about because she was an authority on Ray Bradbury. As a matter of fact, in college, she wrote the cliff notes about his stories. Needless to say, that dumbass failed.
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WTF? I've just graduated from a British university and on the top of EVERY assignment I was given was a little note saying "Plagiarism is a serious offence, show your sources in the footnotes". This guy is either a liar or incredibly stupid. I'm betting on the latter.
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I'm a friend with a professor, so I hear a lot of war stories. On the front page of every syllabus are the rules on academic honesty. Last semester was truly an eye-opening event. He actually reads and checks every paper and presentation. If you plagiarize, the work gets an 'F', and the student has to submit a new paper on academic dishonesty (and receive no credit for it). If the student refuses the paper, the student gets an 'F' for the course. I could not believe how many students copied other people's work, cut whole pages from the internet without citation and claimed it was their own, and then would actually complain to the teacher that what *he* was doing would hurt their GPA and that was unfair. One woman even gave the response, I would do ANYTHING to get an A in this course.
He commented, Well, have you thought of doing the work?
Posted by kswygert at May 28, 2004 02:53 PM