Discussion:
What is the name of your state?
The name of the state is FL.
(I wasn't sure where to put my question but i thought this would be the best area)
Hi I"m a student currently in grad school and i have a problem i hope you can help me with. Recently I had a group presentation which i thought went well. the problem however was that one of the students plagarized on two slides of our presentation. as a result my entire group is charged with academic dishonesty even though only ONE person did this action. Also, i want to inform you that no one in our group besides the plagarizer knew that those slides were taken from another source without citattions. moreover, the school is planning to put a file in our university record to show that we were dishonest even though again most of the group members had no idea the action was occurring. the problem with having this file is that it can absolutely break a student if they wanted to do residency or pursue their education.
So what i wanted to ask everyone is ...if they're argument is "if your names are on the presentation then the entire group is responsible" then what can my group say to refute that? Any help is greatly appreciated because my group has decided to appeal the punishment, and we need to be able to answer this...if not our careers as a grad students is screwed.
Answer:
What is the name of your state?
The name of the state is FL.
(I wasn't sure where to put my question but i thought this would be the best area)
Hi I"m a student currently in grad school and i have a problem i hope you can help me with. Recently I had a group presentation which i thought went well. the problem however was that one of the students plagarized on two slides of our presentation. as a result my entire group is charged with academic dishonesty even though only ONE person did this action. Also, i want to inform you that no one in our group besides the plagarizer knew that those slides were taken from another source without citattions. moreover, the school is planning to put a file in our university record to show that we were dishonest even though again most of the group members had no idea the action was occurring. the problem with having this file is that it can absolutely break a student if they wanted to do residency or pursue their education.
So what i wanted to ask everyone is ...if they're argument is "if your names are on the presentation then the entire group is responsible" then what can my group say to refute that? Any help is greatly appreciated because my group has decided to appeal the punishment, and we need to be able to answer this...if not our careers as a grad students is screwed. I'm sorry to hear about your problems, but this isn't a legal problem -- plagiarism isn't illegal, unless it rises to the level of copyright infringement. You will need to work through your school's system to try and appeal or argue your case. Certainly your school has a provost or ombudsman that you can go to to discuss your case.
Not to make you feel worse, but the idea that "if your name is on it then you are responsible," while not a legal theory of liability, is pretty common in academia. A decade or so ago, a Nobel Laureate from MIT (I believe) lost his (or her, I can't remember now) job because a graduate student he or she was advising falsified some data in a scientific paper that they published in a journal. When it came to light that the data was falsified, the grad student was hosed, but the Nobel winner also got into trouble -- nobody seriously believed that the Nobel laureate had anything to do with the falsification of the data, but when you put your name on the top, you have to take responsibility for what's in the paper.
Just like when you sign a contract, if you sign something, you are presumed to have read and understood it, and your signature means you agree with it -- even if you really didn't read it.
But you should go to your university's provost or ombudsman or dean of students (or all of them) and argue your case, you have nothing to lose at this point.