different tools or more time learning how to use them than others. Through various stages of guidance, advisement, mentorship, and professional development, students like Mary can triumph in academia as well as in the counseling profession.
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Chapter 3
It’s Not Their Work: A Case of Plagiarism
Tiphanie Gonzalez
2014 ACA Code of Ethics Standards Addressed
F.9.a. Evaluation of Students
G.5.b. Plagiarism
G.5.c. Acknowledging Previous Work
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Professor P was a first-year faculty member at a local college in a city environment. While grading for the Multicultural Counseling course, one paper struck Professor P as very familiar. The assignment was so impressive and of such high quality that their initial thought was that it could be published. Professor P did not have the software that allowed them to check for plagiarism. Rather, students submitted paper assignments during class. Although the content, language, and flow of the paper felt familiar, the fact that Professor P had received the assignment in this way made it feel new as well.
Professor P considered the student’s past in-class contributions and assignments while evaluating the suspicious assignment. It was clear that this assignment was not in the student’s voice. Unsure of how to move forward, Professor P started with a simple Google search using the most familiar sentences. Rather quickly, Professor P found an article that had been published in a well-known journal by a well-known author whom they had personally met at conferences in the past.
After finding the identical article via a Google search, Professor P emailed a request to the student to meet after the next class to talk about their submission. This was new territory for Professor P. Before meeting with the student, Professor P took several steps to build a plan of action for addressing the plagiarism. After notifying the department chair, Professor P printed out the original published article and the student’s paper for comparison. Professor P showed both the article and the paper submission to the student, addressing the plagiarism directly. During their meeting, the student shared that they did not understand the rules around plagiarism, noting that they were returning to graduate school after having an entirely different career and that writing these kinds of papers and citing in this way was foreign to them. The student asked Professor P not to report the plagiarism to the administration or fail the student in the course. The student offered to redo the assignment instead.
Because Professor P was teaching a graduate course, they had never considered teaching their students about plagiarism. Professor P thought plagiarism was something students already knew about. Plagiarism was something that could end the student’s college career. Professor P wondered whether there might be a technology gap based on age, socioeconomics, or limited access to technology (Burt et al., 2011). For Professor P, this kind of plagiarism meant the student needed to at least fail this assignment, which in turn meant they were going to fail the course. Professor P was clear with the student that although this was the first time the student had been found plagiarizing, failing the assignment was fair. Professor P moved forward with some discomfort, wondering what they could have done differently to prevent the situation.
Case Analysis and Discussion
“Plagiarism occurs when a student intentionally or unintentionally uses another person’s words or ideas without properly crediting their source, an offense that most university officials consider to be a serious breach of appropriate academic conduct” (Youmans, 2011, p. 749). Plagiarism is common among students. In a review of the literature, Youmans (2011) found that 7% to 55% of college students had knowingly plagiarized. Universities recognize the slippery slope of academic dishonesty during students’ careers, noting that academic dishonesty can hinder the completion of degrees and contributions to potential fields of work (Youmans, 2011).
The ACA Code of Ethics (American Counseling Association [ACA], 2014) makes it clear that counselor educators need to be well informed in the areas they teach (Standards F.7.a., F.7.b.). Many students and faculty members are drawn to certain authors, sometimes networking with them while attending conferences and programming. This is why Professor P easily realized that the student had submitted a work that was not their own. Counselor educators and supervisors also have an ethical responsibility to ensure aspiring counselors have the academic skills and professional dispositions to be in the field (Standards F.6.b., F.9.a.). This includes remediating incidents of academic dishonesty, which is a reflection of students’ work and their moral character. Even when reproducing language from their own published works, authors need to properly cite and quote (Standards G.5.b., G.5.c.).
Vehviläinen et al. (2018) discussed how faculty members who work with students who have plagiarized can use one of two approaches: a rules ethical approach or a care ethical approach. The rules ethical approach is “based on the notion of the universal application of a rule viewed as detached from the subject” (p. 2), whereas the care ethical approach “places the act in relation to the actor’s intentions and understandings” (p. 2). In deciding how to work with this student, Professor P was torn between being student forward or rule forward. As a counselor educator who was largely person centered, Professor P leaned toward a care ethical approach. Instead of sending the case to a disciplinary committee, Professor P created a lesson on the ins and outs of plagiarism and strategies for avoiding plagiarism. In accordance with a rules ethical approach, Professor P gave the student a failing grade for the assignment. However, they did not report the incident to the administration.
This decision to use a care ethical approach in assessing the student’s explanation for why they had plagiarized the assignment but a rules ethical approach in handling grading was in line with a student-centered approach to teaching. It is important for instructors to be mindful of student diversity and needs (ACA, 2014, Standards F.11.b., F.11.c.). In this case, Professor P was mindful of this student’s socioeconomic and age diversity. The student was older than their peers and admitted they were struggling with this type of writing and unfamiliarity with plagiarism. The student also appeared to have a technology gap compared to students who had moved directly through their undergraduate program and into their graduate program in a time of very easy access to journal articles, books, and websites (Burt et al., 2011). This increased the chance that the peers had been formally educated about plagiarism in a way this student had not. Although their peers may have been accustomed to plagiarism-checker reports, the entirety of this student’s prior work may have been graded by hand, thus limiting the student’s learning opportunities in comparison to peers who had access to this technology, which was normalized in their work.
Preventing Plagiarism in Future Classes
Graduate students have a wide variety of backgrounds, and counselor educators should consider strategies for preventing plagiarism. Faculty members may teach minilessons on plagiarism early in their classes and include tips on how not to plagiarize in their syllabi. They can also use worksheets and widely circulated plagiarism materials available through programs like Turnitin. Most colleges and universities also have preventive information. For example, the City University of New York at Hunter offers information on their website (see www.hunter.cuny. edu/studentaffairs/repository/files/What%20is%20Plagiarism.pdf).
Counselor educators can assess students’ understanding of plagiarism early in their classes. Often they may be surprised by how little students understand plagiarism in its many forms. Unlike the blatant plagiarism in this scenario, more subtle forms of plagiarism often become a problem.
By sharing information in their syllabi, counselor educators can ensure that students have resources they can lean on when they are unsure about whether they