Stone Soup by Jan Eliot for January 21, 2013

Some students when I was in university copied other’s programs, but didn’t think to remove program comments “This program was made by X.Y” from the start of program text… which professors checked, of course.

I sense an F with a detention.

I certainly hope Jan doesn’t back away from dealing with the punishment aspect of plagiarism. This is dreadfully serious. It indicates an approach to life. Look, I know it’s a comic strip, but if you’re going to write about this stuff, then have the courage to really write about it. The girl needs to be suspended from school, with parent conference required for re-admission, and (it goes w/o saying) an F in the class at least.

Doofus!!

As Alix said: uh-oh!

It’s not “uh oh” anymore; it’s “busted!”

I agree with jacquilove. Ms. Eliot ventured into this topic, and how she wraps it up will say something about her beliefs and values in terms of ethics. Stay tuned….

Shame on you, girl.

I sense an F with expulsion!

When I was teaching in a community college, one of my students plagiarised a movie review…. when I gave her a chance to do a report on another film, she paraphrased a report done by another student, that I had already handed back. Do they think we are idiots?

I had a 7th grade student turn in an assignment once that had been cut-n-pasted. It still had the blue hyperlinks right in the text!Yes, an F is deserving of this action. They need to learn early how serious this is…

I agree, if a comic ventures into a territory like this they ought to finish it out. I’m sure a lot of young people read this and they can learn something from it. I used to read Funky Winkerbean for a while and they delved into some pretty heavy topics.

Ii teach tesol English and students will copy essays from English sites. Always a fail because none of us is that good at writing including myself

I always warned my students ahead of time that if I caught them plagiarizing, it was an automatic F on the paper. A paper that was best effort but low quality, I would give them a chance to redo. But cheating—that’s not only wrong, but also an insult to my intelligence. If you hand in a plagiarized paper, you are basically saying that you think your teacher is too stupid to know the difference.

Busted. Surprising, really, how much effort it takes to effectively cheat. Almost as much as doing the actual work.

If they actually moved ahead grades in this strip, Alix would be caught up to Holly by now.

I agree with those that say some stiff penalties are in order. My hope is that Holly actually learns something from this and she understands WHY cheating is wrong (not just “this is bad because I got caught!”)

Geez. When I caught my college freshmen cheating, I gave them an “F” on the paper and a talking-to. Evidently, according to some comments here, I should have called out the National Guard. Also, let’s not dump on Jan’s handling of the cheating until we see where the arc is going.

Expulsion for first offense at the HS level? The colleges I’ve taught for online aren’t that harsh. What with the current state of the bureaucracy, I’d expect the school to have written policies on how to handle each incident. This is a teaching moment – yes, there are consequences, but they shouldn’t be something from which one doesn’t recover for the first offense.

In the Grounded for Life episode “The Cheat is On,” Lily cheats by purchasing an essay from the Internet and turns it in as her own. Then, her mother Claudia, who also happens to be going to school, steals her paper and turns it in as her own work. That’s a horrible thing to do to your daughter. Both ladies end up getting an ‘F’ and Lily ends up getting threatened with expulsion. That’s another problem with plagiarizing — you never know if your plagiarism has been plagiarized. I think the show writers handled this plagiarism plot well.

Only Holly can be that dumb

Busted!!!!!

Headers??? Yes, those hundreds of Email addresses that AOL’ers fwd;fwd;fwd;fwd to you without trimming them from the junk they’ve sent to “a special you..”

Reminds me of an old (pre-web) thread of Funky Winkerbean which contained two stories of copying:

Les copying an article by Ernest Hemingway (he had only enough sense to remove Hemingway’s name from it), and getting busted easilyCrazy Harry, who simply handed in a xeroxed page from Encyclopedia Americana (even easier than Les).

Holly did the web version of Crazy Harry’s stunt (did she simply print the page off the web? Has she even heard of cut-copy-paste — by which she could have removed the headers easily?)

At below college level, an F for the assignment and calling in the parents for a conference are sufficient. Why? This way the real world consequences can be discussed with a discussion of what kind of punishment will occur if it happens again.

Give Jan time, guys, we’re still at the beginning. “Don’t rush me!”

Oh no! She didn’t proofread it, did she?