Wild Thornberries Abstract Discussion 4/22/13

By admin Published April 22, 2013 Public Minutes

The Wild Thornberries Abstract Discussion Minutes from 4/22/13

Members Present: Brian Guggenheimer, Janela Harris, Ryan Baxter-King, Emily Brown, Erin Berlew, Jon Laks, Tamar Hoffman

Members Absent: Everyone else

Public Portion Guests: Alanna, Jack, Sara, Nick, Karina

Wild Thornberries

Sara: Eliza was supposed to work on time management, but she didn’t complete her letter to the community in a timely manner. Or at all.
Jack: the letter is easy to write, and is your principle way to seal the breach of trust with the community by explaining yourself to them. And everyone with a Haverford diploma has a HC stamp of approval, but I’m not sure I like to think that she’s out there somewhere claiming to be a community member, when she’s not actually fully restored.
Sara: there seem to be two possibilities. Either she’s still out there, struggling through this issue and waiting til it’s resolved before writing the letter, or maybe she just doesn’t care, which makes me sad.
Brian: let’s move to discussion questions. Should Eliza have been separated?
Emily: I agree with Jack that she graduated without being restored. It sucks that she’s a full-blown alumna, but she wasn’t ever actually restored to the school as a student. Maybe separation would have help with restoration.
Alanna: maybe she’d have thought more and written the letter if she’d been separated.
Ryan: are you talking about late graduation?
Yes.
Jon L arrives. Karina arrives.
Sara: I feel like this is hard because it says that the jurors didn’t feel that separation was necessary because she wasn’t separated enough from the values, but in retrospect, without the letter, she wasn’t taking it seriously. But I don’t think separation would have been appropriate at the time. It’d have seemed undully harsh.
Brian: what level of plagiarism would warrant separation?
Jack: Anonymity is important, but the fact that the work is confidential, even though we know that it was a thesis, makes it difficult to know what proportion was plagiarized. A ‘portion’ could be more or less severe based on the length of a thesis.
Emily: Mine was 99 pages.
Janela: way to keep it under 100!
Sara: you got 99 problems but a thesis ain’t one!
Emily: the part she plagiarized was due first semester, and in my experience the lit review from first semester is very different than plagiarizing her actual thesis work. It’s more like a research paper. It was a chapter of the rough draft.
Erin: the abstract also discusses depression and anxiety, so it was a little more grave than simply laziness
Ryan: she did say that she did consider whether she was citing properly, but also talked about how 4 days isn’t enough time to find professors and ask them about stuff like this
Nick: I really think there was a lack of communication, and she should have done more to try to find them. It was her responsibility.
Karina: can you get extensions on thesis chapters?
Janela: yes, but she didn’t think she could have one since she was already outside of the deadline.
Emily: that also doesn’t make it okay.
Sara: in the code, it does say that most cases of plagiarism will result in separation, and I agree with separation a lot of the time, but I think separation is very particular to a case, and it should always be an option, but not the default.
Ryan: does it make sense to have separation as the standard, but circumstances can lower the severity of resolutions?
Jon L: Sara’s got a valid point, though. My freshman year there were a lot of conversations about how the code says that, but we weren’t necessarily folowing that.
Emily: i think the point is to always consider plagiarism, but not necessarily use it.
Jack: my father (a professor) once received 4 identical papers which were all from the internet. But that’s plagiarism in totality; none of them did anything toward the assignment. But the majority of our cases are paragraphs or sections of work, which is clearly not the same as plagiarizing an entire document. And in my mind, that’s partial, and that’s why we don’t always separate.
Ryan: the goals of a trial are restoration, accountability and education. Separation is generally thought of as related to accountability, but do you think it is ever restorative?
Jack: When we permanently separate, or basically do (Amelia) that’s accountability. But when we do it for a semester or two it’s more like saying you need some time away to come back with a blank slate and be able to see it all with different eyes.
Sara: The way you worded that question… I think the only way to hold people accountable is if they’re restored. If you do it the other way than it’s just punitive. You have to restore first before that kind of thing can be effective.
Tamar: I think sometimes accountability and restoration can work both ways. I think it depends mainly on the perspective and if you look at it from the point of view of the community or the individual. These are just goals, and I think you can’t always accomplish each goal perfectly and sometimes you have to prioritize some goals over others. I’m not sure this is related to these resolution, but I think its important to note that you can’t always fulfill all the goals of a trial.
Emily: I think separation is always restorative. It means that they need to take time off to reconsider their outlook. You could look at it from an accountability standpoint too, but I think the restoration piece of it is more importantly.
Karina: I agree and I think that’s why I have a problem with the way it’s phrased in the Code. Normally it’s the reasons they acted the way they did that causes separation, not the fact that they acted.
Janela: I think that’s true, but Haverford College as an academic institution has responsibilities to the outside world to treat plagiarism with a certain level of severity. There are some schools with a zero tolerance policy. I think the way we phrase it is much closer to the haverfordian approach. I don’t think the wording is perfect right now, but I think haverford has an obligation to treat it with a certain level of severity.
Karina: I agree, I was on Council when we were looking at this kind of thing. I see separation is inherently Haverfordian. I think it’s very different from being expelled.
Janela: I disagree. I think it’s a suspension.
Ryan: I think the approach is more warm and fuzzy.
Tamar: I think the idea of the jury is not the same as the perception of the student. Students
Brian: I do want to point out that Haverford isn’t the only school to think about separation this way. I know two people who were separated from Harvard, one for plagiarism and one for cheating, and they were each told that the point of their suspensions was to think about their actions, and come back as better Harvard students.
Karina: I think there might be a difference because it’s student mandated and there are tasks that you need to complete to come back.
Ryan: I think we should come back to it at some point.
Emily: Reading this abstract I still feel like I would have been in favor of separating her, but that may just be hindsight. I’m not super torn up about it though.
Brian: Next discussion question? How should juries distinguish between intentional and unintentional plagiarism? Wow, that’s a toughie.
Erin: I think it’s a spectrum. There are some things that are clearly intentional. Things like taking something out of your notes and thinking it’s your own writing is unintentional, but everything else in the middle is murky.
Emily: I think it’s difficult when people say they didn’t know it was supposed to be plagiarism. You can’t be like “oh you did know that”. If they don’t know they can’t be held accountable to that standard.
Alanna: I think we do some things to educate people. If others
Jack: Now that the Plagiarism Education program exists now I don’t think the education argument is acceptable. I think that it’s not acceptable to use ignorance as a defense because it is your job to know. Part of handing a paper in is knowing what it means to plagiarize.
Tamar: I somewhat disagree with that. I think there is an extent to which that’s true, but I think that despite all efforts students sometimes don’t. Whether they had somebody help because English isn’t their first language, or maybe they didn’t do well in their writing seminar where they should have learned it. While in some ways it is your responsibility as a student to know that kind of thing, I think we are doing a disservice to say it is your fault anyway.
Sara: I see your point. As an HCO we spoke to our Freshmen. I know the WC did mandatory sessions about citation and writing. The thing I emphasized is that if you don’t know, ask your Professor. I thought I was communicating it clearly. There is no way to tell Freshmen everything they need to know, but that is why we say it is their responsibility to ask their professor. We put the responsibility on students to find it out.
Tamar: I think there are students from different background for whom asking is not the norm. But I think that if they do legitimately do not know I understand that and it is their fault. But if they took the time to do the assignment but didn’t know it was a problem.
Karina: I think it’s important to remember that mistakes happen even when you’re trying. It’s the same with plagiarizing ideas. I think that is one of the hardest places.
Tamar: For example in my PoliSci class we are working on a project that we’ve revised 10 times. I am no longer sure whether my citations correctly correspond with the material. I think there is such a thing as an honest mistake.
Janela: One thing I think about all the time is the difference between taking in something somebody else said then regurgitating it, and learning it. I am most worried I will make that mistake, where I think I’ve learned something, so I own it, and can write it without citing, but a Professor will see it as me claiming to have thought of something that someone else owns. At what point do you own that information. Part of being a student is learning something that other people have thought of.
Tamar: You mean memorizing?
Janela: You can memorize something with ill-intent. But if I memorize/learn the definition of a term and use that definition, do I need to cite where I found that definition. Things like that are the biggest gray zone in my mind.
Ryan: It’s a really tough line. I had this really interesting idea. Leaving citations is like leaving breadcrumbs so that other people can follow your trail.
Emily: sorry i keep talking about my thesis, but something i had trouble with was analyzing things and coming up with conclusion on my own, independently of someone else’s work, and then needing to research the idea to find citations for when other people had the same thoughts
Ryan: i had to write a paper in high school that ended up matching another existing parer really closely even though i’d never seen it, which was frustrating
Sara: also, the more in depth into a discipline you go, the more ‘common knowledge’ there is. Do I need to cite something that I’ve only just learned, if it’s basic knowledge for the reader/professor? That’s where common knowledge is weird, because some people know it and some don’t.
Tamar: i generally assume that it’s based on what the writer knows, and a PhD student would be held to different standard than you would.
Janela: The danger, there, is that maybe you think of something as common knowledge but others disagree
Tamar: there’s no really good answer, but I’d say err on the side of caution.
Brian: my HCOs would probably just say ‘ask your professor’
Karina: I was just about to say that my science professor wants us to come talk to him, but also that you could write somewhere that you learned this from somewhere, but you can’t remember where, so you’re trying to cite but can’t.
Emily: Eliza knew what she was doing, though.
Brian: it’s 8:30 pm…
Mo si. Some people leave.

These minutes reflect the interpretations of Janela Harris and Brian Guggenheimer, Co-Secretaries. They are neither reviewed nor approved by the rest of Honor Council. Questions/comments? Email hccosecs@hc!

Tags: Abstracts Grade Change Intentionality Plagiarism Plagiarism Education Separation