And then Shelley said: “And I don’t know if you read my most recent case or not, but a student had a helpful grandmother, and I’ve been able to talk to that student and reach her and hopefully put her on the path of learning for herself. ”

These two examples seem more humanely sensible than TII or any PDS program can hope to offer. Bradley points out ,through his example, that this doesn’t mean a pass for the student, but it does bring the act of plagiarizing back to the teachable moment rather than the criminalizing one.
I find Dennis’s comments intriguing because I’ve been wondering of late if TII is marketed outside of the English Rhet/Comp world. It’s time to start asking around my campus to see if colleagues are getting the hard sell, too.

“I’ll whisper here my dark and unspeakable secret: dear reader, I won’t lose sleep if I fail to catch and punish every single wicked, evil plagiarist. Sure, I notice the odd changes of voice and style, and every time I’ve noticed such shifts (every semester save one since 1998), I’ve confirmed that there was indeed a problem, and followed up on it. But if The Doomful Specter of Academic Plagiarism called me before him to pass judgment upon my pedagogy and told me that I’d been found wanting — told me that a student had, heaven forbid, Gotten Over — I’d be like, “Well, OK. So?” Does that in some way invalidate my entire pedagogy? Does that show what a jacked-up terrible instructor I am? Does that show that said student learned nothing from the course and thereby offer a reason why we must use machines to hunt down and mercilessly exterminate the relentlessly proliferative scourge of plagiarism committed by the lazy and amoral students populating our courses?”

It addresses my concerns well and helps to push the discourse on this issue more, which is what I was trying to accomplish with my posts. I guess I do want to “catch ‘em all” if I can, for the sake of the students who don’t plagiarize rather than my own feeling of pride that no one’s getting one over on me. Sure, I want to prevent it in the first place, but I know some students are going to do it regardless. This paragraph is the best response to that argument I’ve seen so far.

(Also, about “burden of proof” — I should have put that in scare quotes! It’s the phrase they used to use at one school where I taught. I was engaging in a bit of WPA-ese there, heh.)

Finally, there’s one major weakness of the arguments I’ve been making that you haven’t mentioned, Mike, and that’s that I don’t really define plagiarism. Jonathan has this fantastic paper on plagiarism that he delivered at a conference in 2002, and I’ve pleaded with him to post it, but he hasn’t yet. Anyway, in that paper, he poses the question that if a student is clever enough to “plagiarize” (patchwrite in this case) in a way that is completely seamless with his or her other writing and speaking, hasn’t the student demonstrated some writing skill? I think it’s an excellent point (though I don’t know if Jonathan does, or if he was just putting it out there). Here we get into that distinction of “when we do it, it’s borrowing; when they do it, it’s plagiarism.”

Back to the definition: When I talk about plagiarism, I’m mostly talking about the extreme cases: a paper taken in toto from the Web, or a big chunk of text — 1/2 a page to a page — taken from some other source without attribution. I don’t know if that changes the way any of you read my posts on plagiarism, but I wanted to clarify just in case.

I’ll try to make it back for a more thorough look later. I’m interested just lacking in time.

In fact, before I read this Pokemon entry, I blogged the Ballad of Mike Edwards and the PDS.

http://jerz.setonhill.edu/weblog/permalink.jsp?id=4465