Plagiarism :(

Well, we have some plagiarism on our site.  I cannot begin to express my disappointment in this discovery.  Both instances were on the same page and to make matters worse, one of the plagiarized pieces of information was from Wikipedia–a site they are not even allowed to use for reference.

Usually I would penalize this with a grade of zero, however, the first instance was just discovered and in my haste to get things graded (did I mention that this project was way to big for one teacher?) I did not take enough care in my grading to notice the stolen section and that grade is from the previous nine weeks.  The second already has a zero because the work was not turned in so I have no grades to penalize.

I did have a long and serious talk with both of the students today.  For one, this is not the first time the student has done this.  I tried to impress upon them that in high school it was severely punished, but most importantly that, in college, plagiarism was an offense that could get them expelled.  I asked them to be mature enough to go home and initiate a conversation with their parents about this incident and state that they would never do it again.