Due Date: Initial post due by Wednesday, 11:59 AM ET

Replies due by Saturday, 11:59 PM ET

Please review the website above, especially sections on “What is Plagiarism” and 
“Preventing Plagiarism”.  

Most often, when a student is caught plagiarizing, their response is that they “didn’t mean to” and often do not believe that what they did constitutes plagiarism.  This may be because the student did include a citation somewhere; or the student feels the material they wrote was different enough from the original sources that it can be considered their own work.  However, there are clear guidelines about what must be referenced and cited, and how,  in order to avoid plagiarism, and when these are not followed the result is plagiarism.

Sometimes, students (or others) may intentionally steal material.  A person may cut-and-paste from various sources, piecing together paragraphs that “technically” aren’t plagiarized from one source–yet this is still plagiarism.  Similarly, closely paraphrasing a source requires a citation of the original work.  Some students get around this by “quoting” everything; this, although not “plagiarism,” is not original work–it belongs to the original authors.  I once graded a paper in which about 80% was within quotation marks, to “avoid plagiarism”.  I gave the student a grade based on the 20% of work that was actually their own, and not someone else’s work.  Needless to say, this resulted in a failing grade, and a complaint by an unhappy student who felt the work was fine.  What would you do in a situation such as this?

For our discussion this week, use a peer-reviewed article of your choice as a source document; then, provide  non-plagiarized summaries of three points from the article.  In other words, choose three points from the original article and discuss them, in your own words without plagiarizing.  After each one, explain why your work is original and not plagiarized. You can use the website above, or other resources, to help guide your non-plagiarized summaries. 

For the final part of the discussion, give an example in which you use material in a way that WOULD be plagiarizing, using a passage from the article, and explain why this IS plagiarism.  In other words, demonstrate a way that material from an article can be plagiarized. 

In your response to others, provide scholarly analysis to support or refute your peers’ claims that they have not plagiarized passages from the articles they used.

This week we will be continuing our discussion of human evolution. Choose a trait that humans have that you are interested in and find a primary research paper (published within the last ten years) that traces it back in a phylogeny to a particular date (or tree location). Explain why the trait is beneficial (or not). Please be certain to give the full citation and DOI (if available). And please read through all the entries before submitting yours, so that you pick a novel article that has not yet been discussed!

For example, I chose the evolution of the appendix, which is shared by other mammal species besides us. In fact it has evolved independently 32 times! (Once in hominoids, so before the Orangutan-Gorilla split in our lineage). And what is interesting about this is that the appendix may indeed have a function – as a microbial refuge for the fauna that have evolved inside of our intestinal tracts! So, when a bad event (e.g. food poisoning and diarrhea) occurs, our microbes are expulsed from our guts, but those in the refuge of the appendix remain and repopulate our intestines! (Why is this a good thing? Better the microbe that helps you break down food and not the pathogen that will eat you from the inside out…). 

Smith et al. 2013. Multiple independent appearances of the cecal appendix in mammalian evolution and an investigation of related ecological and anatomical factors. Comptes Rendus Palevol 12(6): 339-354.  

  So find a trait that you think is interesting, and trace its pathway back in time…

Search entries or author