This English teacher gave me a really hard time... I had to write a political essay about the success and failures of the current president. I read some articles about the government, president Bush etc. I found one article that I really liked and I agreed with the author's points - it basically was written in a form of an essay. I thought - since I agree with the topic sentence and the author's points, I will paraphrase it so that I get an original essay. I rewrote EACH AND EVERY sentence, for example:

Original: President Bush should have not been reelected.

I changed it to:

I don't think it was good for the nation to elect Mr. Bush to be the US president again.

I left the original author's ideas, but I completely reworded them. Unfortunately, my teacher had read this article before and somehow determined I plagiarized it and gave me an F!

I don't think it was fair of him... He didn't require us to include a reference page so I didn't write where I got the ideas from.

He was the hardest teacher I had to deal with througout college... :( I still think I didn't plagiarize it.

Joy

Well, I think quoting somebody's ideas without referencing may be considered "a sign of plagiarism" - but I don't think the teacher was right to give you an F.

Beatrice

bring it up with the dean, explain there is no evidence that you plagarized and that paraphrasing is not plagarism!

Well, it would be difficult to persuade a professor that paraphrasing is not plagiarism... Check out this link:

http://facpub.stjohns.edu/~roigm/plagiarism/Paraphrasing%20and%20plagiarism .html

Beatrice

I wrote an email to the dean; he promised to "look into it." The problem is - I'm going to have two more classes with the same teacher who gave me an F so I also told the dean it's not that important - the most important is getting a good grade on the final exams...

Joy

Any news from the dean, Joy? Your case doesn't look like plagiarism at all.

Actually, I was going to make a post about it. My teacher told me he found out I contacted the dean. But he wasn't angry with me or something. Instead, he offered me to write another essay on a similar topic. I agreed, of course and this time I made sure everything was 101% original. I got an A- and I'm happy about it. I'm lucky the teacher wasn't malicious or something. Thanks for asking.

JOy

Some of these teachers are taking this anti-plagiarism stuff way too far. I wrote an essay about television. My opening sentence said, "Television is the most powerful form of communication ever created", or something to that effect. The teacher flagged it as "plagiarized" and demanded to know where I had stolen that sentence. I told her that if I was guilty of anything, I was guilty of not being very creative, but not of plagairism. Your sentence, "Bush should not have been reelected" falls into that same category. I could see a possible plagiarism issue if you listed specific reasons why he should not have been reelected, but those could be easily fixed by saying, "As John Smith observed, blah blah blah..." or by using a parenthetical citation. What's next? If I write, "The Earth is round", are they going to ask for a source in APA style?

workingonit
That's exactly what I'm talking about. The more information, the less anti-plagiarism software relevant is. One can hear stories on TV about respected authors accused of plagiarism. There must be something done about it.

JOY

Joy~you are lucky! I got an "F" several month ago. The reason is "late submission". Of course I'm not.... Just because they made mistake with my student number!
I argured it, but the professor told me there was no chance to change it because the term was almost finished (it's an one year Master course, I got the result in the last week) and I passed because I got B in the exam, so she will not change the result for me!! can you believe that!
So~~you really lucky!! He's a kind teacher

some teachers are indeed nuts ..........i have one teacher in College.....when we wrote our thesis she told us to pick some good topic , we gave her our topic and she turn it down , the next thing we do , me and my classmate think of another topic and she turn it down again, again we made another topic we asked our friend one PH.d and another Master Degree and to our horror she turn it down again....we are so furious already that topics made by Ph.D and a Master Degree were turn down.....Later we know that she have already have a topic in mind and she tells us to write bout it ....tsk........tsk.........tsk..........can't believe teachers are really nuts sometimes.......anyway we have been graded A+ ........lolz........