A student claims not to have plagiarized...

Sir Gawain Beheads the Green Knight

New penalties announced for plagiarism...

(Image from Wikipedia)

A Korea University student from my course in Medieval Literature wrote me an email:

I was in class 'The Middle Age's English Literature' actually I can't remember exactly .... Please consider my grade again. I can't understand my grade "F" .... I think I did my best in this class and also i've never been absent even once. Please.

I replied:

Your paper had a lot of problems.

The most serious problem was plagiarism, which is especially characteristic of page 5, which is almost entirely full of plagiarized material. You quote online sources word for word without using any quotation marks. Page 6 looks much the same, almost entirely copied from the internet.

Plagiarism results in an automatic "F" -- as I repeatedly made clear.

The student replied:

No, I didn't copy all the things from website absolutley .... I guess there was my mistake or something in my footnote. Eventhough, the reason make my grade worse but I can't understand "F" .... I sear, I did my best. I worked for many days .... My grade "F" made me be in a very difficult situation. If you don't understand me and even there is a concerete rule. Please consider my grade again. Actually I really really want to avoid "F", and I believe I did better than "F" .... Please proffessor.

I replied:

I have pasted below the material on pages 4 and 5 of your essay that you copied from GradeSaver, a website that belies its name if you simply plagiarize from it, as you did:

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GradeSaver:

The Celts, the people who lived in the British Isles prior to the arrival of the Romans and the Anglo-Saxons, had a strong body of pagan belief, ritual practices, and stories surrounding those beliefs and practices. Many of the characters in these myths were gods and goddesses; many of their ritual practices and beliefs echoed motifs in their myths. As the Middle Ages progressed and Christianity grew more dominant, these motifs and characters were often preserved in the folklore and literature of the British Isles. Arthurian material is particularly notable for its ties to Celtic myth, for many of the characters and events in these stories resemble gods and motifs in the older myths.
...
As the poem progresses, this becomes especially complicated when set against the obvious Christianity in the story.
...
Christian belief and pagan ritual mingle in intricate ways in Gawain.

GradeSaver:

One further interpretation of the shield should be mentioned. Recall again the role that Celtic, pagan mythology plays in the poem. The Pentangle is often seen as a pagan, and not a Christian, symbol, so it is unusual that it should appear on Gawain's shield, with the image of Mary on the reverse side. The two-sided shield, with a pagan symbol on one side and a Christian symbol on the other, can thus represent the dual pagan-Christian nature of the story.

GradeSaver:

There are pagan connotations with the obvious emphasis on fertility. We can even see the pagan, magical green girdle:
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[This] is not acceptable by chivalric and Christian standards: in keeping it, Gawain goes against his code of honesty, courage, and faith.

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For none of the above did you use quotation marks. The two times that you did acknowledge GradeSaver, you did not cite the webpage that you actually used. Sometimes, you cite other websites entirely even though you took the material from GradeSaver. But for much if not most of the copied material, you cited nothing.

The "F" grade stands.

And thus do things also stand, though I expect that I haven't heard the last of this student yet.

Regardless of what this student may believe about the proper consequences for plagiarism, the standards for scholarship are being raised in Korea. Today's Korea Herald notes in an important article by Jin Dae-woong, "Top school to issue plagiarism guideline," that "Korea University yesterday announced ... [that] it will establish a guideline by next month to tighten up rules regarding plagiarism." The article goes on to provide the following welcome information:

"We are working on a guideline for research ethics including plagiarism," the university said in a statement. "It will be officially released around mid-January after gathering opinions from professors through a public hearing."

The guideline will contain a set of concrete concepts constituting plagiarism, including its definition, span and period, along with specific examples for appropriate application.

"It will be a basic standard to judge various different forms of plagiarism allegations although it will not be an absolute principle," said a professor at the university on condition of anonymity.

The new standard will start to be applied from as early as next semester, he added.

The guideline project originally began in July to cope with growing plagiarism scandals in academic circles, another university official said.

The university has been operating a task force comprising six professors from different academic fields since then to set the basic ethics code, the official said.

I humbly submit that this task force add me to their number. Of course ... the fact that I'll soon no longer be working at Korea University might pose some bureaucratic hurdles, but these could be easily bureaucratically hurdled by rehiring me as a professor of scholarly ethics.

That probably won't happen, but at least the standards are officially rising now, so I can just direct any complaining students to these more rigorous standards.