[Englecturers] Academic dishonesty question--is this considered "fabrication"?

[Gray Scott]

Benedict,

Yeah, it's academic dishonesty -- and it's covered by the student conduct codes. 

Here's the official UCR definition on "fabrication," which is listed as one of the student conduct sins:
FABRICATION. Examples include:

· falsifying the results of any laboratory or experimental work or fabricating any data or information

· crediting source material that was not used for research

· falsifying, altering, or misstating the contents of documents or other materials related to academic matters, including but not limited to, schedules, prerequisites, transcripts, attendance records, or University forms

· giving false reasons (in advance or after the fact) for failure to complete academic work

· giving false information or testimony in connection with any investigation or hearing under this policy

(Source: http://senate.ucr.edu/agenda/041116/CEP_STUDENT_INTEGRITY_DEFINITIONS.pdf -- and please excuse me for not using MLA citation format here. I'm in a hurry and assuming a forgiving audience.)

I've had this sort of thing before, too. In fact, it happens a lot more than we think. If you haul off all of your papers to the library and start checking sources -- a time-consuming but eye-opening process -- you discover that something like a third of your students are citing one source but getting all of their information from another. Frequently, they've never even seen the book or article they're citing. Sad, but true. 

My favorite example of this is from a student of mine a year or two ago who wrote a concept essay about chaos theory. He cited a book titled The Butterfly Effect by, if I recall correctly, Susan Hawthorne. When I tried to look up the book, I found out that not only had it been in binding for a month, but that it is not a science book at all. It is a book of lesbian poetry. The student grabbed all of his information from a science blog, looked up "butterfly effect" in SCOTTY, found Hawthorne's book, and just plugged in her text as the reference for his Web-sourced information. 

At any rate, you're not alone on that sort of thing. Have fun!

- Gray
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: jonesbk at ucr.edu 
  To: englecturers at lists.ucr.edu 
  Sent: Monday, November 05, 2007 10:08 AM
  Subject: [Englecturers] Academic dishonesty question--is this considered "fabrication"?


  Hi, everyone. I've assigned a light research paper to my
  English 1A students. All but one source on this paper must be
  from UCR libraries or UCR library databases. To ensure that
  they were getting a head start on the research, I asked my
  students to write up an annotated bibliography. They only need
  to annotate three secondary sources, but those sources must
  come from UCR libraries or official UCR library databases. Yes, I 
  know, I'm mean.)

  One of my students has listed approved sources that clearly
  came from UCR databases, but the annotations have nothing to
  do with the sources. The student is actually annotating
  articles from regular Websites like musicbabylon.com and
  msnbc.com. Is this considered fabrication? If not, what kind
  of academic dishonesty is it? I've never seen this particular 
  brand before, so I've been caught a little off guard.

  Thanks for any feedback,
  Benedict Jones
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