Archive for Erin Millar and Ben Coli

Students are caught unintentionally plagiarizing all the time. Learn how to stay safe

You’re writing a paper and you find yourself on the horns of a dilemma: if you make up facts that show the world as you think it ought to be, that’s fabrication and you’re guilty of academic misconduct. On the other hand, if you do your research and find the foremost expert on the subject and repeat whatever he says word-for-word, that’s plagiarism and it’s also academic misconduct.

Come on! It hardly seems fair!

Joking aside, plagiarism is easy to commit accidentally, it’s easy for professors to detect, and it can have serious repercussions. Ignorance is no defense against a charge of plagiarism; at this stage in your academic career, you are expected to know what plagiarism is and how to avoid it.

Plagiarism, in a nutshell, is when a student takes someone else’s idea or their way of expressing an idea and passes it off as their own. (This plagiarism stuff is making me nervous. I admit it: I paraphrased this definition from the University of Toronto’s Code of Behaviour on Academic Matters.)

To make things extra weird and complicated, you can also plagiarize yourself if you take things from papers you’ve previously submitted without citing them, because all academic works are supposed to be original.

Why would students plagiarize themselves, or anyone else, for that matter? Most plagiarism is committed accidentally, or out of ignorance.

“Usually it’s because they are not aware of correct citation practices so they don’t include quotation marks, they don’t cite their sources correctly,” says University of Western Ontario ombudsperson Adrienne Clarke.

Citation practices vary from subject to subject and from university to university. There are several styles of citation you may be expected to use, such as the MLA system and the APA system. It is your responsibility to learn the expectations of your professor and your department, and to follow them. Most universities have websites on plagiarism and citation, and if you’re still not certain, ask your professor.

Even if you are aware of expectations, it’s still easy to make mistakes if you’re not careful. Clark gives a scenario of how an honest student could land up plagiarizing a source:

“A student is working on a paper. They have notes in front of them, with citations and page numbers on sticky notes. They are organizing them, putting them down, moving them around. They are taking information from different places and jotting down page numbers and references. And then when it comes to putting the final paper together, there has been some careless note taking, or they have put their stickies in a different order, and written down wrong page numbers or gotten sources confused, so that their final citation list is not correct.”

Alex Gillis, a journalism professor at Ryerson University, has also seen mistakes made by students with chaotic notes. “Get organized so that later you don’t inadvertently plagiarize by thinking ‘That’s a great sentence I wrote’ when it’s actually from the Village Voice or something.”

Yes, improper citation, committed with the best of intentions but without much attention to detail, is plagiarism, and could be considered academic misconduct. When you’re taking notes, it’s important to keep your sources straight so you don’t attribute the wrong source, or worse, mistake a quotation you jotted down as an original idea of your own.

Next: What’s another way students accidentally plagiarize?

Are you a physics major who dreads going to math class? Maybe it’s time to reconsider your career plans

So, you’re halfway through a four-year undergraduate program and you decide, for one reason or another, that you’ve made a mistake: you’re getting the wrong degree.

Maybe you keep flunking classes and you’re starting to suspect that you’re terrible at math and you’re going to be a lousy physicist. Maybe you realize that you’re scared of blood and embarrassed by naked people, so a career in medicine isn’t for you. Or maybe you’ve just found another subject that suits you better.

Whatever your reason, you’ve just put all of that time, energy and money into passing the prerequisites for a program you don’t want to complete and you’re halfway to getting a degree you don’t want to get.

What should you do?

Changing your mind about your major isn’t always a bad thing, particularly if it happens early in your degree. University, after all, is an opportunity to explore and to discover what you’re interested in.

The classic example, says Janet Sheppard, a counselor at the University of Victoria, is undergraduates who change their minds about going into medicine. “Science professors will joke sometimes that everybody in their biology 100 class is a pre-med student,” she chuckles. “But by the end of the year, things are starting to change.”

In your first few years of university, you’re exposed to a much broader world of learning than what you experienced in high school. There are whole fields of learning you probably never knew existed. Other subjects turn out to be very different than the little taste of them you had in high school — so it’s natural that your plans might change.

Sheppard advises students to keep an open mind, take a wide variety of courses and get involved in campus life. Exposing yourself to the broadest experience possible — both in class and through clubs, volunteer work and other activities — will help you discover what you are interested in.

“Students need to pay attention to the courses they actually look forward to going to, the ones where they actually enjoy the reading,” Sheppard says. You should also talk to people who have the degree you’re thinking about getting, and research the kind of career you’re setting yourself up for.

If you’re still uncertain about what to major in, then “decide not to decide,” says Sheppard. “Give yourself another semester or two to explore.” Staying in school for an extra couple of semesters is not the end of the world; loads of students are doing it. “The reality is most students take more than four years to do a four-year degree.”

The further you get into your studies and the more time you’ve invested in a program, the more difficult it can be to switch. Some changes can be relatively painless, because of the large amount of overlap in prerequisites — for example, changing from psychology to sociology. Transitioning from engineering to sociology, however, could add semesters to your degree and thousands of dollars to your student loan.

How the hell are you going to get anything done in this place?

So, your adorable sweetheart of a roomie has turned out to be a total slob who turns on the lights when she comes home from partying at 2:00 a.m. The shared bathrooms have degenerated into shambles. A guy who lives down the hall spent his scholarship on a booming stereo and has terrible taste in music. Some other guy spent the entire last week sleeping on the couch in the lounge because he spilled water from his fish tank all over his mattress. (True story!) What you don’t know yet is that he’s going to be too lazy to put his bed back together and will sleep on the lounge couch for most of the semester.

Well, maybe it’s not that bad (yet) but the welcome parties are winding down and the excitement about meeting so many new people is wearing off. It’s becoming clear that not only are you going to have to live in this crowded place for the next two semesters, you’re actually going to have to read, work and think clearly.

How the hell are you going to survive?

Some of it will just be a matter of adjustment. “You become good at sleeping through anything as a matter of necessity,” says Jesse, a graduate of the University of Alberta who lived next door to the guy who spent his scholarship on a stereo. “You get to know people really quickly and you become comfortable with sharing a bathroom.”

But it will also be a matter of discipline and strategy, particularly when it comes to studying and getting your assignments done. Residence can be an incredibly social place, which is great, until you have to get some work done.

“I realized pretty quick that I could not study in my room, so I would leave,” says Lizzy, a University of British Columbia student who is a four-year veteran of living in res and has spent two years as a residence advisor. “You can try to shut everyone out, but there’s a push on the floor for everyone to be involved in the community. If you have a hard time saying no to people, the easiest thing to do is leave.”

“For the first little while, I tried to tough it out, but it got harder to ignore the noise,” says Danielle, a St. Francis Xavier graduate who moved out of res after only one semester. “I put on music, but even that’s kind of distracting in itself, so I would go and find other places on campus like the library or the student union building — anywhere where there was a quiet desk.”

Thirteen students’ unions petition to leave the Canadian Federation of Students

Although this blog is supposed to focus on advice about going to university, please allow me a moment to dive into the dark waters of student politics. The McGill Daily has the story: 13 students unions across the country are going to run referendums in an effort to leave the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS), Canada’s largest student lobby group.

I’ve been following the story of the CFS for years, first as a student journalist and then in my work at Maclean’s. And the entire time dissatisfaction with the organization has been slowly growing. It seems to have come to a head in the past couple of years; two years ago, three student unions (Kwantlen, SFU, and Cape Breton) attempted to leave the union, albeit unsuccessfully. Now another 13 are petitioning their students to leave.

The McGill Daily sums up the reasons why these students’ unions want out as:

• A student politician from Trent believes CFS staffers are “incompetent lobbyists” and use their considerable resources to attempt to sway the political perspectives of students (Please note that I don’t necessarily agree with this statement.)

• Some student politicians felt that the organization is not transparent and accountable to members.

• Many of the unions are unhappy with the CFS’ track record of aggressive litigation, often against students.

I wrote a story a couple of years ago about how the CFS deals with student journalists. It described how mere hours before The Eyeopener–Ryerson’s student newspaper–was to go to press, the CFS hand-delivered a letter to the editor threatening legal action if she included certain statements about the CFS in the next issue of the newspaper. This wasn’t a reaction to the newspaper printing something inaccurate or defamatory; this was preemptive–the CFS hadn’t even read the article yet. The Eyeopener did not alter the story and the CFS did not end up pursuing any legal action, even though those “certain statements” were included. The incident seemed to me to be a clear attempt to intimidate student journalists.

Probably because I wrote that story, I was interviewed by the writer of the McGill Daily article. I told her that in my experience as a journalist, the CFS is the most aggressive organization I’ve ever reported on. I don’t mean most aggressive “student organization” but most aggressive organization–period. This includes stories I’ve done on criminals, coal companies, you name it.

Why should the regular student care about this backroom student politics nonsense? Here’s why: The CFS represents some 80 colleges and universities in Canada, which means that half a million students are members of the organization. And it’s funded by student levies that you cough up when paying your tuition. So that means that a student organization is taking student funds and using it to sue and threaten students. Does that sound like an appropriate use of these resources?

We examine how much students really drink, which province parties the hardest–and how to consume safely

It’s frosh week. You’re standing on the front lawn of a house when a headless mannequin flies through a second-story window in a shower of glass and lands at your feet. Loud dance music can be heard through the hole in the glass.

A staggering student passes as you walk up the front steps, across the beer keg-strewn front porch and through the front door, where you find yourself in a riotous party. Students mingle, empty beer cans are scattered everywhere and unidentified objects periodically fly across the room. A student crushes an empty beer can on his forehead. A motorcycle bursts through the front doors and flies up the stairs to the landing, where the rider opens a beer and hands it to the stunned freshman he just nearly ran over.

It’s a typical scene from frosh week at a Canadian university, no?  We all know that students are a bunch of irresponsible drunks, don’t we?

The sophisticated 1970s film connoisseur should have identified the above as the opening scene in Animal House. In order to figure out how much the Animal House stereotype is merely perception, Maclean’s OnCampus looked to the latest available research to determine just how much students really drink and which province parties the hardest.

During frosh week festivities it may seem like everyone on campus is partaking in more than their share of booze, but the reality is that the drunken second-year student you saw passed out on the couch at that house party is in the minority. According to a survey commissioned by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, 32 per cent of students reported hazardous drinking (which means experiencing symptoms like blacking out or feeling guilty). On the other hand, fifty-eight percent of students never drink more than five drinks in a sitting, and 38 percent of them drink less often than once per week.

It is, of course, true that most students drink; over 85 per cent of students reported drinking during the previous 12 months. But the revelers around you at that house party most likely drink less than you think. A number of researchers have found that students have an inflated perception of how much their fellow students consume. At the University of British Columbia, for example, 67 per cent thought the typical student had had five or more drinks the last time they partied, while in reality only 24 per cent of students actually did. In fact, at UBC 64 per cent of students never drink five or more drinks in one sitting and one in ten students have never tried alcohol at all.

No, but knowing too much can make you stupid

At least one post-secondary pundit thinks that procrastinating is good for you. Carson Jerema of the Winnipeg Free Press, formerly of OnCampus, writes in his biweekly education column that procrastination can make you brilliant.

Jerema’s first point is that if you never procrastinate, you will never do anything other than schoolwork. Clearly, smart planning of when you study, socialize and do other things doesn’t consist of procrastinating. But what I really disagree with is that attempting to produce your best possible work is misguided because some writer heavyweights Jerema refers to didn’t produce their best work until they were old. With that, Jerema implies that guys like John Rawls could be lazy throughout their early lives, then one day they woke up and BING! the light turned on and brilliant work spewed forth from them with little preparation. In reality, it takes a life of working hard before you’ll have a chance at producing a great work. You may as well start now.

Alright, so I’ve made clear that I think Jerema is mostly full of bullshit—and likely was procrastinating while writing the piece—but his article hints at an important point for students: over-researching an assignment can lead to unfocused and poor writing. Trust me on this one; I know firsthand because I do it all the time when researching articles I’m writing. I often get so caught up in learning everything there is to know about the topic I’m writing about that when I sit down to write, I can’t figure out what the story is anymore. Plus, in the process of reading three books, interviewing 10 people, and sifting through dozens of articles all for one lousy 600-word article (ok, I’m exaggerating) I wasted time that could have spent on something else. Sigh.

Author and New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell delves into the concept of knowledge overload in his book Blink, which I recently read. His basic premise is that rapid cognition—the kind of thinking that happens in the blink of an eye—is extremely powerful and can be of great use, if harnessed properly. To introduce his topic, he tells a story about the Getty Museum in California acquiring a statue, believed to be a rare marble kouros dating from sixth century BC. The museum went through months of research and study to ascertain the statue was indeed what they thought it was. When they were satisfied, they bought it for just under $10-million.

Government student loans are changing. Get schooled on how they affect you

You may get a surprise in the mail this year. Upon opening that fateful letter that tells you how much student loan funding you’ll receive, you might find yourself the recipient of a non-repayable grant from the Federal government that you never asked for. If free money seems to good to be true, fear not: it’s part of a new Canada Student Grant Program that is being implemented for the first time this semester and means that you will receive extra dough you won’t have to pay back later.

In the 2008 budget, the federal government announced big changes to federal student aid, including a new national grant program, the scrapping of the Millennium Scholarship Foundation (the previous source of national bursaries and scholarships) and new programs to help student loan borrowers having trouble repaying their loans after graduation. So how exactly do these changes affect you?

Starting this year, when you apply for a national student loan, you are automatically applying for a grant as well. Full-time students who are deemed by the Canada Student Loan Program to be from low-income families will receive an extra $250 per month up to a maximum of $3000 per year. Those from middle-income families will receive $100 per month up to a maximum of $1,200 per year. To find out what your family’s income level is click here.

An important distinction between the previous bursary program and the new grant program is that grant funding is determined according to your family’s income, not your need (expenses minus resources). This means that no matter whether you have savings from your summer job or you borrowed money from your uncle, you will get the grant as long as your family’s income is low enough. It may seem like an inconsequential difference, but it affects who gets these grants.

In other words, while getting a part-time job or otherwise improving your financial circumstances decreases the amount of funding you qualify for in the form of student loans, it does not affect your grant funding. Take this example: Student A is from a low-income family and, after subtracting his meager savings from his total university costs, he needs $3,500. He will receive $2,000 in grants and $1,500 in student loans. Student B is also from a low-income family and, having sold her car and working her butt off during the summer, she only needs $1,400. She will receive a $2,000 grant and won’t have to take out student loans. If you qualify, you get the grant—simple as that.