Do you agree with the professor about this "plagiarism case"?

Fix it right now. Turn it in right now.

Yes, that is harsh. I understand why plagiarism is treated severely, but that does seem excessive.

Regardless of what she said, do it, and send a note explaining how you managed to overlook that citation. If you have anything else to mention in your own favor, such as that it was just one out of 100 citations and an oversight, say it (without whining). But take care how you express yourself, and do not accuse her of anything.

Also document this correspondence. Keep everything, including the before and after versions of your paper. You will need them if you appeal this.

Very harsh, you shouldn’t be treated like that for one little mistake.

For our sake, can you give us the offending sentence?

Also, your teacher sounds like an asshole.

Your professor picks out one little sentence in a 12 page paper? Cmon that is a little insane. I feel for you on this one. Maybe you should take matters to the headmaster because that is not right

Wow, the more I think about it, the more offended I am myself. I feel for you, man.

Also give the exam everything you’ve got. Showing that you have mastered the material will speak very well for you.

Time to go over the prof’s head to the department chair. Take everything with you – your paper, the email from the prof, your response, the citation that should have been there, etc.

Be polite. Be respectful. But make your case, and explain to the chair why you think the prof is being unreasonable in this case.

ONE sentence?

That’s way too icky picky

@Jeruba I fixed it and emailed it back to her. She responded with “I still cannot accept this. The exam is tomorrow, and the plagiarism still happened. If you wish to take the exam, you may.”

@holden It was a quote. “People never notice anything.” I’ll assume you know who it’s by.

Do you think I actually have enough of a case to appeal this?

That’s completely ridiculous. I teach a college-level course and I would never respond that way. (In fact, we had a case where two students turned in identical assignments worth only 2% of their grades, and they were simply given a zero for the assignment and a warning—we could have failed them for the entire course.)

Unless there’s more to this story that you’re not telling us, fuck your prof and go over her head. I would go directly to the dean or head of the department.

Good luck and keep us posted.

That’s ridiculous. Plagiarism should be taken very seriously, but if this occurred the way you are describing it with no important details omitted, your teacher is nutso. Is there a department chair you can appeal to?

Take the exam. Ace it. And appeal.

@Likeradar Well. She is department head, but I could talk to the dean. I think.

Maybe the one sentence was written by the teacher?

It sounds to me like the prof is on a huge power trip. I highly recommend that you follow @MrItty ‘s advice and go straight to the department Chair with all documents in hand. I can pretty much guarantee that the Chair will be infinitely more reasonable. You should have, at most, been given a warning and have your paper deducted several points for failing to cite a source. If you had plagiarized a whole page or the whole paper, it would be another story. Failing your paper for a four word sentence is ridiculous, and the Chair will realize that.

@fireside It was a quote from The Catcher in the Rye. It just slipped my mind to cite it.

What utter rubbish. Go over their head and talk to the Dean. You’re paying to fail a class if this isn’t solved and as a customer of education you have rights.

There will be time later to change your grade. Right now the final exam is the main thing. Don’t give up on this course. Show your stuff. Even if the decision goes against you in the short run, that might not be the end of it, and you should shine in all other respects.

Unless the course is titled something like, “Citations 412” I think this is very strange. This is not something you should just take without putting up a respectful and mature fight.

Do your absolute best on the exam, then go talk to the dean. Don’t worry about the paper until after the exam, just put your effort into the test for now. Good luck!

People never notice anything…unless, of course, they intend to screw you over with it.

This would make sense if the statement she made that you didn’t site one of your sentences was made in the tone of, “You didn’t cite a single sentence in the whole paper” but not for missing the citation of once single sentence within a paper, especially if the original writer/researcher was cited elsewhere for a similar thought process.

Wow, I am surprised to be the only voice of disagreement. When you said to @holden that you assumed he/she knew the quotation, it took 2 seconds to figure out from whence the quote came. You didn’t indicate the class for which this paper was submitted (English perhaps?) You also neglected to indicate the theme of the paper. Both of these elements (class and theme) would indicate. more accurately, how bad a transgression this really was . . .

English class.
Research paper on censorship of the book.

What level English class? And are you an English major?

Cathcher in the Rye is not going to be an extremely high level class, and I’m assuming by the community college that this is your gen ed English Class. I’d say missing only one citation, if all others are there, is an easy oversight / mistake that should lead to points being deducted, but not a flat 0 for the paper. I’d take the exam, then go to the Dean of the English Department to appeal the professor’s decision.

Yeah, it’s just the general English class. We all had to pick a book to write about, and that was on the list.

In that case, I think you should have a leg to stand on. A gen ed class is supposed to teach you how to write these types of papers. The missed cite is important, but there are less extreme ways to get the point across in a freshman level class than having you fail because of one missed cite.

Are there other mitigating circumstances, like poor class attendance, paper turned in late?

What was the nature of the sentence? Did you quote directly and forget to cite or did you paraphrase and forget to cite? (It doesn’t really matter much but I’m curious.)

Did you merely forget a parenthetical citation or did you forget to include the work on your list of works cited?

Just wondering. This lady seenm to take herself too seriously.

Edit: Had just skimmed the thread, sorry. If there were quotation marks around it then this isn’t plagiarism.

That sounds really hinky. I’d see the Dean with all my documentation after I took my exam.

The sentence is a direct quote from the book she was writing about, and a familiar enough one to make it to lists of quotes from the book. It’s not like she was trying to pass it off as her own.

I have never read The Catcher in the Rye (I know, right?), but that sentence is no “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

So my question is this: how did the teacher even know that it was a quote? Did you say something like “Character A says “People never notice anything.”. or similar? Because then, at least according to many other classes, it is as good as citing the book. As long as you don’t claim it as your own and/or cite the source in the Works Cited, what’s the teacher’s beef?

Also, on a similar note…how many sources did you have? If only a few, than your case gets even more ridiculous.

I’m rooting for you. Let us know how it goes!

It is a very famous quote from Catcher in the Rye. Surely, and English Professor would know it. And if it was placed in quotation marks, with just the citation missing, it isn’t as if the OP was trying to claim the quote as their own.

If she won’t let you fix it, contact the dean since she is the department head. Let them know that you unintentionally missed one reference in an entire large paper and that you should have been contacted long ago so that you could fix the error instead of being strictly penalized for a simple mistake. Document everything and take it on appeal. Then never take the teacher again!

In the meantime, be good and get on the exam! Study, show that you know everything that you need to and are capable of making a good grade if you are allowed. You do have recourse, but you need to take care of the rest of business before worrying about this.

Do what @Jeruba said. Fix it, send it in, document everything, and if she sends something back saying it’s too late (which is bull, the class is not over with), then go over her head.

Since you did put the sentence in quotation marks, you have a more than reasonable case.

There is a huge difference between plagiarism and failure to cite.

The first implies basic dishonesty of intent. The second merely is simple carelessness.

Since the prof. CHOSE to use the more perjorative term of plagiarism, in spite of the quotation marks, you could reasonably point out that she doesn’t understand the word at all. Plagiarism is fraud. How can it be fraudulent if it’s enclosed in quotes?

Whichever higher up you appeal to should definitely be made aware that the offending sentence was within quotation marks. That clearly shows that it was not your intent to plagiarise it as your own.

excuse my language, but What a complete and utter psycho!
Fight til you get this changed, this is a completely insane response on the part of your professor,
and anyone reasonable should see that.

Just don’t use and vocab I used and give them an excuse to dismiss what you’re saying. (my friends do this all the time, lose credit by losing their temper even though they’re completely in the right.)
Good luck and let us know how it pans out!!

(i haven’t read the above so don’t know if this has been said)

You have advocates as a student when a teacher is unreasonable (which if you are telling this correctly this certainly seems unreasonable). There will be an office in your college that deals with students who cheat and other “legal” issues as they pertain to the school. They can also work as your advocates. If there is a “students center” or “student life” office they will know, otherwise ask an academic advisor. It isn’t too late now to do this.

OK, so this was not a paper about great American literature in general, it was actually a specific paper about Catcher in the Rye in which you neglected to cite one quotation from (yes) Catcher in the Rye which you clearly knew came from (Yes, here it is again) Catcher in the Rye.

If I am not mistaken, plagiarism smacks of being sneaky and trying to pass off writing as one’s own. How in the world could there be any confusion when the teacher 1) knew what book you were writing about and 2) the entire paper is only about the one book.

This sounds like an issue of misplaced/forgotten punctuation marks, not plagiarism.

@Jeruba, girl, you are the voice of reason! I bow to your levelheaded insightful answers while all I can do most of the time is get lurve for clever quips.

Riiiiiiiiiiight. So.
I took the final.
Aced it.
Talked to her after about the paper. Handed her a fixed copy of it, and the print out from the plagiarism detector saying the paper was fine.
She set it on the desk and said that it is still too late ”..because the course is now over. You finished the exam.”
So I told her that was fine, because I had copies of the original paper, fixed paper, plagiarism detector report and her emails and that I had an appointment with the Dean to get this sorted out.
She told me that was “fine” and that she is not backing down on this.

So I find out tomorrow if he is gonna help me or not.

@rangerr: What a crazy bitch. I really hope you win this one.

I hope so too.
She’s ridiculous.

@rangerr Wow, what a freak. I really can’t believe how strict she is being. Good luck, keep us posted!

@rangerr What’s your usual relationship like with her? The only reasons I could possibly think that she’s doing this is a) She’s a nutso on a power trip or b) You’ve done sneaky/cheating things in her class before, and she finally has a solid example and isn’t gonna let you get away with it. I’m not suggesting you have done things before, I’m just trying really hard to think of why a professor would do this to a student.

@Likeradar Maybe to “teach her a lesson” which I think is ridiculous, because a plagiarism mark against someone is serious, it shouldn’t be taken lightly.
I know I’ve made mistakes in my papers, with early English classes…not citing properly. The professor guided me, or told me to fix it. (usually you have time to fix a paper, you know?) The professor is being quite unreasonable. Maybe she has a history of it?
I’d check ratemyprofessor to see other student comments.

I haven’t done anything that I know of.
I have a strong opinion during group discussions, but I haven’t said anything offensive or that would be grounds for her to dislike me. I asked a few classmates their opinion.

@casheroo I didn’t think to check there.. I’ll do that.

Good for you, @rangerr. Aced the final! Talked to the prof! Appointment with the dean! Documentation! You are doing everything right. And you have a terrific cheering section here.

I want you to win this one for all the honest, hard-trying students who fall a sixteenth of an inch short of perfection and don’t need to be beaten up about it, against all the rigid-minded little martinets and power-tripping bullies who confuse discipline with punishment and don’t understand the sheer educational power of humility and a gracious apology.

@Jeruba – ::CLAPCLAPCLAPCLAP!!!::

I think she’s fucking the dean.

So I showed everything to the dean.
He read it for about 10 minutes.
Then pointed out that I handed her the paper after she said I couldn’t go back and fix it.
So I explained that she didn’t return my email for two weeks, so I had no way of knowing.
He took my side, then at last minute decided that I ”did not follow the guidelines of the paper” and by leaving out that citation, it was wrong.
He said that it was the teacher’s choice and that he trusts her judgment.

So I’m not sure if I can do anything now.

Did you point out that the one offending sentence was in quotes so you obviously were not claiming it as your own.

That is what makes this less than plagiarism. It clearly shows lack of intent to claim it as yours.

Failure to cite is so minor compared to plagiarism that it just makes no sense at all. Failing you for the entire class for that? That’s ridiculous.

Is there no other source of appeal? This is so NOT plagiarism, it really boggles the mind.

Is there someone higher up who you can go to? Do you have an academic adviser you could talk to about your options? (I’ve never gone there, but I’m pretty sure my school has an office where you can go for help with things like this.)

The whole thing is too ridiculous—you have a strong case (or rather, your teacher has such an incredibly weak case) that you shouldn’t let this drop.

Just a point of clarification . . . while you put the offending sentence in quotation marks on fluther, it is not clear nor have you stated that it was in quotation marks in the actual paper. I am not clear if you simply failed to cite that the sentence (in quotation marks) was from the book or if you just had the sentence in the paper without quotation marks and failed to cite it.

I think some other students at your school would be interested in knowing about this. Is there a school paper?

@rangerr Forget the dean. The Dean’s role is to support the University. They rarely go against it.

Get an advocate at the school. Go to the student office and get student legal aid involved (the same people who prosecute those who actually cheat which is an entire department of it’s own). Or get an academic counselor or head of a student group, someone with guts and a bit of shift to back you up. There are lots of places on campus to report wrong-doings. Find your resources and pursue it. If you think it’s worth it, I certainly do and would.

I just don’t want to make a fuss about it.. I’m quite shy, really.
Do you think the academic counselors could help?

@rangerr It depends on which academic counselor you get. I worked in academic counseling as a student (not counselor) while in college. There were two academic counseling offices. The one I worked in advocated on behalf of students all the time. They were well known for it. The other one, well you had to find the right person in the office. University politics are so crazy. Some people just refuse to step on toes. Others believe their purpose there is to support students. You need to find the latter.

Having said that however it will be creating a fuss because at this point you are fighting the teacher and the dean’s decision (even though i’m sure dean is one of those people who refuse to step on toes and probably had little to do with your actual scenario). But I suppose it never hurts to talk with an academic counselor about your options before pursuing them because that doesn’t create any fuss.

I think at this point it is all up to how much motivation you have to right the wrong. If you are going to pass the class anyway and it doesn’t really affect your GPA then it is really your decision as to how far you want to pursue this.

Also writing an editorial in school newspaper as @Jerbua mentioned can work as well.

I think your teacher should give you a chance. I am also a teacher at university of California. However, do not get worry and take care for next time.