Honor Board Academic Abstract Case # 0504
Two Bryn Mawr students—a senior, Sally, and a freshman, Jessica—turned in their final papers for a 200 level psychology course. These papers were based upon a class project, and two of the four parts of the paper were to be written in collaboration. The other two sections of the paper were to be written individually. However, Professor Kevin noticed that Sally and Jessica’s papers shared a paragraph nearly word-for-word in one of the sections, which was to be completed individually. Concerned, Professor Kevin confronted the students and asked them to contact the Honor Board.
In their statements to the Honor Board, both Sally and Jessica denied having written the individual sections of the paper in collaboration. While they admitted that they had discussed the results of the class project in regards to the sections that were supposed to be completed individually, they denied that they had done so intentionally and repeated that they had not actually written their papers together. They claimed that they had both, individually, found the same secondary source to use in their papers and that they had both been working off the same notes of group discussion, which would explain the similarities in their papers.
Having admitted that they had discussed the sections of the paper, which were to be completed individually, Sally and Jessica were already guilty of some degree of collaboration. The Honor Board also found it unlikely that they would have achieved such similarity on their papers without some additional collaboration, but had no concrete evidence of how much collaboration might have occurred.
Because the section in question was only a portion of the whole assignment, the Honor Board did not feel it would be appropriate to fail the students on the entire paper. Rather, the Honor Board resolved that Sally and Jessica would both have an equal number of points deducted from their overall grades on their papers and that Professor Kevin would be the appropriate person to decide exactly how many points would be deducted.
