A Texas Tech English project meant to provide the university with an audience-friendly, easily accessible, multi-media project focusing on plagiarism and the student code of conduct were unveiled Wednesday.
Sarah Rockwell, a senior English major from Weatherford, said her senior-level English class, "Issues in Composition," saw a need to address plagiarism in a way she believes the university has not.
"We tried to really raise awareness of how plagiarism impacts everybody and not just the people who are guilty of doing it," she said. "We wanted to let the administration know that not everybody knows about, and hardly anyone has actually read, the (student code of conduct), and we kind of wanted to just make it more accessible to students."
Rockwell said throughout the course of the semester, her class produced a video and Web site, www.ttufightsplagiarism.com, to address issues of plagiarism and collusion, which students may not realize are in the university's student code of conduct.
"I think what really upset us is that when we tried to go look for the student code of conduct, we actually had to search for it," she said. "We had to go on Google and do it because the Tech search doesn't work very well, and it's not very easily accessible from the home page."
Included in the class' project is a video comprised of man-on-the-street style interviews with students and faculty members, and a Web site with clips from the video as well as a link to the student code of conduct.
Katie Schmidt, a junior English major from Spring who is in the class, said she hopes the project will increase student interest in being familiar with Tech's code of conduct because she believes, at present, "no one's going to take the time to go and find the student code of conduct, and even if they could, they probably wouldn't, and so this is the way to get it out there."
Schmidt said she believes students' current lack of knowledge and interest is one reason plagiarism and other forms of academic dishonesty are an issue at Tech.
"That's what Texas Tech is: It's the kind of school where people can get away with cheating, and we just don't really care about it," she said. "That kind of attitude, I think, just follows kids from high school to college."
Rockwell said although the university does address academic integrity through its anti-plagiarism initiative, "Integrity Matters," she believes other universities provide more easily accessible links to their student codes of conduct, as well as other resources stressing academic integrity.
"That's why we were kind of embarrassed whenever we went to the other schools' Web sites and saw how much emphasis they place on their codes of conduct, and ours seems so hidden," she said. "We just wondered why the disparity is there. Why not put it out in the open?"
Rich Rice, an assistant professor of English who teaches the class, said he believes the class' project will encourage people to read and be aware of the code of conduct's guidelines about plagiarism and collusion because it is a student-driven project as opposed to one lead solely by administrators.
"There's a lot of talk about plagiarism from professors and talk about "Integrity Matters" bus wraps, and things like that, but it's all top down and it's not student-driven," he said. "If it's not student-driven, you have an extra challenge of getting students to pay attention."
Rice said he anticipates distributing approximately 200 of the class' DVDs, which the English Department's media lab sponsored and helped produce, mainly to faculty members at Tech and other educators in the community, including high school teachers and counselors.
He said the student-conducted, man-on-the street style interviews could provide a more relevant format students can relate to and find entertaining, and he hopes to see the program expand beyond the class project.
"We are a YouTube generation, YouTube was created and sold within a year and a half for $1.65 billion, and what that says is people like that form of literacy," Rice said. "They value impromptu, a little bit of humor, low production quality video. I think the impromptu, lots of voices and lots of student voices is going to be very receptive."
Be the first to comment on this article!