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A student has plagiarised her assignment. The lecturer gave all students a lecture on plagiarism at the beginning of the semester. The student maintains she was absent that day but the university does not keep records on attendance. However a copy of the lecture is on BlackBoard. Her excuse is that she didn’t realise she was plagiarising. As she is an overseas student a fail in a unit means she risks losing her visa.
What actions should the lecturer take?
If your institution keeps a record of academic misconduct, be sure this gets into the record. If you don't do that, you enable serial cheating.
Do not allow a "do over." The message you send is that there's no penalty for for misconduct, even if one gets caught. Misconduct must have some irrecoverable penalty, however small. It need not be a grade penalty; it could be extra work, but see below about setting a penalty.
Follow University policy if there is one. If you have the opportunity to set the penalty, and I hope you do, consider the magnitude of the offense. A single un-cited paragraph from a work listed in a bibliography is far less egregious than a substantial part of the work copied with no attempt at attribution.
It is not your problem that the student missed the plagiarism lecture. Do not allow the student to make it your problem.
It is not your problem that the student might lose her visa. Do not allow the student to make it your problem.
Just to offer a perspective on the background of international students, especially those from underdeveloped countries from Asia, the concept of plagiarism is virtually non-existent. More precisely, students graduating from high schools in those country will probably have never heard about how plagiarism is a serious offense in developed countries like such as U.S. Like, they would not have the faintest clue about the gravity of the whole plagiarism issue.
I was one of those students and know for a fact that every single student in my high school never knew how much important citation and biography are when they were writing a paper in high school. This was literally the biggest "culture" shock I had experienced in my first year of studying in the U.S
However, I am not saying that you should not penalize the student. But if a single academic misconduct on plagiarism automatically means the student will lose his/her visa and if the student happens to be from a similar place that I was from, then maybe it would make reasonable sense to arrange something so the visa stays untouched.
It's hard to imagine a better learning opportunity than this. And anyway, do we want to destroy her life, or help her learn a very important lesson?
Be creative, be effective. For example, in addition to giving her an incomplete and having her re-do the assignment, you could reduce her final grade by one letter (i.e. from B to C), and you could have her write a separate research paper describing three famous plagiarism scandals of her choice.
To quote a classic story:
At a certain school in [your region here] some girls were beginning to use lipstick, putting it on in the school bathroom. After they put on their lipstick, they pressed their lips on the mirror, leaving dozens of little lip prints.
Every night, the maintenance man removed the prints, but the next day, the girls put them right back. Finally, the principal decided that something had to be done. She called all the girls into the bathroom along with the maintenance man. She explained that all these lip prints were causing a major problem for the custodian, who had to clean the mirrors every night. This inspired yawns from all the little princesses.
To demonstrate how difficult it was to clean the mirrors, she asked the maintenance man to show the girls how much effort was required. He took out a long-handled squeegee, dipped it in the toilet, and cleaned the mirror with it. Since then there have been no lip prints on the mirror.
There are teachers… and then there are educators.
As a graduate student instructor, I encountered these problems occasionally. In one case, as an example, of a student who had not done his own programming, the end result was that he had to take the class again in the summer. He learned to write simple programs, and he learned to hand in his own work, not someone else's. And he got a Bachelor's degree.
