Plagiarism

I recently had to report a student for plagiarism. In 5 years of teaching at Nova, it's​ the first time that I've had to do so. 

This event, of course, was terribly upsetting. 

I have all of my students submit their work electronically via Blackboard. When they do, there's a program called SafeAssign which compares their works with past works on various databases. Then, it gives me an originality report. It's not uncommon to have students with originality reports in the teens meaning that a percentage in the teens of their work matches the work of someone else. This is acceptable due to a combination of simple sentences or phrases that are likely to be in multiple papers and the fact that citations will often be near identical if they're cited properly. A quick comparison of the work in question has always, until now, shown the student to be innocent of any wrongdoing. 

This particular student had an originality score of 98%. The student had excuses, but none that were able to pass muster. 98%!

Nova's policy is that the student gets an automatic zero for the assignment, and that a disciplinary report be filed to see if any further action is required. As this student plagiarized on the research paper that is twenty percent of the course grade, his overall grade dropped from an A to a C. I'm not sure when the hearing will be.