NEIL W. TENNANT
tennant.9@osu.edu
If you email me, please use the header PHIL [COURSE-CODE]: [YOURNAME].
Professor
Department of Philosophy
Plagiarism
Plagiarism is intellectual theft: purloining another person's ideas or mode of expression without proper attribution, and passing off the written material in question as one's own work. Plagiarism is serious academic misconduct, and the University has strict rules that penalize it. You will be assumed to be acquainted with these rules. Please be mindful of the need for careful note-taking, so that you do not inadvertently make the mistake, when completing an assignment, of including material that you forget you had copied earlier from another source. The risk of inadvertent copying is especially marked if you download material from the web. But then so is the risk of being caught, since one can search the web for the very material that the student has failed to attribute to its original source.
The Ohio State University's policies on punishments for plagiarism do not pre-empt the instructor's right to specify a minimum penalty for any student who plagiarizes in the instructor's course. A central requirement in my grading policy is that every assignment needs to be completed by the due date (unless an exemption from this requirement is expressly granted by me). Failure to meet this requirement results in automatic failure in the course. Naturally, if you are unable to complete an assignment owing to illness, family emergency or like cause, I shall be lenient and understanding, and grant the necessary exemption. But if a student is found guilty of plagiarism after due process before the Committee on Academic Misconduct, and if the Committee imposes only the very lenient penalty of a zero for the piece of work concerned (or the even more lenient penalty of allowing the student to re-submit the piece of work in question), then the Committee's penalty will be overridden by my grading policy. As a result of any such decision by the Committee, the student will be deemed to have failed to complete the assignment in question by its due date, and will consequently fail in the course.