2 U.Va. students booted off ship

JUST AS AN FYI HERE -- Get the FACTS straight please. The 2 students booted off (rightfully so it appears) ARE NOT UVA students. They are students from other universities who have KNOWINGLY AGREED, sat through and acknowledged awareness of the UVA honor code, as well as the appropriate references for how to cite sources, etc. provided by UVA since they run the Summer at Sea program. Sounds like both students, Mark and Allison thought they were going on a booze cruise and instead wound up on a ship whose destiny was a code of honor and actual academics -- something were ill-prepared for. Allison's father appears to also have been a TEACHER at one point in his lifetime, now turned ATTORNEY. It doesn't take Perry Mason to figure out that he should have taught her a bit more before letting her loose. As for all of the other nonsense that these crazy students apparently thought they were going to get away with... good luck with that. And as for the PERMANENT RECORD... What were you thinking when you blew off the assignment and then threw together some plagiarized remarks that were supposed to be your own, but were taken from Wikipedia?

The Semester at Sea professors has no business acting as judges in an Honor Code trial. This was a kangaroo court by a professor with a burr up his backside and other professors who lack the integrity to think independantly. The Honor Code was created by UVA students to ensure that value of a UVA degree (not by faculty). This should be retried back in Charlottesville with students acting as judge and jury and professors acting only as witnesses. If they're guilty, the students will find them guilty (no UVA student wants the value of a UVA degree diminished by those who cheat to get the same degree that honest UVA students have earned).

First, JM, you should known the facts. SAS is not a booze cruise. The students are good students, sincerely interested in cross cultural experiences and learning. Not sure where you got your information. Second, even education professionals can't agree on what is and what is not "plagiarism." Are using factual sentence fragments that aren't opinion or ideas plagiarism? Differentiate for me "paraphrasing" events from a movie "putting things in your own words." For those who want to see the actual factual sentence fragments used in the paper, here they are again: 1. "when the Germans attacked the Soviet Union during Operation Barbarossa" 2. "German speaking minority outside of Germany" 3. "who had just been released from a concentration camp" This was not a research paper. Students were told that they didn't even need citation pages. The paper was meant to be the student's opinion and it was. Plagiarism means taking someone's ideas, opinions, or meaningful units of language without attribution. Ms. Routman did not use Wikipedia's ideas or opinion, and there is not a single Wikipedia sentence that appears in her paper. These are short, factual sentence fragments. Brief, factual phrases do not belong in quotation marks, and they do not require attribution, because they are merely building blocks of language that cannot be owned by anyone. Also, when one is reading written material in work on one's own manuscript, it is a banal waste of time to make minor modifications in phrases that fit both documents. The way to refer to someone who had just been released from a concentration camp is to identify them as someone "who had just been released from a concentration camp." What would the university suggest a student do: Find a way to change a word or two in the above phrase? That is pointless. Even if a student "should have known" the UVA Honor Code specifically requires that act has to be shown to be non trivial BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT. Isn't use of the three factual sentence fragments trivial? Remember, at least 5 students admitted to intentionally cheating and they are still on the ship. Why target a student who innocently included factual sentence fragments? As the UVA students interviewed for the television newscast on Fox 19 said, if you're going to move the UVA Honor Code to the ship, then it should be the real UVA Honor Code, with student advisors, student juries, student defenders, etc. If you want to expel cheaters, then pick on those students who really are the bad actors.