When UW-Madison chemistry lecturer Jeanine Batterton accused 42 students last fall of plagiarism on a written lab assignment in Chem 104, she was floored by the range of “bizarre excuses” offered by the undergraduates.
Some contended that cutting and pasting information out of Wikipedia — the Web-based, user-generated encyclopedia — was OK because no single author writes the entries.
Others argued that since the assignment was a group project, and since they didn’t write the part of the report in question, how could she punish them for any wrongdoing?
One student even told Batterton that when he was caught copying homework answers in another class, the professor let him re-do the assignment — so why couldn’t she do the same?