My Chinese groupmate is plagiarizing...advice?
I'm a master's student from the US studying at a European university. A project group I'm in includes one girl from China. As the native English speaker of the group, I am responsible for compiling and proofreading the final version from everyone's individual work.
The Chinese student's contribution is about 95% copy/pasted from published papers. Some passages she copied are several pages long and still have the original endnotes in them.
In an email to the group I asked her to remove "the notes you copied" from the file and leave only "the parts you wrote and want me to include in our paper." She replied, "I sent you information from references because I am not good at writing." This response makes me feel like she a) doesn't think it's a big deal and/or b) expects me to read what she put together, analyze it, and summarize it....in other words, do her work for her.
The internet seems to be suggesting that plagiarism is not taken as seriously in China. How true is this, and how can I diplomatically tell her that what she has done is unacceptable/career-ending here? How can I tell her that however bad she thinks her English is, she has to read, analyze, and summarize different sources, without spending the rest of my semester basically teaching her how to write a research paper (which I don't exactly have time for)?
I'd like to be culturally sensitive, but when she says, "I did it that way because I am not good at writing," it makes me feel like she is just slacking off and hoping I will do her work for her, and my American/New Jersey attitude starts to drown out my cultural sensitivity.
The assignment is due in about 12 hours, so I might just end up leaving her sections blank. (It's a draft submission, so that won't be a huge problem.) But this is the first of several assignments in this group project, so any advice you guys have will definitely still be useful!
Thanks!
UPDATE: I sent her an email that said I couldn't use her contributions in the report because she sent me blatant plagiarism and we could all get expelled. I then went on to explain the concepts of plagiarism, paraphrasing, quotation marks, proper citation format, etc. Finally I told her that luckily, because it was only a draft version, I just submitted it without her sections and suspect that won't be too much of a problem, but that she needs to fix her contributions for next time.
She replied, and her first sentence was, "Thanks, yes, of course its not allowed to copy." So, maybe that is an encouraging sign? Then she went on a big explanation that sort of just went into more detail about how she expected me to do her work for her. "I copied that because I was worried I would explain it wrong." and "I sent you that passage of 2 pages so you could read it and pick out interesting facts when you are writing the report." She did however end by saying "I feel sorry that I didn't do more things in this part:(...But I will do more in next step!"
Of course, I won't get too excited until I actually see what she does in the next step, and I'm going to run anything suspicious through Google, but all in all, this is probably the most encouraging response that could be expected.
Thanks for the advice, and sorry that all of you looking for blood don't get a juicier ending (....yet).
Posted Dec 2, 2012, 6:45 PM UTC · edited