Getting EdD.. Need advice on difficult group member!

[tinkerbelle81]

So I am working on a paper with 4 other teachers/administrators. There is one member of this group whom I have always questioned trhe quality of her work, however I joined because I wanted to work with the other three.

Our paper is due Saturday. We had agreed to have all portions ready by tomm, Thursday, to put together into one cohesive assignment. All the other group members had emailed their parts, so I was working on my section and the finished product. Whoever put the paper together did not know how to format our page numbers correctly, and to be honest, I can't remember either, so I did what I always do.. I used one of my old assignments to get the correct formating from.

After I copied and pasted the paper, I noticed four words in our introduction that were blue and underlined, looking suspiciously like hyperlinks. Low and behold, as I hovered over the words, I found that they linked to WIKIPEDIA!!! I copied that entire sentence and pasted it into google. I found the whole think, in wikipedia. I started doing it with the rest of the sentences, and found them to, in a number of other websites. Basically this girl, the one whose work I questioned, plagiarized her entire section of our paper. 2 pages of introduction, and a paragraph summary at the end.

Our presentation is this Saturday. The goal was to have the paper completed early Thursday so we could edit, and work on our powerpoint. I am supposed to email the group the updated version of the paper, including my portion. This version now has highlighing and comments all over the first two pages showing where the text was taken from. Should I send this to the whole group? Or should I send it just to her, and hope that she fixes it in time?

 

[aeiouteach]

My advice....

I think you should take it to the whole group and then decide together how to best handle this.That way you are not having to decide alone how to best handle it. I know time is short, so if you can't do that, I would simply rewrite her portion and then tell her exactly why you did. I had a similar situation and regret to this day not confronting the person who cheated. Good luck!

 

[HBteach]

I would show her your highlighted portions and comments on the part she wrote. Then I would give her a chance to either do it over or if not then tell her that you will need to go to the group, let them know what happened, and they will decide how to handle the situation.

I hope she is kicked out of your group.

Good luck.

 

[n2n2n2n]

Yikes.
It is really too bad that someone has put you in this position.
Unfortunately you must address it.
Not only is it wrong, it also jeopardizes your academic future as well.
Probably contact the person before you contact the group.
If the situation is not rectified by the deadline you may have to ask for an extension. You can not hand in work if the source is not properly credited.

 

[tinkerbelle81]

Thanks for the responses everyone.

I really wanted to email my corrections to the whole group, partly because I'm tired of everyone always commenting on how she is the first one to have her work ready.

However, I decided not to. Part of the reason is that one of the members in our group is a principal, and I didn't think it would be right to purposely damage her reputation like that.

So I emailed it to her directly. I gave her a piece of my mind, and told her that we have been lucky that our professor has not noticed this in previous papers our group has submitted. But now that I was aware of it, I could not jeopardize our grades by allowing the group to submit something like that.

I then emailed the group MY portion of the paper only, for their review, and explained that I had also asked this girl to make some corrections to her section. Hopefully she will do this quickly (and correctly) so we can get this out of the way... And THEN, no more group projects for me!!

 

[aeiouteach]

You handled it well!

I know this was a tough position for you to be in, but you handled it very well! :-)