Dear dean of San Francisco State University,
I am very disgusted and appalled with the acts that have been going on around the campus. So many students are doing it, yet not one staff member is doing anything about it to try and catch these students. I mean this is a college campus and we should be more serious about what we try to achieve and learn here. If you are still wondering what I am trying to inform you about, it is the act of plagiarism on campus. Students on campus are plagiarizing behind a professor’s back without the professor actually knowing it for sure. I mean sure professors use programs like Turnitin.com to double check that plagiarism isn’t actually there, but there are other ways a student can plagiarize. That is why I am writing you this letter to inform on of this action and something must be done about it. I am prepared to propose to you certain tasks and steps we can take to insure that students will not try or even think about plagiarizing again on this campus.
One thing that we can do to try and lessen this problem of plagiarize is to lessen the homework load. I think this action is a good to proceed with since students won’t feel all this pressure to try and finish every piece of homework. Students have pressure of making sure that every piece of homework given is finished and turned in. Also, special assignments like essays or projects add more pressure to a student’s homework load. My English class did research on this topic with fellow students on campus and varied the topics into 4 groups: demographics, academic culture, extracurricular activities and motivations to plagiarize. When I look at the research done by the extracurricular activities group, I noticed that 18 of 44 students have jobs. With this data, I can say it adds to the pressure of wanting to plagiarize since it cuts off a student’s time from studying. Even though students can use financial aid to pay for their education at the school, students still love to have a little extra money on the side to buy the things they want. Another reason why a student would want to plagiarize is when a student knows he has two or three papers due that day from different class. It is a student’s responsibility to make sure he does his work and mange the time he has to make sure he doesn’t pile up the work load, it’s difficult to keep everything managed between school, work, family and any other activities the student may have.
Another thing I think you should do as the dean of the school is to really enforce the rule of plagiarism. Knowing students are responsible for their own time management, you should still stand behind the penalty for plagiarism. On a class survey that was done for our research we found out that 70% of the students we surveyed knew the policy the university made for committing plagiarism. Although that is a good percentage of student who know the university’s policy, 30% of the students survey either didn’t know the policy or don’t know it at all. Even though most of them know the policy, how can we tell for sure the person follows the rule instead of just knowing the policy? We’ve asked the students in our surveys if they have ever plagiarized at the college. 10 of the students said they have re-used an old paper, 7 of them said they had other people write their paper for them, and 9 of them said they failed to cite any of their work. Putting these numbers together, we can see that they have plagiarized before, but have they had in mind the thought of plagiarism. People saying they know the policy doesn’t mean they would follow that rule. Students will use that finding to get around the policy and continue with what they’re doing. Some students tend to learn the rules, but they don’t follow them. They only learn it to try and find a way around it, but this can’t be only reason as to why a student would want to plagiarize. Let’s take a look into a student’s mind and see what drives him to achieve in college.
When we think about college, we sometimes don’t get to choose which college we want to go to since there might be other reasons for a student’s attendance at a college. One motivation I found was done by the people in Group 4 who were looking for the cause of them attending SFSU. The one motivation that I found very useful was the fact that students in the college aren’t really motivated to do any writing at all. You can’t blame these students if they don’t really feel like writing anything. I mean sure it is a good thing to know how to write and not get tired of the idea, but students just can’t find the motivation in that. Another thing I noticed in the survey that the same number of students who are mostly religious are equal to those who don’t believe in God. Now religion may also be a factor as to why students would cheat in class. As a follower of God, we should also beak this nonsense of useless arguments, and we should be the ones to stand up against you make. Sometimes student’s tend to keep up with what I do around the store so I’m going to win it back.
Overall, I say that you should do something about the plagiarism stuff top see if they will take it seriously. You are the dean and you should ask the undergraduates to see if they understand the situation that will happen upon them if they didn’t follow the rules. For any plagiarism they do, I say we should set levels as to how harsh the torture should be. I thank you for your time.
-Kenneth
