Faculty Senate Meeting
HIGHLIGHTS: Student plagiarism and the effects of construction work on campus are featured on the agenda of the April 27 meeting of the University of Massachusetts Faculty Senate.
• Address by Robert Francis, Associate Vice Chancellor for Facilities and Campus Planning and
James Cahill, Director of Facilities and Campus Planning
“Capital Plan Update” (Questions and Discussion to follow)
The initial item on the agenda is a presentation by Robert Francis, associate vice chancellor for Facilities and Campus Planning, and James Cahill, director of Facilities and Campus Planning, on the ramifications of capital projects over the summer and through the next academic year.
“There’s going to be a lot of activity and a lot of impact on people’s daily lives,” Francis said. “The purpose of the presentation is to describe the impacts of construction on instruction, quality of life, and the public image of the campus. It will be tailored to a faculty perspective, particularly topics such as parking, noise and dust, traffic, pedestrian safety, and continuity of utility services, and how these relate to classrooms and exams.”
Francis and Cahill also will be available to answer questions.
• Special Report of the Ad Hoc Committee on Student Plagiarism concerning An Addition to the Academic Regulations
(Stanley Hertzbach and W. Curtis Conner, Co-Chairs)
In new business, the senate will vote on whether to accept a proposed addition to academic regulations regarding student use of intellectual property, support for faculty in monitoring students’ use of sources and updated procedures for instructors in cases where they identify student plagiarism. Members of the ad hoc committee making the proposal will be on hand to answer questions and discuss issues surrounding their recommendations.
The campus recently finished a one-year trial of plagiarism-detection software, called Turnitin. University faculty now have software options to assist in detecting plagiarism from two competing vendors to try during the coming year, Turnitin and MyDropBox. Both compare student papers with internet sources, including databases that contain other student papers, and provide color-coded “originality reports” to instructors. These reports highlight portions of a paper that have significant matches to sources the software tracks. The reports include sections of text from the sources so faculty can determine whether a given match is plagiaristic.
“I hear from the Library that more and more faculty are asking about these tools,” said Stanley Hertzbach, professor of Physics and co-chair of the ad hoc committee addressing the issue.
“Both companies want to use student papers to add to their databases,” said Ernie May, secretary of the Faculty Senate. “This raises questions about students’ intellectual property, so we worked out an agreement with them to keep our students’ papers in a separate database.”
“We have to give notice to students in syllabi that we will be using various electronic means to verify the originality of student submissions and that a submission would be saved in a database for future comparisons,” Hertzbach said.
“The Ombuds Office is working on procedures in academic honesty,” May said. “Right now they are long and convoluted, so we need something simpler.”
“This is not new in the sense that we are concerned about plagiarism,” Hertzbach said. “Something new is happening in the way we handle things.”
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• Special Report of the Rules Committee concerning Bylaw Changes (Third Reading)
(Richard Bogartz, Chair)
• Approval of a new course by the Academic Matters Council
(John Jenkins, Chair)
AFROAM 265 “The Blues Came Down Like Dark Night Showers of Rain” 3 credits