Primal Rage!
So I met with a GSI of mine about a paper I turned in for his class and which he had graded. He wanted to meet with everyone in the class to go over our papers and give us the opportunity to revise them before assigning us a final grade (apparently some people did pretty poorly). He began by telling me that my paper was pretty good, his main issue with it being that he felt I didn't make clear what was my own original thought and what I had co-opted from elsewhere. More specifically, he said he figured that I had taken a course in epistemology before, had been exposed to the particular problem being addressed in the paper and simply presenting a solution that I had heard before. He felt my paper was a B+ to A- paper as it was, and that bringing it up to an A would require doing more than just regurgitating something I had heard in some other class.
The problem here is that I have not taken any other courses where this particular philosophical issue was addressed in any great detail. In particular, I came up with my solution entirely on my own, and other than the direct and properly cited quotations from Hume (and remember, the course for which I wrote this paper is a course on Hume and other historical figures) everything in that paper was original thought on my part.
Now, I'm not claiming that the solution I presented in my paper has never been presented before. I, an undergraduate philosophy major with little major interest in the particular problem being addressed, am unlikely to develop an entirely original solution to a philosophical difficulty that has been around for at least 250 years. However, I am not aware of any other philosopher who has offered the solution I offered. My GSI also could not name any such figure. Moreover, he was quite surprised that I came up with said solution, because apparently he thought it's a pretty decent one.
In other words, he accused me of regurgitating information I've never heard from a class I've never taken and lowered my grade because of this. I can think of two problems here:
1) He could not name anyone from whom I might have been able to steal what I was claiming was original work.
2) He gave me a lower grade because he assumed I had already seen the material in question in another class with no evidence whatsoever that I've taken such a class.
After I explained all of this to him, he moved my grade up to an A. I also asked him to tell me if he thinks of any philosopher who has argued along the same lines that I argued in my paper (not because I have any special interest in the topic, but if he's going to accuse me of plagiarism, I'd like to know what it is that he thinks I'm plagiarizing). In any case, I'm quite angry about this whole thing, mainly because he's implicitly insulting my ability to do original philosophical work by suggesting that my solution was so good I must have gotten it from somewhere else.
The problem here is that I have not taken any other courses where this particular philosophical issue was addressed in any great detail. In particular, I came up with my solution entirely on my own, and other than the direct and properly cited quotations from Hume (and remember, the course for which I wrote this paper is a course on Hume and other historical figures) everything in that paper was original thought on my part.
Now, I'm not claiming that the solution I presented in my paper has never been presented before. I, an undergraduate philosophy major with little major interest in the particular problem being addressed, am unlikely to develop an entirely original solution to a philosophical difficulty that has been around for at least 250 years. However, I am not aware of any other philosopher who has offered the solution I offered. My GSI also could not name any such figure. Moreover, he was quite surprised that I came up with said solution, because apparently he thought it's a pretty decent one.
In other words, he accused me of regurgitating information I've never heard from a class I've never taken and lowered my grade because of this. I can think of two problems here:
1) He could not name anyone from whom I might have been able to steal what I was claiming was original work.
2) He gave me a lower grade because he assumed I had already seen the material in question in another class with no evidence whatsoever that I've taken such a class.
After I explained all of this to him, he moved my grade up to an A. I also asked him to tell me if he thinks of any philosopher who has argued along the same lines that I argued in my paper (not because I have any special interest in the topic, but if he's going to accuse me of plagiarism, I'd like to know what it is that he thinks I'm plagiarizing). In any case, I'm quite angry about this whole thing, mainly because he's implicitly insulting my ability to do original philosophical work by suggesting that my solution was so good I must have gotten it from somewhere else.