Both of our groups decided to break our paper apart and have each member write a section. Our papers are due this Thursday, and currently they can best be described as a patchwork of various bulleted lists and random paragraphs (with little to no correlation to the topic), long passages directly copied out of a Bible dictionary (but not cited) and a conclusion consisting of several paragraphs recopied word for word from Hannah's part of the paper.
My professor asked me today how my group's paper is coming, and I told her it was interesting and that I wasn't sure if people really knew what to do. She asked me if there was anyone in my group that had been to the seminary before and I told her that he was the one who gratuitously plagiarized without knowing it. I was hoping for her to offer some suggestion, but none was given.
It's tough to say what exactly the problem is or how to best address it, but I think the most obvious is that there's a large gap between what the professors expect and what the students are currently capable of. As I'm typing this I just realized that I bet no one has ever written a research paper. I'd suspect the high schools here don't have libraries or resources to make a research paper possible. I think it would have helped if when the essays were assigned there had been an explanation of what a research paper is, how to write one and what is to be expected. But alas, that is not what happened and I'll be interested if plagiarism on a group paper leads to a zero for all those involved.
