RICHMOND, Va.
Two students accused of plagiarism and violating the University of Virginia’s honor code were expelled from a global studies program. They left their ship in Greece while their counterparts continued on the summer voyage.
One of the students, Ohio University senior Allison Routman, said she was shocked when a professor accused her of plagiarizing from an online synopsis of a movie.
“Had I thought I had done anything wrong, I, of course, would come forward,” Routman said in a telephone interview Friday from her home outside Minneapolis. “I knew the consequences would not be good.”
The University of Virginia has a single-sanction honor code, meaning students face expulsion after one violation. Students who participate in off-grounds programs that award academic credit from the school are also subject to the code.
Routman was part of Semester at Sea, a global studies program that offers shipboard coursework.
Routman said her class assignment was to watch a movie, then write a paper relating the film to shipboard or port experiences. She watched “Europa Europa” and consulted Wikipedia for the proper historic terminology. The professor alleged that she used three phrases identical to those on the online entry about the movie: “when the Germans attacked the Soviet Union during Operation Barbarossa,” “German speaking minority outside of Germany” and “who had been released from a concentration camp.”
