In my Nursing Fundamentals class we had to do a group presentation and write a paper about how the group worked together to achieve our teaching goals. We turned the paper in on Monday. Today we all got an email that we needed to meet with our instructor. We raced in there, where she handed us the program plagiarism policy. She proceeded to tell us that there was a blatant case of plagiarism in our paper. She understands that only one of us wrote that part of the paper but since we all agreed that the paper was good enough to hand in, that we were all getting a zero for the paper. She said we were lucky that we weren't kicked out. She said that she had discussed it with all of the staff and the dean and they decided that a zero was the least punishment for the group.
Now the girl who did it was really upset because she had cited the book and was providing the rationale that was required. It turns out however that the person who did our references neglected to include this cite. She instead made up her own cite for this reference and screwed it up by only citing the last page of the book. She had not been a very good team player the whole presentation, and now this. The funny thing is, we all emailed her our references in APA format. All she had to do is put them all on one page. That's it. And she couldn't even do that right.
Does anyone know if there is anyway to fight this without making things worse?
