Question for the Scholars

I went back to school this semester for my Master's in School Counseling and am feeling like I am in Twilight Zone grad school. This is my second Master's degree, so it isn't as if I am completely unaware of policy etc. I have this one professor who counts the APA format equally to the content of the paper. This would be fine except that her course packet does not list the sources of the articles. When students asked her why she took points off of their papers for not citing the source properly when she herself did not cite the source, she said that 'In graduate school not everything is handed to you and it is the student's responsibility to find the citation information.'

What?


Am I crazy or is she plagiarizing? She compiled a course packet with no sources!

My next paper is due tomorrow and I finished it and found the sources the best I could, but I just need to know if I am crazy or is she allowed to do this.

Thanks for letting me vent.

what school are you going to? Is there an online data base you can use to download stuff / search for articles? I'm a scientist, so the mother of all research databases for our field is PubMed, and our university has a linkout to the majority of journals so you can download a PDF of the article.

It is definitely true at least in my field, that you cannot write anything without citing all the original articles. We have programs like 'reference manager' to generate the reference list.... generally a 5 page article of original data (with an intro and discussion) will have roughly 40 citations. A review article of the same length will usually have well over 100.

And yeah, your professor probably IS plagarizing... every ppt slide I generate that has published data or conclusions always has a citation of the original work.... but please don't emmulate her bad example, and DO add every citation possible

a little short-cut since time is of the essence :
for basic intro stuff is to cite a couple review articles. For example:

Numerous potent inhibitors of dopamine transport have been isolated from natural sourcses (For review, see Smith et al. 2006). One of the most most commonly abused of these compounds is cocaine (For review, see Jones et al. 2007)

you cannot do this if it is a conclusion that is either recent, or not universally accepted dogma in the field. For example, you can cite 'for review' for cocaine, since there are thousands of articles on it... but you can't cite 'for review' for a novel compound some scientist made (compound XS24354).. since it is pretty specific to that one set of authors who made it.....

sounds really bizarre!!! Do you have the APA publication book? I found that really helpful for making sure I was citing things correctly. That way, if one of my professors had a problem with the way I cited something I could show them where in the book I learned to cite that specific kind of journal/article/book.
To be honest, they are updating that book faster than professors can really keep up, so the odds are in your favor if you cite the way the APA manual suggests even if your professor thinks it's wrong.
Just make sure you have the most currently edition. I think they are on the 5th edition now.

im in a clinical psych doctoral program. everything, obv, is required to be in APA format. the APA publication manual helps me a ton too. now its more habit for me. i think its somewhat ridiculous to have your formatting worth the same amount of points as content, for one. for two, im confused, when you say she put together a course packet w/o references, what do you mean by a course packet?

regardless of what she does, you just follow the guidelines accordingly.

...she obv isnt about helping students to do their best work!!

any specific questions you have about APA or formatting, let me know.

Thanks Ladies.

I have the APA book, but it is a little meaningless, because I am not quite sure what it is that I am citing. She put together a course packet of readings for us to buy at the local copy shop. Our latest paper has to incorporate two of the articles. It has to be in APA, but she never provided a reference list for the course packet, so basically, I have titles of articles, but I do not know where or when they were published. I can google them to get some information, but should I have to do that? Shouldn't she provide me with that information since she is the one who compiled them for her course?

It's Brooklyn College, BTW. I wen there for my first graduate degree in English. It was excellent. This...not so much...

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Posted by Snickers76

Thanks Ladies.

I have the APA book, but it is a little meaningless, because I am not quite sure what it is that I am citing. She put together a course packet of readings for us to buy at the local copy shop. Our latest paper has to incorporate two of the articles. It has to be in APA, but she never provided a reference list for the course packet, so basically, I have titles of articles, but I do not know where or when they were published. I can google them to get some information, but should I have to do that? Shouldn't she provide me with that information since she is the one who compiled them for her course?

It's Brooklyn College, BTW. I wen there for my first graduate degree in English. It was excellent. This...not so much...

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Youre right, you shouldnt have to google them, but thats what I would do. You should be able to get all of the information you need that way. GL!

I have access to psych databases, psychinfo and psycharticles if you cant find reference info for anything, i wouldnt mind seeing if i can look it up for you.