Question 5: Shattered Glass
Please see the film Shattered Glass (Lionsgate, 2003). You should be able to find the film online on Youtube Movies ($4 rental), Amazon (often free with ads if you are an Amazon Prime member, otherwise $4), or on DVD.
Important: You must include a screenshot of the movie and indicate the website where you watched it in your response.
Important: Since you’ll be seeing this film in digital format, you must include timestamps in your response, particularly for question [a] below. Answers without this verifiable time identification will be returned.
We know clips from the film are available online. Using information from those sources is easily detectable and would constitute a violation of our Integrity Affirmation.
Questions:
[a] What scene in the film made the strongest impression on you? Please describe.
[b] What habits did Glass develop that proved harmful to him? How can you avoid developing comparable bad habits yourself?
[c] What advice would you give to editors about how to avoid hiring someone like Stephen Glass? What kind of pre-employment screening do you recommend? Please remember this related Integrity Seminars video.
A word of caution: We’re not asking you to find outside commentary on this film. You’re being asked to think and write for yourself. Much of what we see online about the film is demonstrably wrong–and an invitation to plagiarism (we monitor two pertinent plagiarism sites in particular).
The more students appropriate someone else’s work and submit it as their own the less they expand their own capacity for creative thought. To the extent academic dishonesty becomes habitual, they’re diminishing the quality of their own education.
Repeatedly engaging in academic dishonesty is comparable to aspiring to be a top athlete, but hiring someone else to do all the practice and training. It simply doesn’t work. The failure inevitably becomes apparent on the athletic field and in the workplace. Meanwhile, when dishonesty is detected–as it often is–students are creating educational records damaging to their reputation.
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Identify the author in your answer, either in the sentence (e.g., “Abraham Lincoln said, …”) or at the end of the sentence in parenthesis.
Use quotation marks or block indentation when you incorporate any language from any source, including all seminar readings. Cite the source immediately thereafter. Also, even if you don’t use a direct quotation, immediately identify the source if you use an author’s core ideas or phraseology. Just mention the author’s name when you do so (for example, “As Greenspan suggested . . . “)
If in doubt, it’s always prudent to include quotation marks and a citation.
