My (26F) undergraduate research assistant (22F) plagarized my research poster for her own poster and I don't know if I should just let it go.

I've been mentoring my undergrad, Anna, for over 2 years now. She joined my lab when she was a sophomore, and now she's a senior, graduating college in June. We're at a large research university in the U.S., I'm a Ph.D. student in my 4th year, and I have been directly responsible for mentoring Anna.

Important context for how to judge this, but not part of the situation: Anna and I are are fairly close, and I have always been very understanding of her busyness. She's one of those "machine" college students that does it all - extremely high GPA (like 3.9+) in an extremely difficult science-related, and she's the type to study all night to ace tests left and right, go to the gym, while also partying, going to Coachella, and traveling every 3-day holiday weekend. She's never gone out of her way to do anything or be super inquisitive in the lab, and has not put in a lot of consistent hours in the lab, but is great at doing what she's told to do, and has contributed to my work. She wants to go to med school (she already did well on her MCAT) and she is working in the lab to get a letter of rec from our PI (principal investigator, aka the professor who runs the lab), who's pretty respected in our field. For additional context, our PI, Adam, thinks that while Anna is a smart student who is helpful, he does recognize how she's not the best undergrad we've had, in terms of her passion/commitment/dedication.

Situation: Her senior research poster session is coming up next week, and she's to present a poster about her project. Her project is a small branch off of my project, which we'll say is about vapes. I sent her the poster that I made for a recent conference about vapes. I knew that because she was super busy and had a ton of finals and also had never made a poster before, it would be helpful and ensure she finishes her poster on time if she had my vape poster to refer to when she made her own poster. My mentors have sent me PDFs of their past posters and powerpoint presentations too, to help me figure out how to make my own stuff from scratch in the past. So, the act of me sending her my vape poster to refer to, isn't necessarily out of the ordinary for my field, or something that mentors generally don't do.

She sent me a draft of her poster on Thursday night, and the Introduction, Background, Materials and Methods, some of the Results, the Conclusion, some of the Discussion, and Acknowledgements for word-for-word copied from my poster. Her new data was in the poster as well, with a few of her own sentences that drew conclusions from the data. But, I'd say 80-90% of the words on the poster were directly transcribed (no pun intended) from my vape poster.

I sent her a text saying something along the lines of "I just looked at your poster. It's really similar to mine in that most of it looks like it's just copied and pasted word for word, which makes me feel uncomfortable and regretful that I sent you my poster as a reference. Can you change it up so it's more of your own poster and your own ideas?" to that, she responded, "Oh my apologies. I'll change it right now. I really didn't intend on it, I've just never made a poster before and used yours as a guide and didn't even realize how similar they were. I will fix it now!" She then sent me a poster that is completely reworded, so technically it's not copy-and-paste anymore, but it's still just my ideas, reworded, with no change in overall structure.

The next day, I confronted her in the lab in a private place, and asked her to talk with me through it in person. I asked her what her mindset was when she went into it. She said that she first copied and pasted my stuff, and then intended on rewording it so it's not the exact same, but she sent me the wrong copy before she had reworded it. I told her that it's still not the right way to make a poster and that she should have made it all from scratch, and that my vape poster was supposed to be just inspiration and guidance, even if our topics were the same - that she shouldn't have copied my poster word for word to begin with. She's an extremely clever and smart girl, so she said all the right things, like "I'm such an idiot", "I'll do whatever it takes to make it up to you", etc. She also texted me that night apologizing, "I didn't know what I was thinking", "Our relationship means a lot to me and I look up to you a lot", "I'm sorry I disappointed you", "I know there really isn't anything I could do to make up for it but please let me know", "I appreciate you having an open conversation with me to try to understand my side even though I am in the wrong".

The poster session is this upcoming Tuesday, and with the Holiday weekend in America, she HAD to submit her poster to a printing shop on Thursday to have it on time for the session on Tuesday. Even though I had planned with her to finish experiments 2 weeks before the poster was due so she had plenty of time to make her poster, and we had gone over this schedule 2-3 times during the quarter, she still delayed her experiments and finally got around to making the poster over a couple of days. I would have definitely made her remake the poster more, if we had more time.

My question is, should I just accept her apologies and let it go? Or do I bring this up with Adam? Or will that just make ME look like a petty grad student who didn't mentor their student well enough/not set boundaries enough? Adam is pretty hands-off, but he does care a lot. This could easily be something that makes it so his letter of recommendation for Anna's medical school applications is not as good. I feel like he'd want to know, but at the same time I don't know if I need to burden him with it. Anna is extremely smart - there is no way she didn't realize it was the same exact sentences. In my gut, I think that she thought she could get away with it and I'd let it slide. Also her logic changes from "I didn't really intend on it/didn't realize how similar they were" to "I was planning on rewording it". I feel like I have also let myself down and think I could have been a better mentor. Thanks for your thoughtful insight, everyone.

TL;DR: My undergraduate assistant plagarized my poster contents for her poster, which she is to present this upcoming Tuesday. When I pointed it out, she reworded it so it's not the same words as mine, although the content of the poster is still 80% identical. I don't know if I need to make my boss aware of this, or to just let it go and accept her apologies.

Submitted May 25, 2019 at 03:57PM by OppositeSmoke http://bit.ly/2VLQrpf