Writing reports on client’s assessments or intervention is something that a psychologist has to do, daily. For experienced psycholigists, making reports is piece of cake, but yet still need their full attention. For those who do not have much experiences on writing reports, like me, we still a whole lot of practices and practices. One thing I hate about ‘the great of computer technology’ is the ability to copy and paste anything! Let me share some experiences that had happened around me…
There was one lecturer in a place where I had my internship back on 2003, who copied and pasted report from someone else’s report. The previous report was made by her too. When I had to send the report to the company who referred the client, I noticed that the client’s name was not right. When I checked out, almost half of the report contained the wrong name. My colleague and I told the lecturer about that, and we found out that she just copy-paste the interpretation of assessments from her previous client. Well, I guess she thought that all of her clients were just the same…
There is a classmate of mine who also love to copy-paste someone else’s work. Last week, after the case presentation on the first day, he copied one paper who had been pasted to the classroom’s computer (all the presenters must paste their papers onto classroom’s computer to make it easier to prepare the presentation). We did not know at first, until he opened the wrong paper during his presentation. He was going to open his own paper from his flash disk, but then he clicked on someone else’s paper who had been copied to his flash disk. Well, if he did not fell ashamed of it, we did. Because for us, a psychologist must understand the ethics of respecting someone else’s work… I guess he did not grasp the meaning of respecting others.
I wonder to myself, what can I do when I see a classmate or lecturer doing such thing? A friend told me to report my classmate to Masters-Program Coordinator, but other friends told me not to. Personally, I don’t care of what other people doing, as long as they do not copy my works. But professionally, I feel it’s going to get worse if I do not warn my classmate. He just does not realized the potential harm that he may cause when he’s working as a psychologist one day later…
I will work with him during my internship… hope I can handle it well.
My Writing Paper 