My friends and I were discussing plagiarism with one of my favorite teachers the other day when he told us a story from when he was in college. One of his friends had gotten a permanent mark on her record because she accidentally plagiarized in one of her papers. She hadn’t cited or paraphrased a government act properly because she assumed that it fell under common knowledge. Unfortunately for her, her school had a strict plagiarism policy and that small mistake almost got her expelled.
The unspoken moral of that story, of course, was that it’s better to cite everything—just to be safe. Because something like that might happen to you someday. This got me thinking about how easily that could have been me.
While I don’t think teachers in high school are quite as stringent when it comes to plagiarism, I’ve heard more than my fair share of plagiarism stories. Some of them are hilarious in a “you’ve got to be kidding me” sense because it’s hard to believe there are students out there who will pay $24.95 for a poorly written term paper. Or that someone would simply print off a Wikipedia article and scribble their name on the back. One of my friends, a 7th grade English teacher, dryly recalled an incident when three students in one class printed off some of Shakespeare’s sonnets and tried to pass them off as their own. There are many forms of plagiarism; different layers that might not be as simple as “copy and paste, try to pass it off as own work”.
Yet when I hear the word “plagiarism”, I think of kids who copy someone else’s paper word-for-word despite knowing better. One of the reasons why I think plagiarism is so rampant is because it’s hard to define.
There’s really no concrete definition because it can be very subjective. Some teachers/professors are lenient when their students turn in papers that discuss ideas and themes other people have mentioned because many people may have similar interpretations. Likewise, there are only so many different ways anyone can summarize a book. Would that count as plagiarism?
Point blank: when do we cite and when do we not?
Even though teachers have lectured about the evils of plagiarism since 5th grade, I sometimes still find myself staring at the computer screen, unsure on whether I can copy my AP Environmental Science textbook’s definition of biodiversity or if I needed to paraphrase. Do I even know how to paraphrase that term when the textbook’s definition seems to leave no room for a more direct explanation? Teachers always tell students to reword things they write, but what if the student can’t think of another way to reword what they want to say? In this incidence, sheer laziness isn’t the factor behind it.
It’s the ambiguity of plagiarism that worries me. While I can understand if another student and I both turned in a paper with suspiciously similar wording, what if we both turned in papers with a similar thesis or we discussed the same themes/ideas?
The concept of having to cite themes and ideas (how do you know who to cite?) has always made me uneasy. Maybe it’s because throughout my high school career, none of my teachers have seemed to enforce it. If that’s the case, I wonder if I’m going to be in for a nasty shock when I’m in college. I have the unfortunate habit of picking up random phrases or ideas without noticing. So I’m really not the person who came up with that brilliant elephant analogy even though I thought I was.
Accidental or unconscious plagiarism aside, deliberate plagiarism is something I can’t excuse. Plagiarism is becoming more common now because the internet makes it easy for students to get a hold of written papers online. However, I’d like to think that most students (or at least the ones my age or older) would know that technology works both ways. Teachers now have plagiarism detection software and they can Google with the best of us. I’d like to think that they also know that FreeEssays.com is charging them a ridiculous amount of money for a “C” paper. And if they’re honestly trying to fool their teacher, reformatting their $24.95 essay might be a good idea—nothing tips off an educator quite as much as an unformatted paper that still contains hyperlinks, ads, and the name of the site from where she or he purchased it.
Now a truly ironic factor would be if I accidentally plagiarized within this very post. I’ve been careful not to Google or read any articles on plagiarism just in case so all of this is simply me going by what I know, but you can never guess. They say each writer has their very own unique voice and word choice, but maybe I have a writing doppelganger somewhere in the cybersphere.
To all you educators—do you have any funny or memorable plagiarism stories? I’d love to hear them.
Lastly, I’d like to thank Diane Cordell for recommending me for Students 2.0 as well as introducing me to the world of edublogging. She is one of our biggest supporters and her endless encouragement and belief in all of us has been incredible.
As I read more and more of these posts, I do wish that more educators would get back into the classroom as students. Several of my colleagues in my grad classes started their first classes complaining about the heavy backpacks they carry, the fact that they get lost the first week, and how some of their professors put their information online when others don’t. Some of the same comments we hear our students make about our high school teachers were reflected by high school teachers about their professors. The funny thing though is how these teachers then transformed their classes based on their own experiences as students. Subtle, little changes to improve things for the students in their classes.
As far as an interesting plagerism story, I can say that I had a student turn in her “own webpage design” that was really Yahoo.com. She kept everything but the graphic for Yahoo and turned it in. All the coding, images, and the search tool itself were Yahoo. She only made her own banner to take the place of Yahoo’s on the site. Her efforts scored her a 4 on her project.
I agree with you that it certainly doesn’t pay to not do as it is required, but most importantly, to check before doing anything, because laws change upon where you are, even if you are in the same city. I liked when you quoted: “it’s better to cite everything—just to be safe” - and yes, it’s much more safer to do more than not enough, and I have realized that it is indeed with pretty much everything we do in our lives.
Great post, Stacy!
With the papers that are obvious fakes, return with a zero and the comment that, “I’m smarter than I look.”
For what it’s worth, you might be interested in a poem I wrote a while back that’s related to plagiarism.
Keep up the good work!
An alleged case of plagiarism that I can’t seem to forget involved Helen Keller. At the age of 12, she wrote a story entitled “The Frost King”. Charges were made that the tale was suspiciously similar to Margaret T. Canby’s “The Frost Fairies”, which may have been signed to Keller by her teacher, Annie Sullivan. A spate of nasty publicity ensued, and Miss Keller, who went on to publish 13 books, remained paranoid about the appearance of plagiarism for the rest of her life.
When I first started blogging, I only used my own photos because I was so worried about copyright laws. Now I supplement my pictures with ones located through Creative Commons - or drawn by my husband.
Joyce Valenza often writes about the necessity of redefining fair use in this digital age (she share a wealth of information about this and other 21st century issues in the informationfluency wiki, http://tinyurl.com/yo8qoq )
In an age when new tools and applications abound, when library resources are available all day, every day, everywhere, we need to decide how to balance the rights of a creator with the rights of a user.
It’s an interesting puzzle, one that we’ll all be wrestling with for some time.
Thanks for the mention. I’m as proud of you as a mother hen. And I look forward to interacting with all of you as colleagues and friends.
diane
If in doubt, Cite, is definitely the best way to go.
Although in relation to your general comments about people thinking about the same issues - in my work as a glass artist I have often heard stories of people posting images of almost exactly the same beads within days of each other, when they haven’t seen each others work. Copying is a huge issue in the glass community and people can argue about it for hours, but the bottom line is, after almost 5000 years of history of glass bead making, there is nothing really new under the sun.
I study in a special program, it’s called PROTIC. It’s a program where every students have his own lap-top. At my school (secondary), we absolutely have to respect the authors droit. It’s one of our values, and it has to be respected! After some errors, we use to cite every sources and everything we used to do a text, or every work. I think it’ll be nice for me later, as I understand this “question of respect”, because I’ll be not penalized (I’m not sure if it’s the right word...)
All the secondary 3 students of my program just entered in the “blogosphere”, and we realise how important it is, to cite sources and to respect the opinion of other people.
Finaly, I think it’s nice to inform people about that problem, because we don’t always have the intention to do plagiarism! Good article!
annkaah: I feel you. I wish all teachers and professors would tell students outright what they’d consider plagiarism is; especially when it concerns previous work. It would be horrible if you had to find out the hard way.
Jim Gates: I think I agree with your suggestion. It’s much better than failing the student outright as long as it’ll ensure students won’t abuse the system. (This is my cynicism showing.)
I also love your “I’m smarter than I look” comment. If I ever do become a teacher; I’d write comments such as “Nice try bud, do over”. That might get me some unflattering comments in the girls bathroom (don’t know how catty guys are).
Schu: Ouch, that sounds like a pretty unpleasant meeting! Glad you’re teaching them young then!
Darren Draper: I usually cite when I’m in doubt, although one teacher dryly commented that I could sometimes overcite my papers. Like I mentioned in my post, I don’t think high school teachers are nearly as strict about this as college professors– but I’ve gotten into the habit already.
Diane: I never knew about that incident. Poor Helen!
I always give credit to my photos (usually found on flickr and with a liberal Creative Commons license) and song lyrics. Personally, I hope that the higher-ups in the entertainment business will have more important things to do than to sue me for copying and pasting song lyrics!
I should be the one thanking you.
Thanks so much for getting me involved in this project. I’m still stumbling through everything, but it’s been a very enlightening experience!
Suz: Thanks, Suz! I’m always a bit neurotic when it comes to essays–especially in my AP Lit class which is very discussion-oriented. I shudder at the thought of getting pulled aside and asked why my thesis/introduction is exactly the same as so-and-so’s when all I did was use my discussion notes! It would be like an afterschool special gone wrong.
Universities take plagiarism incredibly seriously: in a course I teach in, a number of students failed because they clearly copied off each other. Meaning they had to repeat the whole course the following year. Plagiarism is bad, you’re basically only cheating yourself, and you will probably get caught.
The reason academics stress the importance of citation isn’t just to deter plagiarism, though. It’s because it’s important for anyone reading your work to see where you got your ideas from. It’s important to show that you’ve researched and located the key writers on a topic, and you’ve understood their work (not necessarily agreed with it). It’s important for academics to be able to verify that you’ve quoted someone correctly.
Basically academic writing is a conversation, and you need to be in that conversation, not just coming up with your own thoughts. So always cite specific quotes.
Where you are citing ideas, cite something like “Smith (2003) stated that x and y. I agree with x, but disagree with y, because...”. At least at undergraduate level, academics are looking for you to demonstrate that you’ve read the key authors, and are able to discuss their ideas and come to some conclusions.
(I’m not sure that’s as well-written as it could be, I’ll leave it up anyway...)
Funny story: A student in my class didn’t even bother to change the color of the font from blue (indicated hotlink) to black. His essay was perfectly formatted and expertly written, except for the tell-tale random words in blue font. What a knucklehead!
Good luck in your future endeavors! (wait who should I cite for that phrase; I am sure its been used several million times in the past... but who was first?)
Je la étudie a la école mais j’etais une étudiante terrible .(Desoleé pour mon francais, je sais il est mauvaise! )
I really like how your school stress the importance of respecting the author. I never actually thought deeply about that but I think that is a good value to learn and appreciate.
Sharon S– I’ve heard of similar incidents. I can sympathize with students who are up to their ears with work (I should actually be working on my AP Human Geography project right now...). Taking advantage of two classes with similar project requirements would be something I personally know a lot of my classmates might do and it doesn’t seem like it’s wrong if it’s their own work, right?
I know there are some educators who wouldn’t accept such work; but I have a feeling others would simply see it as clever thinking. I hope most of them would let students know in advance which side they’re on.
Simon–I think there could be complications for English papers if one is doing an analysis/thesis since it might be harder to track down writers with similar conclusions. I do agree that proper credit should be given, but I do think that it’s not always easy to figure who to credit or if your (using a general “your”) idea is original or not.
I like your analogy–I never thought of academic writing as an analogy, but I’m still very inexperienced on the matter. Hopefully some of these things will become clear in the near future!
NadineN-Ooh,good point. Though I want to argue that it’s easier for some kids to plagiarize by simply using google and copying and pasting (now, looking up magazine and encyclopedia articles fill me with dread– what do you mean it’s not available online?!) and not having to rewrite it by hand or by typewriter.
I do agree with your point about higher expectations. I was actually thinking about doing a post on a similar topic; how students are now expected to be “extraordinary” instead of simply “average”. (I’m going through the college application process and feeling pretty bitter, haha, I think it shows.)
I’ve noticed with my peers and from personal experience that most of us have insanely crazy schedules. Sports, extracurriculars, student council, honors/AP classes... there simply isn’t enough time in the world to get everything done. I think that’s why some kids are tempted to take an easier way out– they can do the work, but they don’t have time and they need to pass since colleges are becoming more and more selective.
That’s a great story.
I was once in a computer lab when a kid was complaining on how he got caught– he did the same thing– didn’t bother to reformat his stolen essay at all!
indigo196–Touché. Well-said. There’s a fine line between things that can be considered to be one’s “original thought” and something reiterated that needs to be cited.
Dan Bucci–I think that might fall under the category of “forgery” opposed to “plagiarism”. Not sure if I should say this, but most of my friends and I forge our parents’ signatures for class field trips and the like because our parents can’t be bothered to sign for them. (Then again, my dad encourages me to forge his signature so he doesn’t have to deal with even more paperwork.)
Several years ago, I was team teaching 10th grade world history as a special education teacher supporting students with ‘learning differences’ enrolled in a mainstream class.
A research paper was assigned. My colleague, a history teacher, graded the papers and then shared them with me. I quickly noticed outstanding discrepancies in the level of writing in the papers vs. the level of work submit during in-class assignments.
My first step was to approach English teachers of the authors in question to ask if the skill and style was consistent with writing samples that they had seen in class. To my disappointment, the majority of the English teachers regretfully had to admit that they had not seen enough writing samples to make this judgment. On to Google I went...
Sure enough, the sources from which groups of sentences, even full paragraphs, were cut & paste were easily found. Thus ensued a messy, frustrating process of having the students face the fact that what they had done was unacceptable.
Ironically, the history teacher had originally awarded higher grades to the better written pieces - yup, the ones that had been cut & paste.
When does sloppy attribution become plagiarism?
http://www.americanpressinstitute.org/pages/resources/2006/09/when_does_sloppy_attribution_b/
I can’t say that my stories are really funny, but I do have several that mostly fall into the “copy & paste” category. One truly memorable event involved one of my ESL students copying a Monty Python skit and passing it off as his own skit. This situation, however, taught me a valuable lesson about cultural awareness. Many cultures don’t place the same amount of importance on originality of work that traditional western cultures do. The poor kid seriously had no idea why what he did was considered incorrect.
Tim
My favorite plagiarism story? It provided the class last year with laughs for the rest of the year. (If I weren’t crushed with a mountain of exams to assess, I’d take more care in the telling of the story, but that’s life. Here goes:)
We were having a literature circle fishbowl on Gulliver’s Travels. Students were allowed to use notes as they contributed comments pertinent to their assigned roles for the reading.
One student - the one who always did the least possible work - followed up on another student’s remark by saying something that not only sounded like the type of dusty, constipated stuff only the oldest of stuffy academics would dare to inflict upon an audience, but also used a verb I had never heard in all my 25 years of literary studies.
“Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “What was that word you just said?”
He looked at his notes and repeated it. (It was such an obscure, archaic word that for the life of me, I have never been able to remember it, and I’m a vocab king, if I do say so myself;) )
“What does that word mean?” I asked.
He didn’t know.
“Spell it?”
He spelled, and I typed in the search terms “[that whacked word] + “Gulliver’s Travels,” and lo! - up came only one link.
*Click*
“Repeat the comment you just made?”
He did - and I joined him in reading the second half of it along with him from my computer screen.
The Wicked Witch of the West never shrunk faster than he did in his desk.
He was a new student. It was ninth grade. I took it for the “teachable moment” it was, and explained that plagiarism isn’t only easy to catch in written form, but in verbal too. WE KNOW HOW YOU SPEAK. WE KNOW YOUR VERBAL FINGERPRINT.
I gave him a warning, laughing, and he laughed too. For the rest of the year, I often asked him to remind me of that word during class discussions.
Lovely fun, your invitation to share a story. Thanks, Stacy
But yeah, cite like crazy! And, well, I think my classmates and I are pretty much screwed over in terms of plagiarism because we’re so used to copying each other’s work. For science and math classes, at least. Be a bit harder in the humanities. There may be entirely different standards in junior college or something and then we’d all be like omgnuuuu.
Perhaps it is the fact that as I type a librarian, or some other student is reading this. I am supposed to be doing a project of some sort.
I check my school website everyday and was sur0prised to find a tab leading to a blog where they express their feelings.
That surprise quickly drained when I realized that the articles seemed to be written by teachers on such appropriate topics as plagiarism. Oh, and to post anything...we have to get in touch! How convenient.
This site is a sad sad excuse for freedom of speech and student voice. I would love to insert some words but I don’t think they would be appropriate enough.
I may be misunderstanding you, but I would think that if you’ve come up with an idea on your own, there’s no need to cite anyone else (even though someone else may have had the same idea, previously). The key thing to remember is, where you’ve knowingly used someone else’s idea, to give full credit. Personally, my problem is with unknowingly using someone else’s idea; I’ll read something, forget about it, and then present it as my own idea a few months later
What topics would you like us to talk about? We’re always open to suggestions and new ideas.
As for having to get in touch, it’s a security measure (ex: trolls, what we don’t want posting on this site ) and it also ensures that there’s a high standard of writing (we have editors look over posts). Please feel free to make an account and write a post; there will be someone who will check it over to make sure it adheres to this blog’s standards.
Stacy is a student. As are all of the other writers here. However, we are not going to just accept run of the mill student writing - it has to be good writing. If we were to just accept every piece of crap student writing, our voice is quickly diminished. An excess of content decreases the quality of the contempt.
If you are interested in writing, by all means contact us: we’ll be happy to review it. That doesn’t mean we’ll publish it. On a final note, we do not edit for ideas: we edit for quality of writing.
If you want complete freedom of speech (and poor content) I suggest you go on Myspace.
-Arthus, student blogger
P.S. I knew Yahoo had fallen on hard times.... but never knew you were so desperate that you needed the exposure from our blog.
Simon– Personally, my problem is with unknowingly using someone else’s idea; I’ll read something, forget about it, and then present it as my own idea a few months later . That’s my same problem. *sheepish* I’m always afraid that I might present an idea that’s actually somebody else’s.
The issues I deal with (and there have been more and more recently) are with those students who are trying to do the least amount of work possible. I understand that often the idea is “just get it done and deal with the consequences later”.
The question I have begun asking is: “Do you really trust someone else’s work? Are you willing to take whatever credit the teacher gives for another person’s work?”
As an educator that works with teachers each day, too many of them come to me complaining about the perceived “plagiarism problem” in our schools. They ask me how to teach kids about plagiarism.
One thing I think works against students is a school culture steeped in reciting the “correct answer” and that alone, is good enough. I could point to standardized testing, NCLB, etc., as root issues behind this.
Our students will Google search (it’s easier than other database searches), find something that looks credible, print it, and hand it in. They may not even read it. “Found it,” let’s move on.
I wonder if the written assignments are simply too boring in 2007.
Those of us from academic backgrounds know that the reason that plagiarism in colleges/universities is taken so seriously is that they are looking for evidence of original thought. But in a remix culture that many teens today participate in, I am not sure we are culturally putting a lot of value on original thought.
To combat the problem, I think students need concrete examples, I think assignments should change with the times to challenge students to find their voice, and I think at some point we could begin to value artifacts of remix culture when/where the authors of source material are agreeing to share their work for re-use.
Like the first commenter Joel Adkins, I am teacher and a graduate student. I found your posting to be very sincere and engaging.
First, let me reply to some of your specific points.
1. I have never asked my students to cite themes because as you say, they are universal. And while it may be acceptable to go to Sparknotes to find a novel theme (I’m sure some teachers would disagree with me here), I would never read Sparknotes’ explanation of that theme before I wrote the paper; your analysis of that theme should be your own.
2. I don’t quite understand your point about plagiarizing a novel summary. While it is true that the plot is the plot, each student needs to summarize it in his or her own words. The major plot elements will obviously be the same, but the student’s voice should shine through in his or her summary. Perhaps, (I can only assume here) the problem is that students try to paraphrase Cliffnotes, Sparknotes, or some other source’s summary of the novel.
While I wish I knew the “perfect” solution to this plagiarism problem, I don’t. The only thing that has had a measure of success is to create unique topics that “force” students to think for themselves.
Having said that, nothing makes me angrier than intentional plagiarism. While I can’t always prove it has been done, I can spot plagiarism right away. As you mentioned in your paper, every writer has his or her own voice, and this makes plagiarism very transparent to me. It is especially apparent when more than one student plagiarizes the same source. For example, when I was student teaching, four students copied the exact same paragraph from a source word for word. These four students were not friends and they weren’t even in the same period, yet each of them had chosen to use the same quotation. Their explanation was that they couldn’t have expressed the idea in their own words any better than it was already written. Understandable, but then they should have put the paragraph in quotation marks and cited the source.
I also notice when students plagiarize each other. Personally, I find this particular practice insulting. Do students think teachers don’t read and remember their writing?
As for the most blatant act of plagiarism, a student turned in a research paper that had obviously been cut and pasted directly from a web page into Microsoft Word and printed. How do I know this? Well, for starters, all of the hyperlinks were underlined and in color. When I asked this student for an explanation, he said he formatted his paper like this on purpose because he liked the way it looked.
However, I have never asked my students to cite themes because as you say, they are universal. And while it may be acceptable to go to Sparknotes to find a novel theme, I would never read what Sparknotes’ explanation of that theme before you write the paper; your analysis of that theme should be your own.
However, I have never asked my students to cite themes because as you say, they are universal. And while it may be acceptable to go to Sparknotes to find a novel theme, I would never read what Sparknotes’ explanation of that theme before you write the paper; your analysis of that theme should be your own.
Finally, remember: teachers don’t want to see your ability to rearrange other people’s ideas on paper. Instead, we want to know what YOU think. If you must use other people’s thoughts ,my advice to you is the same I give my students, cite EVERYTHING! Even if you paraphrase, you should still cite the idea.
It’s subjective, to an extent, but there are ways to make it clear and to mitigate against its appearance. For example, I often duplicate difficult problem set items on the midterm or final exam for my courses, so if students really worked on and understood the problem then it’s only a matter of reconstructing the solution. (And any good solution to a problem is memorable to the problem-solver.) On the other hand, the plagiarizers end up losing significantly more credit than they “earned” through copying work.
You asked for funny or memorable stories. Unfortunately I have very, very many stories and none of them are what I would call “funny”. Academic dishonesty saddens and angers me.
As a result, I now do interactive starter activities during my poetry units and ask my students to write poems based on their experiences from class. They have enough freedom to still tap their creative juices, but it makes it much more difficult to turn in someone else’s work.
Nancy (post 31) mentioned that the best way to stop plagiarism is to assign projects that can’t be plagiarized. I think that’s easier to do in the middle school where our assignments don’t have to be strictly analytical, hard-core research projects. So, for example, instead of asking my students to write “reports” on various figures from the Tudor period in Britain, each student must research their topic, and then create some historical fiction artifacts: a personal journal, a newspaper article, a poem, and a top-ten list.