Students 2.0

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 7^th 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 5^th 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.