Developing a Consensus About Reporting Plagiarism

Some facts about plagiarism:

• About half of high-school students surveyed during the 1990s say they have plagiarized (McCabe);

• Fifty percent of liberal arts college students surveyed could not identify a plagiarizing paraphrase when shown the original passage, suggesting that students who thought they were honest in McCabe’s study (above) might have been plagiarizing without knowing it (Roig);

• Plagiarism at colleges with an Honor Code is less frequent than at colleges with no Honor Code, but that advantage is lessened when students do not believe the system works reliably or faculty refuse to participate by reporting student violators (McCabe);

• Plagiarism convictions by the Goucher College Honor Board tripled between 1999 and 2002, mainly in the spring and most frequently involving juniors from a wide variety of majors;

• Students from all four classes at Goucher were convicted of plagiarism in 2000-2001 and 2001-2, including several would-be graduating seniors and students from ten departments and programs;

• Between 2% and 3% of Goucher’s total student population was convicted of plagiarism in 2000-2001 and 2001-2002, but according to research at other liberal arts colleges 5% of students admitted to submitting another student’s work for a grade and 9% admitted to using the Internet to plagiarize (McCabe), so we may have missed from ½ to 4/5 of actual plagiarisms,

• Goucher Honor Board punishments for plagiarism range from a reprimand (accidental documentation errors by a remorseful first-year student) to zero on the assignment (repentant self-reporting first-time first- and second-year students who intended to deceive) to failing the course (denial of obvious evidence, theft from another student, wholesale rather than small-scale theft) to suspension from Goucher (second offense against any part of the Honor Code).

• Goucher students who report their own plagiarisms to the chair of the Honor Board (“self-report”), whose offenses are first-time and not aggravated by malice, and who are completely repentant, usually receive lighter punishments than those who refuse to come forward when detected, though they must undergo a full trial to discover what they have done, and teachers who encourage students to self-report do not have to attend those trials because they have brought no charges.

When, why, and how would you report a plagiarism case to the Academic Honor Board?  Try to determine at what point in this sequence of violations you would ask the student to self-report as a plagiarist instead of pointing out the problem in conversation or a marginal comment, and at what point you would, yourself, call the chair of the Honor Board without offering the student a chance to self-report.  For reference, you might want to consult the section of the Academic Honor Code that deals with Plagiarism.  Although this sequence of situations was devised to help writing teachers clarify their own knowledge and beliefs, the sequence also could be used by writing students who were asked to imagine that they encountered the situations while reading a friend's paper.

First Semester (September to December) Incidents Involving First-Year 104 Students:

• The student's first paper contains phrases / sentences / paragraphs borrowed borrowed without quotation marks from a source it names, and the student is unaware anything was wrong with the practice.

• The student's first paper contains phrases / sentences / paragraphs borrowed borrowed without quotation marks from a source it does not name, and the student is unaware anything was wrong with the practice.

• The student's first paper appears to have been written for a previous high-school class on a topic similar to one you have assigned, but the student openly admits writing it, has ample drafts and notes to back up that claim, and says s/he always had been told that you couldn’t plagiarize yourself.

• The student's first paper closely resembles a paper you or a colleague received in another section of the same course, but no significant strings of words are identical.

• The student's first  paper closely resembles a paper you or a colleague received in another section of the same course, and several passages are identical. 

• The paper is only a rough draft submitted for the second assignment in September, but its sudden improvement in quality leads you to discover it was copied in part from an Internet site.

• The paper is a final draft submitted for a grade in October but you discover it was copied entirely from an Internet site.

• The paper is a final draft submitted for a grade in December on the last day of classes, and you discover it was copied partially from an Internet site, but your grades are due at SAS in 24 hours.

• The paper is a final draft submitted for a grade in December on the last day of classes and you discover it was copied entirely from an Internet site, but the student probably will get a final grade of C or D if the paper is silently failed without notifying the Honor Board.

• The paper is a final draft submitted for a grade in December on the last day of classes, and variations in the paper’s “voice” lead you to suspect strongly that the paper has copied passages from a source, but you can’t find it on the Internet and grades are due in 24 hours.

Second-Semester (January-May) Incidents Involving First-Year 105 Students:

• The student's first paper is adequately written and clearly depends on sources, which it has listed in a Works Cited, References, or Bibliography section, but it never actually cites any of the sources and never appears to quote any of them directly.

• The student's first paper is adequately written and clearly depends on sources, which it has listed in a Works Cited, References, or Bibliography section, and its voice shifts indicate it is quoting them directly, but it never identifies the sources it quotes.

• The student's first paper closely resembles a paper you or a colleague received in another section of the same course, but no significant strings of words are identical.

• The student's paper closely resembles a paper you or a colleague received in another section of the same course, and several passages are identical. 

• The paper is only a rough draft submitted for the second assignment in February, but variations in the paper’s “voice” lead you to discover that some of its evidence was cut-and-paste copied from an Internet site that it cited but did not quote.

• The paper is a final draft submitted for a grade around the middle of second semester, but variations in the paper’s “voice” lead you to discover it contains passages cut-and-paste copied from an Internet site that it did not cite.

• The paper is a final draft submitted for a grade and College Writing Proficiency evaluation in May, on the last day of classes, and you discover it was partially copied from an Internet site.

• The paper is a final draft submitted for a grade and CWP in May, on the last day of classes, and you discover it was entirely copied from an Internet site.

Then rethink these sequences of situations if the student were a sophomore or junior who was new to your major, and you were teaching a 200-level course.  Would your approach change at some point in the first or second semester, and if so, why?
 

Some questions for instructors to consider about “un-teaching” the habit of plagiarism:

• If you teach English 104, do you spend class time discussing source-use plagiarism and the importance of intellectual property, or do you expect your first day warning or the syllabus or English 105 to do that?

• If you teach English 105, do you talk to students about standards for academic honesty in various situations they are liable to encounter in 200- and 300-level courses, such as collaborative work, including science labs, open-book exams, make-up tests, etc.  Does this discussion include how to handle temptations that might lead them to break the rules, including good friends having trouble in the course they’re also taking, feeling the teacher does not like them, deadline conflicts, and exhaustion?  Do you explain how experienced readers detect plagiarism in shifts of voice/style within a paper or between papers, and how hard it is to disguise those shifts?  Do you explain how easy it is to locate sources of Internet plagiarisms?  Do you tell them, how the Honor Board operates, and that it hears plagiarism cases every year, but it does not broadcast the results to protect students’ privacy?

• Do you discuss the creation and use of intellectual property only in dedicated sessions, only in mini-lessons throughout the semester, or both?  Do you discuss the positive consequences of good scholarly behavior as often as you do the negative punishments of bad behavior?  Do you allow due-date extensions in reasonable circumstances in which you, yourself, would expect an editor or supervisor to extend a deadline?  Have you read carefully the Campus Handbook passages covering the definition of plagiarism as a species of academic dishonesty, including proper reporting procedures, and self-reporting?

References

For more detailed information about students’ opinions and behaviors, see Donald McCabe, Academic Dishonesty Survey, (20 colleges and universities, including several of Goucher’s cohort institutions, in 1999) 18 August 2002  Available online at:

http://web.archive.org/web/20020804065045/http://www.ksu.edu/honor/mccabesurvey1999/survey.htm

Also see Miguel Roig, "Can Undergraduate Students Determine Whether Text Has Been Plagiarized?"   Psychological Record 47:1 (Winter) 113-23.  [Available from Arnie Sanders and from the Library’s Academic Search Elite database.]