DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

We hear the term PLAGIARISM floating around all the time, and it's often presented to students in their syllabi on the first day of class. It's vital to define plagiarism and understand the reasons why students often find it difficult to avoid...

 

 

1.WHAT IS "PLAGIARISM"?

 

Emory Univeristy's Center for Faculty Development and Excellence explains the complexity and severity of the issue:

 

"The word itself, according to Deb Ayer, a lecturer in the English Department and Director of the Writing Center, derives from the Latin for kidnapping. It can involve more than just stealing another person’s words, or ideas, she went on. It can also involve stealing a person’s sentence structure and even the shape of their presentation.

Ayer spoke recently at a panel discussion about plagiarism among college students and how to decrease its frequency. Students are often unaware of precisely what constitutes plagiarism and of the “enormity of their crime,” said Ayer, adding that she favors education over punishment when students thought they had acted in good faith and clearly did not understand that they were plagiarizing.

Plagiarism falls into three categories, Ayer explained:

  1. Cheating: Blatant appropriation of another’s work, such as downloading complete term papers from the internet or paying someone to write a term paper.
  2. Non-attribution of sources: the “writer’s” submissions mislead the reader into believing it is their own work.
  3. Patch writing: Paraphrasing a source’s language and blending it with the writer’s own words. Even when citations are supplied, it’s still plagiarism."

Source: http://cfde.emory.edu/teaching/archive/plagiarisminternet.html

 

 

 Source: http://turnitin.com/assets/en_us/media/plagiarism_spectrum.php

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2. HOW EASY IS TO IDENTIFY THAT YOU'RE PLAGIARIZING?

 

 

According to the Purdue OWL Website, it can be tricky for students to decipher exactly what is blatant plagiarism and which actions fall in the "grey" area:

 

"There are some actions that can almost unquestionably be labeled plagiarism. Some of these include buying, stealing, or borrowing a paper (including, of course, copying an entire paper or article from the Web); hiring someone to write your paper for you; and copying large sections of text from a source without quotation marks or proper citation.

 

But then there are actions that are usually in more of a gray area. Some of these include using the words of a source too closely when paraphrasing (where quotation marks should have been used) or building on someone's ideas without citing their spoken or written work. Sometimes teachers suspecting students of plagiarism will consider the students' intent, and whether it appeared the student was deliberately trying to make ideas of others appear to be his or her own.

 

However, other teachers and administrators may not distinguish between deliberate and accidental plagiarism. So let's look at some strategies for avoiding even suspicion of plagiarism in the first place".

 

Source: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/589/2

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.