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SafeAssign: Intentional v Unintentional Plagiarism

 

As we all know, issues with academic integrity and plagiarism are amplified and complicated by research and writing in today’s electronic environments. The ease of internet information retrieval and the temptations of select, cut, and paste word processing features create rich opportunities for student writers to use sources inappropriately in large and small ways. Other people’s words and ideas might end up in some students’ texts without documentation at the phrase, line, or paragraph level. Still other students are more deliberate and bold, copying large portions of successive text or duplicating whole papers. Most of us are aware of the range of offenses that fall under the heading of plagiarism and punish students according to the severity of the offense. We would not, for example, punish a student who had noted a quotation but omitted its attribution in the same way that we would react to a student who had turned in a paper purchased from an Internet “paper mill” – yet both of these offenses constitute plagiarism and are treated as such by programs like SafeAssign.

 

Because plagiarism constitutes such a wide continuum, we must judge it in terms of student intentionality and the degree of the abuse. As instructors, this asks us to consider how we might effectively discuss all types of plagiarism with our students and provide strategies for helping them avoid situations that might lead to plagiaristic acts. We might, for example, incorporate discussions into our classes about both unintentional acts of plagiarism – what we might call “good faith plagiarism” – and the intentional acts of plagiarism that are unquestionably cheating and even theft.

 

Most students “get” intentional plagiarism. We would be hard-pressed to find a student who couldn't recognize that purchasing a paper online or turning in a paper his friend wrote for another class is plagiarism. Another common example of intentional plagiarism is what professors Andrew Wright and Ghanashyam Sharma call the “potluck paper,” a paper that consists largely of a collection of quotations, summaries, or paraphrases that may or may not be properly attributed. These instances are clearly plagiarizing. Whether or not the writer considers his act dishonest, in each of them, the author has deliberately presented someone else’s ideas as his own.

 

Less intentional acts of plagiarism, however, are often harder for students to grasp and thus need more of our class time and attention. These instances of plagiarism might include small, inadvertent mistakes: incorrect or omitted citations, inadequate paraphrasing, mixing up two sources, incorrectly assuming that something is common knowledge, and so forth. These types of mistakes are fairly easy for faculty to recognize and can, with guidance, be easy for students to rectify and avoid.

 

There are also more global instances of unintentional plagiarism, such as when a student leans too heavily on another writer’s thinking or mimics the organization of another piece of writing. Sometimes the student has not cited the original work, thinking that, because he has not quoted from it, no citation is necessary; at other times, the student has cited the work but is unaware that such heavy borrowing constitutes plagiarism whether or not it is cited. Though instances like these often appear to us as deliberate plagiarism, they are often not intended as such. In fact, many students in such cases are not aware that they have plagiarized. These students have a superficial understanding of plagiarism, considering it only “stealing another person’s words.” Faced with an accusation of plagiarism, they are bemused and frequently say things like “but it’s on my bibliography page” or “What am I supposed to do? Put a citation after every line?” This missing attribution and citation speaks less about academic dishonesty and more about these students’ inability to see that the material they gathered has a connection to real people who deserve credit for their work. For these students, the world of knowledge is often disconnected from the world of people. In their minds, knowledge has no human agency, it just is. This general disconnect is enhanced by the impersonal nature of electronic environments and new knowledge compendiums like Wikipedia that are collectively created. Such environments challenge and complicate our traditional notions of intellectual property. In many ways, our documentation process and the way we think about intellectual property has not kept pace with the changes in the knowledge-creating and knowledge-consuming landscape.

 

It is helpful, then, to think about how complicated notions of documentation can be for students. By distinguishing between intentional and unintentional plagiarism and being sensitive to many students’ genuine misunderstanding about how and why to document, we also avoid lumping honest students together with cheaters and unfairly criminalizing students in ways that can be damaging both to their learning and writing processes.

 

References:

 

Wright, Andrew and Ghanashyam Sharma. “SafeAssign & Plagiarism Prevention.” University of Louisville Delphi Center for Teaching and Learning. PowerPoint. 2007. 2 December 2008. http://delphi.louisville.edu/help/safeassign/docs/SafeAssignPlagiarismPreventionV3.ppt

 

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Also in this section:

• Policing v Prevention
• Intentional v Unintentional Plagiarism
• Culture: a Complicating Factor