What Kind of Plagiarism to Avoid

Every year when I correct research papers I catch plagiarism. It still astonishes me that it continues to happen, despite my warnings to students. I have already caught two significant cases in grading papers recently. One case I caught last week, another today.

Now in case you don't know, there are differents kinds of plagiarists. Some, I think, are just sloppy or careless. They quote an entire paragraph or two of text and include the citation for it at the end, but neglect to put quotation marks around the passage. Since it is an exact quote and they didn't give proper credit, it's plagiarism. I caught one girl doing this last week. I was disappointed by it, and she got her zeroes as the consequence. Anyone who thinks this is harsh should be alerted to the fact that I have talked about avoiding plagiarism and reiterated what it is in class until all my students are sick and tired about hearing me mention it. So there really is no excuse at this point for not quoting huge chunks of the paper. And as often happens with excessively plagiarized work, it would have received a failing grade anyway, even if it was properly cited. This is an irony that plagiarists in my classes have not seemed to catch on to. It's really not worth cheating, because even if they don't get caught for it, they'll probably fail on the merit of the weak research and writing anyway!

Other kinds of plagiarism are equally sloppy. One kind includes plugging in citations in most of a paragraph, then tucking in more info at the end of it without a subsequent citation. While also careless, I tend to be a little more generous with this kind, provided it's the students own words. They paraphrased it and didn't give credit. This is wrong. It receives a penalty. Excessive mistakes this way receive a harsher penalty. When another draft is coming, I expect them to fix it the next time around, or else it won't be accepted. If it's a final draft, I'll likely refuse to give it a grade until it's fixed.

The worst kind of plagiarism, which I caught today, is blatantly devious in nature. It happens in such a way that I know the student is not just making a careless mistake. In fact, they construct their paper in such a way that, when I catch them, I know they have purposefully tried to make it look like it's not plagiarism, when it really is.

I'll try and do my best to illustrate this. A paper I graded today had multiple citations. So it looked like proper credit was being given. In fact, it cited a variety of different sources, which is something students need to do to score highly. It even had sections quoted with the proper quotation marks. On the surface it looked impressive. Problem was, the language did not sound like the student's, even in nonquoted passages. So I did a little googling... And she got nabbed.

I found entire sections of the paper word for word from several internet sources. Problem was, it was written as if the first paragraph was the student's own words, with one citation, then a block quote (indicating it's verbatim) with another citation from a second source, then the writing went back to paraphrasing of a third source. The problem? Though presented as two paraphrased sections and one direct quote, the entire section was verbatim from the same source! This pattern repeated itself throughout the paper. The student apparently cut and pasted huge chunks of writing from several different websites, then edited it to make it look like it came from various books and websites. I can imagine the fun she had "editing" this.

My imagination of her thought process: "Hmmm, let me see here. I think puting quotation marks around this line and saying it came from this book would be good. What page number should I attribute it to! How about 178, that's a number I've always loved. There, that's good. Now, I'll say the next three lines were paraphrased from this journal article. There, plug in that citation. I'm doing pretty well here. I'm citing multiple sources, which will make me look smart. Oh bother, my text ran out from this internet source. Let me just paste in another website here, so I can finish the paragraph. Good, that's done. Now I think I'll end the page with a block quote, and say it came from this book. I'll call it page 32 this time. And then I'll put a line in from this website..."

Talk about cheesy! I was flabbergasted to discover this kind of deceit.

What's also ridiculous, and a bit sad, is that this student does not speak or write English very well. It is not her first language. The pasting job was horrendous. The paper was a misery to read. It was almost literally gobbledygook. Imagine pasting several different websites together concerning the same general topic, and you get an idea of what this paper was like. I can only imagine what this student thought she was doing as she put this paper together. Maybe she thought she was sounding brilliant with her mastery of the English language. But I honestly don't think she understood about three-quarters of what she pasted in (remember I also have a decent idea of her reading comprehension skills.) I can only imagine what she thought I would think about it. I can't believe she didn't think I might question whether it was her own work. I mean, she used the world "curvilinear."

Picture my incredulity at reading this. "Curvilinear!!!!????????? You've got to be kidding me!" That was the gist of my reaction. I, who have a fairly good working knowledge of this girl's English language skills by now, was astounded to discover that she tried to pass "curvilinear" off as her own word!

What I said before about plagiarized work holds true here. If I had bothered to grade the paper, it would have received a failing grade on its own merits. But I stopped half way through after finding multiple blatant instances of plagiarism. I'm still shaking my head...

You wannabe plagiarists out there, please take note, you have to be more subtle than this!