1. Opening Comments

“Plagiarism” when used below always means “plagiarism and other types of academic malpractice related to it”. For reading speed I use “plagiarism”.

On this page I state what I want to say most about plagiarism. I’ve separated basic statements from explanations and examples. The basic points are in bold.

When updating this plagiarism page (Summer 2010), I spent quite a bit of time kicking around on the web for articles, examples, and illustrations that I might be able to use. In the process I noticed most sources sound like policemen warning citizens about bad behavior, or are made humorous (YouTube example, Rutgers University) to hide that core message — which is a policeman warning citizens about bad behavior. I also noticed that the "Plagiarism is …" component usually makes it look like it is easy to define.

That's not true.

John Elkington's blog (http://www.johnelkington.com/)
Graphic source here

Confusion and disagreement abounds:

Personally, when grading, I have a quick instinct for knowing that something has happened. But beyond that it gets tough: How extensive? Was it on purpose? How serious is it? What should be the penalty? In most cases, these questions are very difficult to settle on an acceptably clear answer. So, of course this complicates things.

Also complicating things are the various positions individuals have on how serious a "crime" certain forms of plagiarism is in the first place.

We generally agree that murder is wrong; we generally agree that killing someone in self-defense is OK but there is a lot in between.

Plagiarism, too, has a lot of shapes and sizes. Word-for-word stealing that is presented in a way that falsely claims the speaker has created those words him- or herself is the only type of plagiarism that is easy to prove and widely agreed upon as improper and/or illegal. At the other end: If I say, "Look, it's a rosy-fingered dawn!" I'm stealing the phrase from the Odyssey but no one cares, and for lots of reasons. What about the movie titled "From Paris with Love"? It is clearly referring to "From Russia With Love?" but can the 007 franchise owners sue for stealing their brand. Highly unlikely. But what if the movie uses the same theme song melody? They can zap them, easily. .... Unless it is a parody. No horror film director would try to sue the "Scream" film series for infringement.

Also complicating this is the appearance of similarity between plagiarism and copyright infringement. These are not the same but most people don't maintain the distinction—they lump both into "taking or using without permission stuff that is in the shape of words, music or images, not physical objects or money." And that's a problem. It's a problem because among students there is a strong sense that downloading or streaming music, images and videos is just so much a part of the fabric of how things are done that it isn't practical to worry about the illegality of it. Students then extend this casual attitude to acts of plagiarism because they inaccurately lump together plagiarism and copyright infringement as the same sort of thing: "getting things from the internet" which slides over into "getting things from whatever source." While both take from a protected (by law) source without acknowledgement, plagiarism carries things further by implicitly or explicitly making a claim that you are the original creator / owner. Unsympathetically worded, it adds deception to thievery.

Yuki Suetsugu's manga series Eden no Hana plagiarized from, among other things,Takehiko Inoue's manga series Slam Dunk and REAL. I think few of us would try to argue that any of the three examples below are just coincidence. Also, Suetsugu admitted to, and apologized from the plagiarism. So, whether or not plagiarism happened is a settled issue. Still, how bad is what he did?

Examples of Suetsugu's plagiarism (right panels):

Inoue panel based on NBA photo:

Source of above three sets of graphics here

(By the way, adding to the confusion is, at the head of this string of imitations Inoue creating action panels based on NBA basketball photos that are copyrighted. AND, at the other end of this string, the Korean TV drama One Fine Day apparently plagiarized the already plagiarizing Eden no Hana. ... If interested see the full article listed below.)

But, if you read the comments submitted for the article that documents these acts of plagiarism (the Eden no Hana is just one portion — that one is obvious plagiarism, other parts of the article are more tenuous), you can get a sense right away how difficult it is to settle on what plagiarism is, and that it is not considered by some as a very serious event.

"Korean TV Drama copies Eden no Hana, which in Copies Slam Dunk, which copies NBA photos...too funny."

"I'm surprised that the chinese plagiarized version of clamp was a lot more detailed then the original."

"Great article.
Some of those accusations seem a bit stretched. A few panels, like the half face one or hair covering the eyes, are pretty common in manga in general. It's a rather thin difference between a cliche and copyright infringement sometimes."

"The Takehiko Inoue and photo's incident is interesting, to me I don't see the problem with an artist using a reference image to capture a particular pose though there's a difference between using a reference and directly tracing an image."

"In France, there is a guy, Mars Maggiori, who does plagiat of some ghibli stuff for his "professional" works. He called it 'influence' from japan but it's more..."

"Some of these similarities mean nothing. There's nothing wrong with using references. I doubt anyone can ever come up with an idea that's 'original' anymore anyways. Creators of shoujo mangas should probably start suing each other then. How many times have you read stories with the same plot?"

"I think the Slam Dunk ones can't be considered plagiarism. All the author did was take real-life images of NBA basketball and transplanted it into his character's movements. Unlike taking an established visual medium and usurping it for personal usage, I highly doubt you can trademark and copyright an action done in real-life to be depicted in comics and manga."

"It only bothers me if I know where it's taken from."

"I've been following this incident since the mid summer, yet there's still no solution to it, manga fans obviously complained to the company, but do they learn, NO! Their new book still features they so-called-original images they theft. And the sad thing is, the teenagers who read the novel from the Joustar defend this company by saying: 'Well, the plagerized picture looks better than the original ones, so what's the problem.' God, I just want to slap some sense into them."

"These cases of copyright infringement are seriously ridiculous. I can't believe that publishing companies are suing artists for work that resembles another. What happened to inspiration? It's as if an artist can't admire a piece of artwork and reproduce it without being accused of plagiarism and getting sued."

... Well, as you can see, we are sort of all over the map on what to think of this.

If interested, here's the original full article (scroll down for the comments): A Tradition in Plagiarism | ComiPress July 9, 2007, and here's an .rtf file of the comments, if the web site is down.

Also, if you're interested, here's Suetsugu's apology as stated in that article.

So, what's the big deal?

I wish educators were more up front in admitting that plagiarism by college students usually doesn't damage financially the person from whom the material was taken nor does it do a great deal of harm to that person's reputation. From the perspective of collateral damage, it usually doesn't do that much to affect a curve in the class. From such perspectives, the punishments usually associated with it seem excessive, or, at minimum, the connection between "real world" plagiarism and student generated plagiarism seem overdrawn.

So why are colleges so persistently in the face of students about this issue? I don't know their reasoning, actually, and I don't really care because I'm not sure they have thought long and hard about it. I have some ideas about their thinking but I can't be sure and they aren't relevant for this page.

Instead, on this page I'll tell you what I care about and why, and give you honest statements about what I will judge as plagiarism and related offenses, as well as the usual actions I take when I discover it. That seems on the one hand useful, since after looking at lots of web pages, articles and YouTubes, I think the definition of plagiarism is sort of lame a lot of the time. And, it seems fair, so that you will understand ahead of time what my reactions will be or, if it comes to that, after you have been caught you can return to these pages and see what did, is, or will be happening to you because your work has portions that are plagiarized.

This page meant for ...

This web page, then, is meant for all students in my classes but written primarily with the following sorts of students in mind:

• those who are fuzzy about what plagiarism is,
• those who understand plagiarism but want a clear understanding of my definition of it,
• those who don’t spend much time thinking about this issue and might end up plagiarizing accidentally,
• those who intend to or have plagiarized in my class.

Original image has been altered by me. Original source is Sunshine On My Shoulder (blog) and is here.

Worried?

I'm guessing that these comments are making some of you a bit nervous? If you tend to plagiarize, I'm really glad if you're nervous. BUT, for the most part I end up making undeserving students nervous—those of you who honestly don't and don't want to plagiarize but rightly worry that you and I don't match up in our mutual understanding of what might be plagiarism or worry that an honest mistake might lead to unfair conclusions and/or punishments on my part.

Totally reasonable.

1A My basics

So, please allow me to state this absolutely clearly:

If you approach my class with a good amount of honesty (we aren't perfect), it will serve you very well if I happen to come across something I consider to be plagiarism.

If, together with that approach you understand and employ the following two principles—in spirit not just “by the letter”—it is highly unlikely that you will be considered by me as having plagiarized.

Allow enough time to do the paper writing required of my classes. I have various requirements that are not typical and often students feel boxed in between my requirements and the deadline. If you are struggling with the paper, please don't solve your problem by plagairism, please solve it by contacting me or your GSI! We can work something out, surely.

Everything on this web page, and my approach to evaluating a student’s written work, is based on the following two basic principles.

Both must be satisfied:

My basic principle #1: Regarding plagiarism specifically: As a reasonably alert reader, I should be able to understand easily (that is, during an ordinary simple reading of your prose) clear boundaries between your ideas (and data) and the ideas (and data) of your sources. How you can achieve this is outlined in more detail below, but basically it starts with having ideas in the first place, having clarity in your mind what your ideas are and what their ideas are, and structuring your prose to make that clear to the reader (using phrasing, footnote placement, direct quotes, etc).

My basic principle #2: Regarding other related issues of academic dishonesty: If I read the original source against your written submission, I should be able to decide without much difficulty that you represent your sources accurately and fairly. Accuracy includes the details (footnotes, bibliographies) that point the reader exactly back to the original source as well as managing the import of the idea (or data) correctly. Do you understand what you are quoting? Do you understand whose idea it is (it isn’t always the author of your source)? Often such errors are unintentional but the result is anyway a misrepresentation with effects & consequences and I treat it with similar severity as intentional dishonesty. Please be careful!! Fair representation is essential and can only be done when you understand your source and your intent is to represent its ideas fairly (not in a way beneficial to your thesis that doesn’t match the original intent of the idea in the source).

So, these two principles restated: I consider your written submission free of plagiarism or related issues when I can see a clear boundary between your ideas and the ideas of your sources and when your source ideas are presented by you accurately and fairly.

That's it—the above principles are the essence of what I want to say about plagiarism and related matters.

The rest of this page has to do with giving more precise descriptions to these statements, outlining what happens if I find plagiarism, and ends with some comments on why this is so important to me.

The way I approach this issue means that you can avoid plagiarism by having your own ideas, understanding well the ideas in your sources, distinguishing your ideas from theirs, and taking care to be accurate and fair. I think this is an extremely reasonable requirement.

It is my bottom line, definitely.

1B As a way of wrapping up these opening comments, I'd like to list a few things that happen frequently in my class related to plagiarism. They will be repeated below but these in particular I want in a prominent place on this page, so I mention them once now, here at the beginning:

Direct quotes require quotation marks around them!

Paraphrasing that is very close to the original is plagiarism (examples below), EVEN WHEN FOOTNOTED.

Double-check your footnotes for accuracy: source title, source page number. I am extremely strict about this.

All students are assumed to have read carefully and understand well this web page, and are graded (and, unfortunately, sometimes prosecuted) accordingly.

Unintentional plagiarism is punished.

Email me if you have uncertainty about anything. Otherwise I will assume you are clear about the contents of this page.

2. How to Plagiarize in My Classes or How to Not Plagiarize in My Classes

Students in my classes are asked to analyze assigned readings or, in the case of a paper, present their analysis on a topic of their choice based on good research.

Typically students become entangled in plagiarism in my classes for two reasons at opposite ends of a spectrum:

... either they have little or no analysis of their own

... they are too intent on proving a particular point

These students have problems distinguishing their ideas from their sources because their ideas are not powerful enough to stand on their own.

These students distort source ideas and information to support their thesis

There is a third common group:

those who think that I don’t care enough to notice plagiarism or they don’t care enough to notice that they are plagiarizing (either have not bothered to think about it, or have a looser definition of it than me).

There are other types of plagiarism in my class, but the majority fall into one of the above.

In the next few paragraphs I write about establishing boundaries between your ideas and that of your sources, then comment on accuracy & fairness. I then list the types of plagiarism that I come across in my classes.

Fuzzy boundaries between your ideas and theirs

2A Fuzzy boundaries overview

As the writer, it is your job to establish clear boundaries between your ideas and those of others. This is a basic understanding between you, the writer, and us, as readers. It is your responsibility to handle source ideas and information in your written work in a way that the reader can easily understand what of your prose are expressions of your ideas and what are descriptions of the ideas of others. Making these boundaries intentionally indistinct is intentional plagiarism. Mismanaging these boundaries is unintentional plagiarism but results in plagiarism nonetheless.

Obviously altered by me. The original diagram is from an essay by English professor Russell A. Hunt of St. Thomas University. Here's the article in which this diagram appeared: Whose Silverware Is This?

2B Footnote digression

OK, so here's a common, perplexing situation—probably not the most logical place for it on this web page—but here goes: When should you footnote?

Of course a scholar’s analysis is his or her idea and needs attribution.

But what of “ideas” such as “The Japanese love the four seasons”? This is an example of a widely known, widely mentioned idea that has no particular source.

When you write, you constantly need to gauge your audience’s interpretative tendencies and write to convey what you want to say with those tendencies in mind. It is a judgment call all the way, but not that difficult in most cases.

For the most part it is better to stay away from such general claims such as the above—they might not have much truth value to them anyway and work against you when trying to win the respect and trust of your readers.

General dates and other factual information need not be footnoted but as it gets more specific or unusual it is time to consider some documentation:

“The Meiji Restoration occurred in 1868.” OK, I’m fine with that. About a million history books say the same thing.

“The Meiji Restoration began in the second hour before dawn on May 13, 1868.” Really? Boy, I sure want to know where you got that info.

If you think the reader might react with “Wow, that’s specific (or “that’s not what we usually hear”). How does s/he know that?” then it is better to document your source.

It is easy to pump up the density of a paper with data pulled from the web. Aside from issues of accuracy—the web is a delightful blend of poison and pleasure—you misrepresent yourself as an expert if you include specific information in a way that would suggest this is natural, long-term knowledge of yours. Footnote it for goodness sakes! Intentional misrepresentation of you as more of an expert in a field than you are becomes, at some point, academic dishonesty although the line is difficult to determine. Carelessness that leads to misrepresentation is malpractice; that is, you are expected to be, and responsible for, doing you best to allow the reader to get a fair read on how well you know the topic.

2C Fuzzy boundaries, two deeds to be done

Now, back to the main points of this section on fuzzy boundaries:

You have two deeds that need doing by you to un-fuzzy the boundaries:

1) having ideas different from your sources (and having good self-awareness of which is which)

and

2) expressing yourself in ways that the reader understands which is which.

Deed #1: Having your own ideas, and knowing which ideas are yours and theirs:

How to generate your own ideas is not part of this web page. What I would like to say is that strong ideas of your own are pretty much a stake in the heart of the plagiarism boogie man. That’s your best way forward.

OK, so maybe I will say a little something about how to generate ideas:

Finding a topic that allows analysis is critical, so "all about" papers are a deathtrap. Look for things that require interpretation —

"Baseball in Japan" NO
"Why is baseball so liked in Japan?" YES

"Dazai Osamu's life in his works" NO
"How did Dazai fashion his work to powerfully express his experiences?" YES

"Buddhism in The Tale of Heike" NO
"Is 'impermanence' really an important theme in Heike (as everyone claims)?" YES

In other words, you need to ask a question that the reader thinks, "Oh, that's a cool question that could have various answers, I'd like to see what this person has to say on that." This is different from, "Neat, I always wanted to know about enka and this guy is giving me a great intro to it."

Good note-taking is important, too. Ideas that you think are yours might have been from something you read earlier, didn’t write down, forgot that you read it, and then “rediscovered” it, forgetting the source. Notes speed up the writing process anyway, and give essays excellent details.

Consider developing a code of some sort that identifies sources and that works for you.

I write most of my thoughts in the margins of books or, when digital, I use all types of comment tools for whatever type of file I’m working with. That separates my ideas from source ideas. When I write notes separately, in a notebook or whatever, I can’t tell if I’m copying down a source idea or writing my reaction to a source idea. I’m terrible at labeling such notes — I just don’t have the patience for it — thus my margin note approach.

ZACHERY KOUWE, once a
New York Times business reporter.

In his own words:

"Man, what an idiot. What was I thinking?"

Mr. Kouwe lost his dream job at the NYT because of messy notes:

"He said he would copy stories from wires, paste them into a file in the editing system, verify the information and then put the material in his own words. At least, he said, that is what he intended to do. When I asked him how he could fail to notice that he was copying someone else’s work, he added further explanation: He said the raw material in the computer files in which he assembled his stories included not only reports from other sources but also context and background from previous articles that he had written himself. When putting it all together, he said, he must have thought the words he copied were his own, earlier ones. 'It was just my carelessness in trying to get it up quickly, he said." (NYT Op-Ed: "Journalistic Shoplifting" by Clark Hoyt, 3/6/2010)

Self-check! Basically, whenever you have what you think is “a really good idea”, you should take a few moments to kick around in your memory and see if you can be crystal clear that it is your idea, not a remembered idea of someone else. This isn’t easy, since most of the time ideas are blends or extensions of other ideas. But lean towards giving others credit where credit's due.

2D Deed #2: Expressing yourself in ways that we can understand who owns which ideas:

Expressing yourself in a way that clarifies ownership of an idea is not difficult—doing if perfectly is, but being good enough at this isn’t. My standard is whether a reasonable person can relatively easily understand the idea's source in nearly all cases.

You should definitely begin with the principle: Context is king. ... because reasonable people lean very very heavily on context to understand what they are reading (and hearing, and seeing, and smelling, and tasting ...)

As a reader I make different assumptions based on specific context, and there are lots of these. If you are writing an RP for a J7 class of mine 100% of your comments should be your ideas, except the necessary note on plot here and there. Students frequently make this error. The definition of an RP is a statment of your ideas and analysis, so anything else needs to be referenced, even my lecture content. The context in this case is “I am reading a statement of your ideas because that’s the assignment.”

Example. Here's an email exchange where I spotted unattributed imported information that suggests the student knows more than s/he does about the field:

I didn't like writing that because this is a very nice person, and good student. S/he answered:

Which was a very very cool way to answer. Polite. Not defensive. Answered with honest and full disclosure.

I graded this as a "C". But I remember this student fondly and s/he did receive an "A" in the class. Disaster averted.

Ah! I can hear some of you thinking: "Wallace's email was over-the-top." Come talk to me sometime; I think when you hear my thoughts, it will all make more sense. This web page is already too long, so I won't go into details here. You can read my "Why I Care" section at the end of this page, if curious ... or furious.

Kaavya Viswanathan

$500,000 dollars and a promising career, zapped:

"A Harvard undergraduate who signed a book deal for reportedly $500,000 while still a freshman is facing allegations that portions of her newly published first novel closely resemble parts of a coming-of-age novel published by a New Jersey writer in 2001.

Kaavya Viswanathan's ''How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life" contains more than a half-dozen passages in which the language closely echoes ''Sloppy Firsts," published by a division of Random House Inc., including one 14-word sequence that appears in both books." (Boston Globe, "Harvard author faces scrutiny" by Lisa Wangsness, April 24, 2006)

2E Expressing yourself: Context is king—it is how we understand your expressions.

Other places (besides the RP example above) where the reader will expect to see your ideas ahead of others are introductory paragraphs, thesis statements, conclusions and novels (duh, see K.V. over there), and so on. These areas of an essay, in particular, introduce or explain your ideas and we read them thinking that way. A sentence from another source which might not need a footnote in another place, might need one here.

The guiding principle is always: Context is king so, given the context, can a reader conclude accurately with relative ease the source of the idea?

Of course you must put quotation marks around source material imported word-for-word and footnote it, and of course you must footnote paraphrased information.

I know it is tempting not to. Ask Kaavya. I know that for some of you if you footnoted everything there would be very little paper left that is yours. Go generate more ideas!

I do not think any student here at Berkeley does not know that direct quotes require quotation marks and citation and paraphrasing requires citation. I punish severely for these events because either you are intentionally cheating or you care so little about the rules that you ignore them or you are spending too little time on your paper or you think I care so little about you that I won't notice. All of these are really serious things for me. Really serious. We will have conversations. You will have grade penalties. You will probably have additional work to do. You will be remembered.

Here is an example of missing quotation marks (and no citation by the way) from a student I will remember. I found this match using Google. It was my first guess as to which sentence to search. I searched three more, finding another string, and then stopped. The student received an "F" even though s/he claimed to have forgotten to put the footnotes in. Even if so this is too serious an error. Do not forget! It's like saying "I forgot to think about the red light ..." Some things are just definite dos.

2F I have issues with paraphrasing

But I have some serious issues with paraphrasing, even when footnoted.

Issue One:

When paraphrasing, the reader needs to understand easily where the paraphrase begins and ends.

As soon as I decide that I cannot determine the boundary between your idea and that of another at a significant point in the essay, I’m done with the paper. It is a waste of my time—and I value time dearly—to take on the enormous task of making a best guess throughout the essay. You are now doubted, not trusted, and I won’t put any more time into it.

2G Footnote issues, again. Above I wrote about when to footnote when the information is leaning towards being common or generally known, here I write about how often to footnote:

So, when paraphrasing, do you put just one footnote at the end of the paragraph or do you footnote every sentence? Probably neither.

Clarify in your mind what ideas of a certain paragraph are yours, what are theirs, then write using phrases that tags that, and footnote on the principle of “Does a reasonable reader easily understand that both of these sentences or these three sentence, whatever, belong to the same source?”

Good tags: "According to, ..." "As XXX asserts, ...." "I agree with XXX who claims, ...." and so on. That is super useful to harried, hurried readers. We like you.

When unsure lean towards footnoting rather than skipping it.

2H Footnote issues, still. I've discussed when and how often to footnote. This is about where to put the footnote to establish easy-to-understand boundaries between ideas.

OK, first the most basic:

Footnotes usually arrive at the end of the sentence. NEVER at the beginning of anything.

But not always!

The footnote should be at the end of the relevant phrase if, for example, you started a sentence with the idea of someone else and ended it with your idea. So footnotes can appear in the middle of a sentence.

For example,

“Murasaki Shikibu lived across the intersection from Fujiwara no Michinaga’s estate,(1) and this is significant for understanding the social position from which she wrote The Tale of Genji.”

The first half of this sentence cites a source that states an empirical fact: the location of Murasaki Shikibu's residence. The second is the essay writer’s analysis/observation that results from contemplating that fact. If the footnote came at the end, it would signal that the conclusion is part of the source idea. Perhaps the author of that source strongly disagrees with any such conclusion. It should not be attributed to him or her. Get the footnote in the right place, so we understand the boundaries between the source of the two ideas.

Footnotes can also sit right at the data point, or idea point, when that would be more precise.

For example,

Taniguchi describes this critical event in Kagero Diary as "hysteric"(1) but Ito interpreted that same event as "profound."(2)

Basically, the essay writer needs to strike a balance between accurate boundaries that are marked by good footnote placement and readability (avoiding clutter by an uneven deployment of footnotes — sometimes right at the data point, sometimes mid-sentence, sometimes at the end of the sentence, sometimes just at the end of the paragraph all in a manner that the reader can't get a sense of the principles the writer is using).

2I Issue Two:

Paraphrasing closely to the original is misleading and, for me, most definitely academic dishonesty.

I feel strongly about this. As scholars we read to learn and we are wasting our time if we read the ideas of others who aren’t well informed about what they are talking about. We use all types of methods to try to determine this. Among those, a very important one is writing style, including how things are phrased.

If, for example, I see someone use “Prince Genji” I can date that comment as 1920s through maybe 1940s American-based scholarship on Japan. No one in Japan has ever used that phrase because Genji was only a prince for a brief time, before his father made him a commoner. But the phrase slipped into English by a scholar's error and got passed around. I dismiss any English-language scholar who uses this phrase.

Or, to stick with Heian period scholarship for a moment, I know that scholars who use the phrase “sovereign” instead of “emperor” are more or less of a certain “camp”. There was once a movement to replace the more common “emperor” with this other term. Historians or a certain analytic method were perhaps the most interested in this, and some literary scholars who place considerable emphasis on historical accuracy. So with that one word, I actually know quite a bit about the scholar.

When a student paraphrases in a way that is close to the original, s/he is borrowing a discursive style and in doing so misrepresenting the extent and type of his or her knowledge; s/he is borrowing, deceptively, the clothes of the source's author. From such students’ perspectives, I think primarily they are trying to sound smart or trying to reduce the amount of time it takes to write the paper, or both. Perhaps they have English language concerns, etc. But at the reader's end such style wearing is royally misleading. But ...

Can I be clear about something? The below IS NOT PARAPHRASING, it is just cheating, plain and simple:

Source:

Student:

This student received an "F" for the paper. S/he would have received this grade even if this "paraphrasing" was in the one location alone. However, it is throughout the paper. I considered failing this student for the course (s/he was P-NP) and also reporting to the University. Luck had shined on the student, though: In an administrative error, I had failed to grade the student's essay. On a last check before submitting grades, I noticed that fact, began to review the student's paper, and ran into issues immediately. However, it was 15 minutes before I had planned on submitting grades for the class. Rather than hold everyone's grade to call the student into the office and determine the level of penalty, I spent two hours taking apart the student's paper. In the end, I failed the student on the paper but passed the student on the course and did not make a report, more out of consideration to all the other students in the class waiting for grade results than this one individual. If I had seen this paper a day earlier, that would not have been the outcome.

Issue Three:

Personally, I feel that when you paraphrase very closely to the original you probably don’t understand fully what you are writing; you are, instead, more or less mindlessly moving it from one document to another. My job is to teach you, and this short circuits that. But, in the end, it is most definitely your choice whether to learn X from me or not. So, I can be sad about it, but I do recognize that it is your choice.

2J Review on how to un-fuzzy boundaries between your ideas and those of your sources:

• have ideas!
• know clearly what are your ideas and those of others
• take meaningful notes that preserve who is the source of what
• double-check to make sure a good idea you are proud of is really your idea
• express yourself with this principle: Context is king so, given the context, can the reader understand relatively easily the source of the idea? When in doubt footnote but use phrasing (“According to …,” “I think that …” etc.) and idea organization (don’t skip around) in a way that reduces this need
• avoid like the plague paraphrasing that is close to the original wording of the sources

2K Accuracy & Fairness

Accuracy & Fairness overview

Inaccuracy and unfairness result from presenting another's ideas (or data) wrongly. The only real difference is that, from the point of view of you as the writer, inaccuracy is the result of error while unfairness is intentional distortion of source ideas. BUT, from the point of view of the author of the misrepresented source, s/he may well consider your error as unfair. To encourage students to care about the effect of their words, I take the point of view of the source author, not you, when evaluating your work. I'm not very much on your side on this; so, honest mistakes—even with apologies—are still viewed as having damaged the source author.

This whole section on accuracy & fairness can be summed up simply like this:

I consider your writing to be accurate & fair when:

• the names, titles and dates in your work are accurate
• your footnotes lead exactly to the page(s) from which the source was drawn
• the author of a source, if looking over your shoulder, would conclude that what you are writing is a fair representation of his or her ideas

Doing the above takes care of this entire section. But the footnote portion is a bit tricky. Please read below.

Accuracy in all aspects of the student's written work:

Besides "creating knowledge" (as we are told to do in our profession), scholarship transmits the ideas and data of others. Obviously one of its core principles is accuracy. Please embrace this concept. Yes, I know, this is like a chain around both ankles when trying to get work done under pressure. But it is the nature of the game. I guess that about 40% of my production time is caught up in checking my writing accuracy.

A hint for earning a good grade in my courses: Basically I want you to read for ideas, and, often, those ideas are subtle. They require time to capture. When you make errors in accuracy, I run this chain of logic: the error was due to rushing, if the basics are rushed the reading is also probably rushed, if the reading is rushed, the ideas are probably missed, thus, the student isn't learning much. Accurate work encourages me to think that you are applying your mind to the matter at hand, noticing things, learning things.

Basic accuracy in using sources

Do you understand what you are reading? If not, it is going to be pretty hard to represent it accurately.

Be extra careful that the bibliography is rock solid accurate.

2L Footnotes!

Students are notoriously lax with footnotes, it seems. When I take the time to evaluate a stack of papers for footnote for accuracy & fairness, about 40% of the papers I review will not pass my standard. Read on.

All of these happen regularly:

• the student fails to footnote or locates the footnote marker ambiguously
• the student cites the title or author of the work incorrectly
• the student switches titles (right page number but wrong title although it is one that is also being used in the essay but not for this quote, etc)
• the footnote includes no pages numbers, or wrong page numbers, or too many page numbers
• the student didn't understand what s/he was reading and so imports the idea incorrectly
• the student quotes or paraphrases selectively in a way that doesn't fairly represent the source
• the student doesn't attend to whose idea, actually, it is (i.e., the many places in a source where the ideas aren't those of the author but of someone else)

Footnotes should have entirely accurate title and author data. I became frustrated when it took me about 10 minutes to track down the below source. It never occurred to me that the student would have mistyped "policies" with "politics" and so all my searches were getting nowhere (search by author generated too many results, title had too many common words to search by keyword, exact title was, obviously, wrong). This is the graded version, with comments and highlighting by me:

Footnotes should point exactly to the correct location in a source.

• If what you are referring to begins, say, at the bottom of page 135 and continues on to page 136, then write 135-136.
• If it appears on 135 but then the discussion changes, but then returns to that topic on 137, then the footnote should read 135, 137.
• Footnotes should point to large pieces of text only in very exceptional situations. It isn’t useful to the reader. It locates nothing.

Who's saying that?? — What to do when citing sources that are themselves citing sources:

Some sources are collections of essays. Make sure you are citing the author of the essay in question, not the editor of the whole volume.

Scholar's often cite others in their work. Make sure that the idea you cite is by the author of the source, not by someone the author of the source is quoting or otherwise talking about.

When your Source A is citing another source for an idea, data, cool quote or whatever, and let's say that source is titled "Source Z', you footnote your Source A, the thing you have right in front of you, not Source Z, the citation info supplied by Source A.

Example. Imagine that I am reading a notice from my bank that came in the mail. That's my Source A. Let's title it, "Obnoxious Letter of May 26." I'm writing (sometime in the future) an essay about bank malpractice and I want to cite this letter. I write:

"Banks don't care about their customers. For example they have recently won successful passage of the "Give the Bankers a Break Act of 2021" where it states: "Banks can charge you any fee they want, because we are afraid of regulating them.(1)"

Do I footnote this as "Obnoxious Letter of May 26? (Source A) or "Give the Bankers a Break Act of 2021" (Source Z)?

Most definitely Source A! First, because the bank might be lying. Have I looked it up on the original act myself? No. So if it is wrongly quoted and I cite Source A, the problem belongs to Source A's author. If I cite Source Z, then I am taking responsibility for the accuracy. Second, you are misrepresenting the depth of your research if you list Source Z. As a reader I would reasonably conclude that you know something about Source Z beyond just that it was cited in Source A and that might lead to wrong conclusions about your scholarship.

Citing book reviews, a favorite of my students because JSTOR kicks up jillions of them.

If you have read a review of a book, not the book, then you need to admit to that.

Related:

If you have read an abstract of a book or article but not the book or article, you must say so.

By the way, beware of watching the movie of a book to get the story straight. I guess script writers alter plotlines about as often as there are finals at the end of semesters.

2M Fairness

Understand what you are reading then be fair about representing it. You usually need to read several pages of text to quote even one line of text. You need to understand thoroughly both content and context.

Students sometimes seem to treat data and ideas as essentially the same type of animal in a source. They aren’t. Ideas demand some careful reading to grasp them and usually they reach across several pages of text or more. Ideas cannot be “plucked” from a text the way data might.

Imagine the author of the source looking over your shoulder, watching you compose your essay. Will he or she accept readily how he or she is represented by you? If so, you are being both accurate and fair. If that individual is inclined to say things like “You’re quoting me out of context!” or “That’s not what I meant.” or “You are making me look stupid by dumbing down my idea.” or such, then you are probably taking too many liberties with how you are presenting the source ideas.

Example. This student wants to argue that Japanese fast food is the result not of Western influence but rather that the Japanese themselves have always been interested in time-conservation. S/he has set up a line of logic that traditional = slow and modern = fast. S/he quotes from a book to establish the definition "traditional equals time-consuming" although the source does not make such a claim. The section quoted is, instead, describing common ("standard") eating practices in Japan, not traditional eating practices. The student slides the definition towards traditional by putting that word in brackets. The student then obscures that the topic is breakfast by substituting "diet". This is an abuse of the source material:

3. Some plagiarism-type things that happen in my classes

• taking from book covers
• trolling the web (since I don't expect you to know data, if you cite data I need the source of that data)
• poor boundaries between your thoughts and theirs
• over-borrowing of source language
• not using quotation marks
• asking a friend (or paying someone) to rewrite (or write!!) your paper for "better English quality"
• purchased essays (hard to do in my class, by the way, and expect to get ripped off. Read this: "Essay; Dear Plagiarists: you get what you pay for" NYT 8/22/2004 by Suzy Hansen, the upshot of which is that you should expect to pay a couple hundred bucks for an essay that won't score very high in a competitive environment like ours at Cal)
• under-footnoting, giving the impression that more of the paper is your ideas than is true
• suggesting that an idea that comes originally from a source was from the onset only yours
• cut-and-paste from various sources
• misrepresentation of source ideas
• recycling from another class biblio lists, papers or parts of papers or thesis

NYT: Education Life "Exactly How Personal Is That Personal Statement?" — April 8, 2010

"Talk about chutzpah. The admissions director for Penn State’s M.B.A. program, Carrie Marcinkevage, recalls that the school once received a student essay with three of four paragraphs taken directly from an article online. “It was, ironically, in our ‘Principled Leadership’ admissions essay,” she says."

4. An important cultural note. Not quite sure where to put this...

In traditional learning practices in most East Asian countries, the "student" copies out the wisdom of the "master" and in contemporary society this has translated into just copying out information. While I understand—really I do—the humility behind this practice, and the honesty in trying to obtain and present good information, under the rules outlined on this web page, it can never meet the fundamental requirement of my courses, namely, that you have your own ideas and analysis, and, in most cases, it is going to be treated as academic malpractice, dishonesty or perhaps plagiarism, depending on how you delivered the content.

5. What happens when I come across something that I think is plagiarism.

VERY FEW OF YOU—I am beary happy!—need to worry about any of my comments below. Nevertheless, I would appreciate it if you read over it once.

The following is a statement of typical penalties in my classes for plagiarism and related issues of academic dishonesty.

In the mix below are a couple of things that might seem counter-intuitive to you, or different from practices in other classes so I pull them up to the top here, so you notice:

First, I penalize on first offense. I don’t give warnings. I really don't have time to allow you to test my boundaries and then apologize if caught in an attempt to avoid or reduce the penalty. We will have a conversation, but it won’t be about penalties.

Second, unintentional plagiarism (next to impossible) and unintentional academic malpractice are also punished. You need to be aware of my boundaries from the beginning.

Third, when I discover plagiarism all past work done by that student is reviewed, looking for other instances of plagiarism or related academic dishonesty. I reserve the right to change grades already given on assignments when, via such a review, other instances are discovered.

These are my guiding principles when I discover plagiarism or related issues of academic dishonesty:

A fun, or depressing quote:

Singer Jin Joo wrote on her home page that the Korean music industry is “a dirty world where plagiarism is a sure-fire way to become a star.”

A fun, or depressing excuse:

Kim [Do-hun] refuted the allegations [that one of the songs he wrote is similar to an Usher song] in a statement issued earlier this week. “There are so many similar songs because they all belong to the same genre,” the statement said.

Posted by KoreanTopNew.com under this title "Netizen's Gather Signatures Urging C.N. Blue's Composer Leave The Music Industry," at this link, which might now be broken

There are three factors I spend time thinking about when determining a penalty:

• Where does the event fall on a spectrum of intentionality? Done on purpose? (Premeditation.) Resulting from lack of vigilance? (Negligence.) A genuine misunderstanding? (Mistake.)
• How egregious (severe) is the event?
• How extensive (within an assignment and across assignments)?

These most definitely are NOT averaged or balanced against each other. For example, one severe event, even if a misunderstanding, can lead to a severe punishment. Generally speaking, the punishment is determined by the “worst” condition of any of the above three categories.

Also, it is very difficult to determine intention. I work under the assumption that you have been told many times about plagiarism, that you are aware of the University student code, that you have read this web page, and that you understand that I care very much about this issue. Under those conditions, it seems to me that to still be negligent indicates a severe lack of interest in something that is very important. Thus I treat intentional and negligent acts almost identically in terms of punishment and don’t spend a lot of time trying to decide which it really is. And so, of course it is to your benefit to understand this web page well.

Also, a misunderstanding would be rare: it would have to be scenario not suggested by these pages by a reasonable person making a good effort to understand and follow them. Honest mistakes are made, but honest mistakes that lead to car accidents, for example, are also made but the driver is still liable. I’m quite serious about this topic — not like a car accident, but I am serious — so mistakes are not simply forgiven.

Also, I consider plagiarism very important so I lean towards more severe, not less severe, punishment.

Also, I am very busy and prefer to spend my time with students trying to learn. This has various results: once plagiarism is found I don’t usually review the rest of the document. I assume that if you have plagiarized once you are doing it repeatedly. When the event of plagiarism is clear, I stop grading the student on the work and simply fail them without further review and often without contacting the student before hand. Sometimes s/he receives a chance to continue with further assignments in the class but the student is NEVER given the chance to redo work. I definitely do not have time to allow you to test my boundaries and see what is acceptable. I am stating my boundaries in this document.

Note: I will not accuse a student of plagiarism or academic dishonesty without already having proof of it. If I ask you a question, it is to give you an opportunity to reply honestly and with full disclosure before I proceed. Definitely the best course of action!

This is the range of penalties I use when issues of plagiarism or related issues of academic dishonesty arise:

This, then, is the spectrum of penalties, depending on the three evaluation principles mentioned above:

Minor or accidental, however minor: “C” for the assignment even for the best of students who have clearly just erred. This is because I don’t like treating students differently (deciding "nice" student probably erred, "not very pleasant" student did it on purpose—ugly way to think!). I like the playing field to be level and the same for everyone. I bend this principle in some very special cases, but rarely. (This very light penalty crops up now and then, but usually it is one of the below.)

Fail the student on the relevant portions of the assignment. (I almost never start here.)

Fail the student on the full assignment. (This is a typical response by me.)

Go back and fail the student on previous assignments that have already received a grade but, upon review, also seem to have dishonest components. (I do this about half the time, when something about the nature of the event gives me a sense that it has been going on for awhile but I now just noticed.) Fail the student for the essay writing process (which leads also to an “F” in the class). (I detail below what instances lead to this very severe penalty.)

Fail the student for the class. (Same result as above, but stated differently in the course record.) (These are the same circumstances as the above except that I feel the student’s dishonesty is not limited to the essay writing process, based on other notes I have taken on the student during the course of the semester.)

Report the student to the University with the cooperation of the student & his or her signature on the appropriate form. (Less severe a result for the student than the below.) (Undertaken for flagrant violations.)

Report the student to the University without the cooperation of the student, opening an investigation. (A very severe result for the student when the investigation determines that s/he has indeed been academically dishonest.) (The only difference between this level and the one above is that in this case the student is recalcitrant, contrite, or insisting on innocence in the face of clear data otherwise.)

**If I feel the student is truly not interested in reforming past conduct, I reserve the right to refuse acceptance of further assignments, and score an "F" for those assignments. I do not want to have to read every submission from a student who has plagiarized worrying about finding further plagiarism. It is way too time consuming.

Why I care about all this

This is really easy for me to say: I place a high value on honesty and fairness. Students who cheat are not honest and they are trying to place themselves ahead of others who have done honest work, which is not fair. I try to build a community (at the micro-level of the classroom as well as doing my part to improve the academic community at large) that is pleasant and functional in terms of educational opportunity, mutual trust, and credible, high-quality research. There is a converse effect: If I do not make the effort to discover and punish plagiarism and related issues, I am indirectly stating that the above values of honesty are not important enough to bother with. In other words, by caring, which is more or less automatic with me, I'm also forced to act because I don't like to live in a contradictory way. I don't really want to act, but the two are irreversibly linked. I'm jut not practical this way; it is in my nature to do what needs to be done rather than determine that it isn't practical to do so.

The above reasons would already be enough for me to care deeply about cheating. However there are two other reasons very important to me, really:

The first is that an effective (or maybe I should just say pleasant & satisfying?) student-teacher relationship is born of trust. All acts of academic dishonesty absolutely crush that trust. It is not that I regret the loss of the relationship with that particular student, although sometimes I do and sometimes we can even recover from it, but what really bothers me is that each event of cheating has an impact on students downstream; that is, it can cloud my ability to trust future students and definitely puts in place safeguards against similar events that future students must accept the burden of (see list below). Anyone who behaves in this way, at that particular moment anyway, has denied the obvious reality that we as humans form individual bonds and communities and share the same space even when we would like to think otherwise. It is impossible, in my mind, to control the distance that travels across place and time by your behavior. Students, when they cheat, conveniently forget this for that moment, thinking it is only more or less just between s/he and me. It is never that way; it is between you, me and the next several hundred students who will get measured with a memory of your behavior and have to shoulder the burden of the safeguards that you made necessary.

Second, I really want you to learn interesting things in my class; cheating, of course, short circuits that process — that’s obvious — but what might not be obvious is that it obscures my understanding of your understanding. I can’t tell any more what work is yours and what is just imported, and so on. Students can, and do, choose not to learn. But I am also free to try my best to teach you. Plagiarism and such really are a huge road block.

Third, cheating in all forms wastes my time. I am really very busy and a really resent having to take time to pursue such depressing matters as determining if a student has cheated and building a case against him or her and so on. You might think that I could just not worry so much about it but it is because I care about the honest students that I police for dishonesty: I want their environment to be safe and supportive and fair, and I will act against those who try to make it otherwise. But I still resent the time and students are cheated out of some time that could have been spent in better ways on them if the cheating had never happened.

Above all, the worst result is that I sometimes doubt students who do not deserve to be doubted. I try my best not to do this but it happens. I really regret that I have to think at all about this type of thing, or write these types of pages. The teacher student relationship can take two forms: we work cooperatively together discovering interesting ideas and each other for that matter, or I use the authority granted to me by the University to apply leverage to “persuade” you to do various things while you, using the tools available to you, attempt to un-leverage that pressure. The first is a beautiful relationship, one that I cherish; the other is truly depressing to me but a regular part of my job. Most educators have felt the burn of students who we were open and vulnerable to, trusting them, only to find out that they have cheated or otherwise taken advantage of the relationship. Many choose, at some point to distrust everyone, or most everyone, and all of us, I think, get more skittish over the years as the unpleasant events pile up. A student who cheats in a class of mine is remembered more or less permanently.

Academic dishonesty by students has lead to all sorts policies and practices created by me that lead to a more controlled and restricted classroom environment. Certain students have put all students in the same boat. Among changes I've implemented, though reluctantly and not without thought but because abuse happened too many times:

> the log in process is a result of student’s submitted corrupt files on purpose to try to get deadline extensions

> the late penalties are the result of students abusing frequently and severely less specific statements of deadlines, or deadlines without penalties … lateness was such a problem that there were times when class was almost dysfunctional — I was spending enormous time tracking down assignments, grading them at odd times and so forth

> the quiz process —both the speed of the timed slides and the “even” “odd” structure are the result of students taking answers from each other during the quiz. This quiz process works against non-native speakers, which I regret. I try to work with them individually to balance this out, and I have to spend much more time both making and grading the quizzes. The even/odd system is quite difficult to make. This is time I could spend better for the class

> no laptops is a result of students not keeping their word about using the laptop only for class

> seating charts was instituted after students cheated during a midterm and the only way I caught them was through a seating chart I secretly made during the exam since I sensed something wasn’t right. Seating charts are not a permanent part of my exams. Some students are uncomfortable where they are placed, all students have less time to write essay answers.

> essay bibliography abstracts began because students falsely listed sources they actually never had possession of

> essay source URL addresses is required so I can check footnotes

and so on.

No plagiarism, please!

source

And just to end on a note of how complicated this all can be, here's a quote from a student's email — one of my students kind enough to proof-read and comment on this web page: "Another thing was, (since I happen to kind like True Blood... lol... *shame*) was that the placement of True Blood's promotion poster makes it seem as if it was plagiarizing Jennifer's Body's promotion poster but when I checked, True Blood first came out in Fall of 2008 and Jennifer's Body was released in spring of 2009. I'm not sure though, since Jennifer's Body's promotion poster could have been released way earlier, but it's doubtful, since True Blood has had that poster from the first season & before (when it was promoting). Wow, sorry that was actually much longer than was needed :P"