Why Students May Be Confused about Plagiarism and How to Help Them Avoid It

by Terry Myers Zawacki, WAC Director, and Shelley Reid, Composition Director

For students, source acknowledgement is often a murky, confusing process that varies from the popular world to the academic one, from high school to college, from one discipline to another, and from one classroom to another. Students are constantly learning new rules, relearning rules they misunderstood the first time, and adapting to increasingly complex writing tasks. It makes sense that they would sometimes make errors.

Widespread serious citation errors can create a document that is in effect plagiarized, even if the student didn’t intend that outcome. Faculty must judge whether to report such students for cheating. Sporadic citation errors may indicate that a student is still learning the process. Faculty may choose to designate a grade penalty for such errors—as they might do for errors of fact or insufficient argumentation—without labeling such problems as cheating.

Here are some questions you might ask to decide whether students are deliberately plagiarizing or are still trying to figure out what needs to be cited, when, and how.

Are your students making serious citation errors, which may stem from misunderstanding?

• Might uncited material have seemed like “common knowledge” to the student?
  (What is considered common knowledge may vary from field to field and even teacher to teacher.)
  
• Might a student have misunderstood whether a particular source needed citing?
  (Some faculty tell students that textbooks, handouts, or commonly used sources do not
  need citing.)
• Might citation problems reveal a student unsure of when to quote and when and how to
  paraphrase?
  (Students in some disciplines are told that they don’t need to quote phrasing that’s five or fewer words or add citations more than once per paragraph.)
• Is some source material incompletely, inaccurately, or inconsistently documented, as might happen with poor note-taking, unfamiliarity with a new format, or carelessness?
  

Are your students deliberately plagiarizing?

• Did the student copy someone else’s work and present it as his/her own?
  
• Did the student ask someone else to write the paper for him/her?
  
• Did the student purchase a paper or download one from the Internet?
  
• Did the student “patch write,” i.e., copy and paste passages from other sources without attribution?
  
• Did the student make up sources?
  

Plagiarism is cheating. It should be reported to the Honor Committee.

Click here for advice on helping students avoid plagiarism.