#plagiarism, #profjorgeentrep, #originality, #attribution, #credits, #wikepedia
From Writing Center of University of North Carolina hand out
I learned of a very difficult predicament students in one in a distant location. Their integrity as individuals: students, businessman are under fire on account of an alleged serious academic malfeasance. It is a very serious allegation/offense, and may mean end of their academic career as students They were (at least 4 of them) were alleged to have committed plagiarism) and the issue has reached the higher ups of the school. The professsor has informed the dean of the alleged mischief.
Just what is plagiarism?
According the UNC hand out, "it is “the deliberate or reckless representation of another’s words, thoughts, or ideas as one’s own without attribution in connection with submission of academic work, whether graded or otherwise.” Thus attribution is an important action on the part of the student, or a part of the paper that removes plagiarism from a quoted text, sentence or paragraph. I saw in the students' paper that proper attribution: footnotes, bibliography were made.
Plagiarism, according to Wikipedia does not exist in legal sense. It is not considered a copyright infrigement.
Plagiarism is as serious offense in academic institutions and in the practice of journalism and may merit expulsion from academe.
But various universities, as cited in Wikipeda (on plagiarism): Princeton, Stanford, Yale, Oxford are unanimous in saying that plagiarism exist when there is no proper attribution or giving credit to the source or authors
How is plagiarism defined in various universities (from From Wikipedia on Plagiarism)
"Plagiarism is defined in multiple ways in higher education institutions and universities. For example:
- Stanford sees plagiarism as the "use, without giving reasonable and appropriate credit to or acknowledging the author or source, of another person's original work, whether such work is made up of code, formulas, ideas, language, research, strategies, writing or other form."[16]
- Yale views plagiarism as the "...use of another's work, words, or ideas without attribution," which includes "...using a source's language without quoting, using information from a source without attribution, and paraphrasing a source in a form that stays too close to the original."[17]
- Princeton perceives plagiarism as the "deliberate" use of "someone else's language, ideas, or other original (not common-knowledge) material without acknowledging its source."[18]
- Oxford characterizes plagiarism as the use of "a writer's ideas or phraseology without giving due credit." [19]
- Brown defines plagiarism as "...appropriating another person's ideas or words (spoken or written) without attributing those word or ideas to their true source." [20]"
It was further alleged that tables graphs from other sources cant be published in your paper/article, even if proper citations and attributions were made. What? Newspapers, professors, regularly do this in their research paper, especially if the research uses secondary sources.
What is common with the definitions: lack of attribution, or credits to the author.
Perhaps, the confusion arises from use of originality online checkers in grading or checking students work. Please refer to Turnitin Orignality Checker which shows % of originality rather than % of plagiarism
When you use an originality checker, the student would have % of originality score coming out. The checker does not read the attribution. It does not mean though that the student plagiarized if he has proper attribution, citations, footnotes. bibliography. Look at the filter setting too. It may have excluded the bibliography and attribution.
And some, do not work properly as this site: Plagiarism detect. Errors appear. Comments say it does not work
From the looks of it, the group of students are creative, are smart, and cant be guilty as alleged. (Of course I have not seen the other paper, and the standards of the university on the said offense; I could be wrong, as some lawyers are in their advocacy of allegedly innocent criminals)
What do you think?
How do you define plagiarism?
Free plagtracker
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