Plagiarism Scenarios for Class Discussion

  1. Your teacher assigns a HUGE research paper on analyzing some form of media. You pick a popular documentary as your topic; to get ideas, you spend some time reading reviews on the Internet. You copy and paste interesting sections of the reviews into a Word document as you go, along with some of your own ideas and notes to yourself. Then you get busy with other work, and come back to the document a few days later. When you open it up again, you can’t exactly remember which parts you wrote and which parts are copied from the Internet, but you have about seven pages, so that’s good. You change around some sentences so that it sounds better and is well organized. You turn the paper in.Later, you get an email from your teacher, saying she’s reporting you for plagiarism and you’re failing the class! When you explain that any plagiarizing you did was a total accident, the instructor says it doesn’t matter—the paper is still plagiarized.

Who is right—the instructor or the student? What could the student have done differently? Isn’t the instructor being a little bit harsh?

  1. While writing a paper about American history, you want to briefly reference Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, but you want to make sure you cite it correctly. You spend, like, an hour, looking for somewhere it was published, before you finally find it in an anthology. You cite it as if it was an article from a book, because that’s where you found it—it’s not as if you heard the speech yourself. You wonder if that was the right way to cite it, and if your teacher seriously expects you to spend such a long time looking up a citation for something that everyone knows about already.

Did this student do the right thing? Why or why not?

  1. In China, where you went to school most of your life, there’s no such thing as plagiarism because it’s assumed that everyone will reference the same handful of recognized intellectuals, not come up with their own individual interpretation of everything. Now that you’re going to school at a Seattle College, you see in your syllabus that you can actually fail a whole class for copying just a few lines from someone else’s work.

How can that be? How can two cultures that place tremendous value on education have two such radically different ideas about citing sources?

  1. You find an article during research that’s perfect as a source for your paper… almost too perfect. It says everything you ever wanted to say about gender roles in TV shows, only much better and in more detail. You start writing the paper, then realize you’re quoting from the source (with proper citations) so much that you might as well be copying it.

Is this a problem? What should the student do?

  1. While writing a paper, you paraphrase an argument you read in an outside source. You paraphrase it so that it fits into your own paragraph, then cite it at the end, like this:

Even though men and women try their best, their different brain structures means that communication can easily break down. A full awareness of the way the genders speak can help improve relationships (Tannen 97).

You thought you did everything right, but when you get the paper back, the teacher says that I haven’t adequately explained the source.

Why isn’t this documentation enough? How could it be better?

Deciding What to Cite

1. Cite all quotations.

This is a society that has “been raised on a diet of media manipulation” (Rushkoff 5).

2. Slightly rewording someone else’s idea but keeping the general wording is still considered plagiarism. In this case, you can choose to either keep the exact wording and quote it with a citation, or paraphrase the idea also with a citation.

Quotation (Acceptable):

Rushkoff has faith in the people who grew up with media: “Likewise, people weaned on media understand its set of symbols better than its creators and see through the carefully camouflaged attempts at mind control” (5).

Plagiarism by slightly rewording (Unacceptable):

Thus, people raised by media understand its group of symbols better than the people who created it and can see through the cautiously disguised attempts at mind control (Rushkoff 5).

Paraphrase without citation (Unacceptable):

People today are more familiar with iconography of media than those who come up with media images, and this knowledge allows people to resist being manipulated by media.

Paraphrase with citation (Acceptable):

According to Rushkoff, people today are more familiar with iconography of media than those who come up with media images, and this knowledge allows people to resist being manipulated by media (5).

3. You do not have to cite your own ideas/conclusions or general knowledge.

Own idea/conclusion (Do not cite):

Even though people may be familiar with media, familiarity itself may lull people into unquestioning acceptance of the messages put out by the media.

General knowledge (Do not cite):

Seinfeld was a popular sitcom of the nineties.

4. Cite statistics.

Siebecker claims, “One study indicates that 95-98% of dieters return to the set point of their bodies’ weight after dieting to lose weight” (103).