Plagiarism

Preventing Plagiarism What is plagiarism?



"The unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one's own original work." ( The Random House Dictionary )

Plagiarism is cheating: it is the “wrongful act of taking the product of another person’s mind and presenting it as one’s own” (Alexander Lindey, Plagiarism and Originality qtd. in Gibaldi 30). According to Joseph Gibaldi of the Modern Language Association (MLA), “To use another person’s ideas or expressions in your writing without acknowledging the source is to plagiarize. Plagiarism, then, constitutes intellectual theft” (30). Certainly plagiarism is morally and ethically wrong: this form of cheating involves stealing, lying, and insulting others. First, taking ideas and words from another to use as your own without permission or acknowledgement [sic] is stealing. Second, offering another person’s ideas and words as your own in any assignment—a paper, test, examination, poster, or oral report--is lying. Third, disrespect for the intellectual integrity of the source, your fellow students, and your teachers is insulting (Babbie). Full source.

What counts as plagiarism?
 * Buying or downloading a paper from a research service or term-paper mill and offering it as your own
 * Turning in another student’s work, with or without that student’s knowledge, as your own
 * Copying any portion of another’s work without proper acknowledgement [sic], including primary texts (literature)
 * Copying material from a source, supplying proper documentation, but leaving out quotation marks or failing to cite properly
 * Paraphrasing ideas and language from a source without proper documentation Full source.

Types of Plagiarism Explained
 * Type I: || **Copy & Paste** ||
 * Type II: || **Word Switch** ||
 * Type III: || **Style** ||
 * Type IV: || **Metaphor** ||
 * Type V || **Idea** ||

When do I have to cite? Determining what is common knowledge.

How can you tell if I plagiarized? An example of what plagiarism looks like and how obvious it is:

What happens if I plagiarize?
 * There are many consequences for plagiarism. Here are a few from other schools. Do you know Noble's policies? What do you think the consequence should be? **


 * "Any student who is caught cheating and/or plagiarizing will automatically receive a zero on the assignment. Students will be required to re-do the assignment to complete the original learning objective; credit, if any, for the assignment will be determined by the teacher and the Academy Director. Students who do not complete the assignment __will__ receive a failing mark for the marking period. **


 * All cheating and/or plagiarism incidents must result in parental contact by the classroom teacher. Subsequent offenses will result in a failure for the marking period; grades not to exceed: MS=59%, HS=64% and further disciplinary action. **


 * Plagiarism is a violation against academic ethics. Examples of plagiarism are: stealing, borrowing, buying or copying someone else’s work, including but not limited to: homework, lab reports, take-home tests, research papers, copyrighted materials, published books and/or internet websites." **

IN COLLEGE:

In colleges with honor codes, plagiarizing once can result in expulsion and the incident being marked permanently on your academic records. In some colleges, you are lucky to get a zero for the assignment, or a double zero, and to be required to take a course (for no credit) on academic integrity in addition to your regular course load. You may have to repeat the course, and you will not be able to remove the grades from your transcripts, even if you transfer.

"Plagiarism can have undesirable ramifications for the transgressor e.g. 'failing grades, suspension, expulsion, etc.; degrees may be revoked, jobs may be lost and careers may be ruined because of plagiarism' [|[1] ]. It may result in expulsion from university [|[2] ] [|[3] ]. Despite the risks, it is nowadays becoming more common [|[4] ] catalysed by the magnitude of widely available information on the WWW [|[5] ]." -David McCaldin

"I think these consequences are ridiculous. You are making a really big deal out of something that no one cares about in the real world..."

Click here to find out how plagiarism can literally ruin your life in the real world.

Click here to watch a video on the real life consequences of plagiarism When you have finished the video, take the quiz to the right of the video window. After you are finished, click on "Review Quiz" and go through each review screen. When you are at the screen that says "Good Work," call me over so I can record your credit for taking the quiz.

What if I didn't know I was plagiarizing or didn't do it on purpose? Like every other law, ** ignorance can not be used as an excuse ** for committing an act of plagiarism. This may seem unfair at first, but imagine how you (or a judge) would react if someone tried to get out of a speeding ticket, paying their taxes or a bank robbery by claiming that they didn't know it was illegal! Some common excuses for plagiarism are:

a. “I didn’t know it was plagiarism” b. “I don’t know how to cite the passages correctly” c. “I thought that by citing it in my bibliography it wasn’t plagiarism” d. “I thought by citing it in text I didn’t plagiarize” e. “I don’t remember where I found the information so I couldn’t cite it” f. “I paraphrased; I didn’t use the same words” g. “I only lifted a few words” h. “I didn’t plagiarize because it wasn’t intentional” i. “I must have inadvertently memorized the passage” j. “I simply forget to properly credit the source” k. “I was distracted by [family problems, illness, stress]” l. “It’s a novice mistake”

Why don't these excuses hold any weight at all? After these lessons you should be thoroughly informed and educatedabout plagiarism. We also review expectations for citing with every new research and response paper. We are available if you have any questions or difficulties with citing. The librarians are also trained to help you. Librarians at your public library are also available to assist you with proper citation. Educating students about plagiarism is a standard practice and avoiding plagiarism and upholding your academic integrity is a standard expectation at all educational institutions. It is cheating. If you were caught cheating on a test, you wouldn't argue that you didn't know that you were cheating by using someone else's answers, would you?

A Warning About Online Plagiarism Checkers and Sites that Sell Essays:


 * Most sites that claim you can buy an essay will take your money and run. They get your money. You get nothing. Not even an excuse you can use.
 * Websites that sell essays are based in foreign, non-English speaking countries, in order to avoid copyright laws: Look at how impressive their writing is! And another example.
 * Plagiarism checkers that claim you can cut and paste your essay into their online checkers **for free** are actually stealing your essay, so they can sell it to someone else for several hundred dollars.
 * If they do take your money or steal your essay, remember, they are in a foreign country, so even if you did hold a copyright (unlikely) on your work, they are outside of the jurisdiction of American copyright and intellectual property law, so you have no recourse against them.
 * Laziness when it comes to educating yourself about citing sources properly and avoiding plagiarism can cost you quite a bit in the end. Imagine you spend hours, or days, working on a research paper. Instead of spending the time to put quotation marks around quotes or in-text citations in immediately, you decide to just get it over with first, and then try to go back and stick in the quotation marks and citations later (anyone who has ever attempted this will tell you with no humor whatsoever how it took them ten times longer to do it this way than to write the paper using the proper steps).
 * Maybe you get a little nervous that you missed something, so you decide to cut and paste your essay into an online **plagiarism checker** instead of spending the time to check over everything yourself. Your paper is stolen, posted online, sold and...worse yet, it shows up when your teacher does a professional plagiarism check as **a paper available for purchase online!** You now have no proof that you were the original author, that you did not purchase the paper, and you are facing the consequences of plagiarism.
 * Not fair? Hmmm...but plagiarism isn't really that big of a deal right? No one really cares about it in the real world, right? When you think of //what it could do to you if someone stole your work//, all this fuss about plagiarism begins to make sense, doesn't it?

How to be 100% CERTAIN that you are not plagiarizing:
 * Make sure you understand what plagiarism is and all of its forms. Completing this training and successfully earning your certificate on your final plagiarism test will help ensure that you understand and avoid plagiarizing.
 * Stay up to date: Whenever you are unsure, it is your responsibility to ask someone reliable (a teacher, professor or librarian) for clarification or confirmation. Ultimately, ignorance is no excuse. You are responsible for staying educated about plagiarism.
 * Use Noodletools to create notecards. Whenever you find information that you will use in your paper, IMMEDIATELY paste the information into a new notecard and complete a new entry for the source in your Bibliography (You will be trained on how to use Noodletools in depth shortly, when you complete your Author Research Project). If you follow this one simple rule, you cannot plagiarize. Noodletools does everything else for you! Yes it is that easy. (Much easier than the length some people go to when they plagiarize!)
 * If you think something is common knowledge, check with a librarian or a teacher before making that assumption in your paper. Why risk it?
 * Don't go there: Reading unreliable source information (such as personal websites and wikipedia) will fill your head with all sorts of information (potentially misinformation) on a subject that you may later mistake as your common knowledge on a subject. If you avoid these unreliable sources altogether, you won't risk plagiarizing unintentionally.
 * But I didn't know anything about the subject at all before I wrote the paper. I have to cite everything?!?

This crosses over into another issue. Students learning to write research papers often think that a research paper is a conglomerate presentation of facts on a subject. ** Yes, you have to cite everything ** you did not know before writing the paper. ** However, you should not be turning in a list of facts as a research paper. ** You should be collecting these facts through research in order to assess what you have learned overall, and to ** develop a thesis (your own theory) ** on the topic. For example, when you are writing your author research paper, you should be using ** primary sources ** (excerpts from the author's original writing) and ** secondary sources ** (articles written about your author by experts). Once you have these sources, you will analyze what you have found and decide: How your author has made a valuable contribution to the American literary canon in several ways: stylistically, content wise, thematically, politically, and so forth. ** Your analysis of the information presented in your sources should make up the majority of your paper. The primary sources provide examples for each of your topics, and the secondary sources provide credibility for your claims. **

Final Plagiarism Assessment:
 * 1) Complete the online test below.
 * 2) Print out your certificate to HP 960c (you must connect to the printer with the USB cord). Print your name on it legibly and sign underneath.
 * 3) Read the plagiarism statement provided in class (copies below), print your name on it legibly and sign it.
 * 4) Turn in the signed certificate and the signed agreement in order to receive credit for your "Plagiarism Assessment".

Plagiarism Test: Take this online test from Indiana University to make sure you understand and can identify plagiarism. Once you have completed the quiz satisfactorily, ** you will receive a certificate, which you must show me ** in order to receive credit for all of our plagiarism activities in class and for this assessment.

Plagiarism Agreement:

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #ff0000; font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif;">The Works Cited for this Page (Created using Noodletools!):