Plagiarism

In class last week we worked on an exercise to identify plagiarism.  I expected this to be easier than it was.  Previously, it seemed to me that the issue would be pretty clear-cut; either the writing was plagiarism or it was not.  However, we worked with a scale of plagiarism that ranged from outright fraud, to simply inputting an entire quote, to legitimately good writing.

At times it was obvious that in an example the student had simply stolen the words of an author and tried to pass them off as their own.  There were also times that the student did a good job of citing a source, integrating it into their own writing, and including their own ideas.  The difficult examples were the ones in between these two extremes.  Sometimes it was difficult to decide if the writing was acceptable or not because it seemed like the student might be paraphrasing but on the other hand maybe they were not.  Sometimes students appeared to have tried to cite a source and not done a very good job of it, but at least their intentions seemed to be to give credit where it was due.  Other instances made me question what needed to be cited and what could be considered general knowledge.  In these cases hopefully a writing consultant could talk with the writer and determine if information needed to be cited and, if in fact it did, do so properly.

Further complicating the issue of citation was the fact that even within our class we could not agree on where in the scale certain examples belonged.  There was an element of interpretation involved that made me sympathize with students; how are they supposed to handle the issue when professors have the potential to be so subjective?