For example, the Mother Scenario (#7) suggests that students may privilege the writer’s ownership of ideas. In my discussions with student groups about this scenario, several students—though not all—have claimed that this writer is being responsible, in that she is seeking out editing help from a legitimate source, her mother, the same thing that all expert writers do. Although a statistically significant number of teachers deviate from this judgment, the responses to the online questionnaire hint that some teachers agree with these students’ less text-specific approach to defining plagiarism. One teacher claims that several of the scenarios illustrate students asking for advice on content or on editing, which is “exactly the kind of collaboration that workers will participate in in many job situations.” This teacher acknowledges the difficulty of judging these cases of collaboration, in that they describe exactly what writers do in real professional situations.
Finally, the two scenarios exemplifying examples of citation and paraphrasing, the Faulty Plagiarism (#4) and the Sight Gag (#5) scenarios, also reveal wide divergences of judgments between teachers and students. The fact that 74% of students, as opposed to 48% of teachers, determine the Faulty Plagiarism Scenario (#4) as not a case of plagiarism may suggest that students are willing to overlook the writer’s borrowing of exact phrases and sentence structure as long as he has clearly marked his intention not to deceive the instructor, which he does by citing his encyclopedia source. This writer, therefore, may be signaling he is working in good faith. Of course, the responses to the Sight Gag Scenario (#5), in which the writer adequately paraphrases the source but does not cite it, reverses this logic. In this case, only 30% of students judge this scenario not to be plagiarism, indicating that, for a majority of students, the writer’s failure to identify the source of her definition makes them suspicious about her intentions. As one of the comments on the online questionnaire demonstrates, some teachers respond emphatically to attempts to rationalize writers’ actions in these two scenarios. The teacher writes, “Intentionally lifting a word, phrase or sentence from a source without enclosing these words in quotation marks and citing them is ALWAYS [sic] plagiarism, only slightly less egregious than buying a paper from a term paper site.” Yet, the student responses may be hinting that interpretations of this adverb, “intentionally,” make these cases difficult to define.
Scenarios Showing Most Variance
Despite several scenarios that show strong agreement, the teacher responses demonstrate that there is little unanimity and consistency among how they judge the more complicated, less obvious scenarios. In fact, in three of the scenarios—the Vietnam (#3), Faulty Paraphrasing (#4), and Salinger (#9) scenarios—there is a statistically significant difference between teachers who determine them to be cases of plagiarism as opposed to teachers who do not. Additionally, an analysis of the correlations across all the scenarios suggests a lack of consistency for how teachers score one scenario as compared with another.
These data do not necessarily suggest that teachers are randomly making decisions on what should be considered plagiarism. Instead, these findings may indicate, especially given the variance evident in the Faulty Paraphrasing Scenario (#4), that a great deal of anxiety currently exists about how to label and judge writers who may be just learning how to incorporate outside sources. Consequently, of the 52% of teachers who indicate that the Faulty Paraphrasing Scenario (#4) depicts an act of plagiarism, 83% of these teachers mark it as the least serious type. The differences among teachers may reflect definitional, not pedagogical, confusion. The Collaboration Scenario (#8) also suggests a great deal of teacher variance, as 25% of teachers judge it to be “not plagiarism,” 30% as “plagiarism, not serious,” 34% as “plagiarism, more serious,” and 11% as either a “very serious” or an “extremely serious” case of plagiarism. Though a great deal of this variance is undoubtedly based upon different interpretations of the scenario, it is alarming that a case of peer collaboration provokes such a wide range of responses.3 Quite possibly, it is the teachers’ interpretations of the writer’s intentions to deceive and to completely appropriate his peers’ suggestions that influence this decision.
Conclusion: The Uses of the Questionnaire
The “Attitudes towards Plagiarism” questionnaire can facilitate conversations about the definitions of plagiarism and about how we—both teachers and students—hold different assumptions about such concepts as originality, common knowledge, and collaboration. It is also important for us to become aware that the definitions of plagiarism are messy and that, before we rely wholeheartedly upon textbook definitions, we should reflect upon the complex factors that make up our writing, research, and collaborative strategies.
In my experiences with using the questionnaire in teacher training as well as introductory writing classrooms, I discuss the following types of questions after teachers and students have rated the scenarios:
Which scenario was the easiest one for you to respond to? Which one was the most obvious case of plagiarism? Why?
Which of the scenarios troubles you? Why?
Which case of plagiarism did you find to be the most unintentional?
What do the cases you marked as plagiarism tell you to watch out for?
How did you decide the severity level for each scenario you marked as plagiarism? What should teachers bear in mind when making decisions about punishment?
In high school and in your college classes, what have you been told about plagiarism? How consistent has this advice been?
What fears or concerns do you have about your own research and use of sources?
These types of questions, and the discussions they provoke, allow us to reflect on our responsibilities as researchers and writers. They can reveal the larger purposes behind citation rules and conventional formalities: Instead of seeing these aspects of writing as final obstacles to be hurdled before handing in a paper, teachers and students can consider research, the integration of sources, and collaboration as important elements throughout their drafting.
I have found the questionnaire helpful for teachers to understand the citation “logic” of their students and for students, meanwhile, to grapple with the judgments their teachers make. For example, students, I have discovered, focus a great deal of their attention on the variable of intentionality. While discussing the Salinger Scenario (#9), two student groups defended this writer’s use of the sarcastic voice of The Catcher in the Rye, arguing that this scenario did not represent plagiarism because the writer did not deceive the instructor and sampled a well-known text only to enhance a “sense of character.” It is also interesting to listen to student groups defend the scenarios, such as the Faulty Paraphrasing (#4) and Sight Gag (#5) scenarios, that indicate wide disparity between teachers and students. In my experience, students have not focused on the writers’ inability to paraphrase or on their lack of knowledge of citation conventions but upon the fact that these two writers were only attempting to incorporate definitions—not, that is, more important substantive ideas. According to this logic, “mere” definitions are not that important to cite; after all, who possesses intellectual ownership of a definition? The Vietnam Scenario (#3), similarly, highlights these issues of public knowledge, the status of facts, and their accessibility. Again, students have asked, who owns historical facts, such as names or dates? Alternatively, as one studentgroup implied, does the accessibility of these facts—whether it could be reasonably inferred that the general public had common knowledge of these facts—dictate whether they should be cited?
The questionnaire can also indicate how judgments about plagiarism differ among educational levels, disciplines, and institutions. I often ask students whether the plagiarism advice they receive from their teachers is consistent or if there were any differences in how their high school teachers, as compared with their college professors, talked about plagiarism. Not surprisingly, I have received several different responses. One student, for example, claimed he did not bother to read the university honor code because what constituted plagiarism had already been thoroughly dealt with in his high school. On the other hand, students indicated that plagiarism appeared more complicated at the college and university levels and that their high school teachers did not handle plagiarism cases too