As this brief study suggests, there are many uses of the “Attitudes towards Plagiarism” questionnaire, the most important of which I believe is to promote dialogue between teachers and students about such issues as collaboration, paraphrasing, and ownership of ideas. Because these scenarios may not address specific institutional concerns or technological innovations, I encourage teachers and students to create and talk about their own scenarios. In the online questionnaire, for example, two participants suggested that I should include a scenario that described a recent change in their institution’s honor code, one which classified work or research conducted in one class, yet submitted to another, as academic misconduct. These types of scenarios can contribute to how we perceive plagiarism and its consequences for writing and the teaching of writing.
Notes
1. I thank Elise Barker, Jerrod Bohn, Ron Downey, and Emily Merrifield for their contributions.
2. This study was a replication of an earlier pilot study I conducted at a different institution. Amy Martin has also used a modified version of the “Attitudes towards Plagiarism” questionnaire to test the fitness of The Council of Writing Program Administrators’ statement on plagiarism and to examine how faculty in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences respond to the scenarios differently.
3. Other studies that have deployed the “Attitudes towards Plagiarism” questionnaire demonstrate the variance of the Collaboration Scenario (#8). In the pilot study, 55% of the instructors considered this scenario as plagiarism. In Martin’s study, 81% of humanities instructors considered it plagiarism, whereas 100% of science instructors defined it as plagiarism (69).
Works Cited
Ashworth, Peter, Philip Bannister, and Pauline Thorne. “Guilty in Whose Eyes? University Students’ Perceptions of Cheating and Plagiarism in Academic Work and Assessment.” Studies in Higher Education 22.2 (1997): 187–203. Print.
Howard, Rebecca Moore. “Sexuality, Textuality: The Cultural Work of Plagiarism.” College English 62 (2000): 473–91. Print.
Love, Patrick, and Janice Simmons. “Factors Influencing Cheating and Plagiarism among Graduate Students in a College of Education.” College Student Journal 32 (1998): 539–49. Print.
Martin, Amy. “Plagiarism and Collaboration: Suggestions for ‘Defining and Avoiding Plagiarism: The WPA Statement on Best Practices.’” Writing Program Administration 28.3 (2005): 57–71. Print.
Roig, Miguel. “When College Students’ Attempts at Paraphrasing Become Instances of Potential Plagiarism.” Psychological Reports 84 (1999): 973–82. Print.
Spigelman, Candace. “Habits of Mind: Historical Configurations of Textual Ownership in Peer Writing Groups.” College Composition and Communication 49 (1998): 234–55. Print.
Questions for Discussion
1. Discuss with peers and your instructor(s) the “concepts of originality, common knowledge, and collaboration” that Phillip Marzluf discusses. Working in groups, talk about what you think each of those concepts means to you, and compare it to the definitions in Marzluf’s essay. How do your definitions compare to or contrast with those of your instructor? Why?
2. Marzluf writes, “The scenarios consist of the four variables that appear most often in my discussions about plagiarism with teachers and students: the writer’s level of intentionality, the degree of appropriation, the borrowing of ideas and/or expression, and the status of the source.” Now that you have read his chapter, go back to the definition of plagiarism that you wrote before you read the chapter. How would you rank the variables Marzluf discusses in terms of their importance in determining whether something is plagiarized? How does your ranking change your definition of what constitutes plagiarism?
2 Plagiarism vs. Copyright Law: Is All Copying Theft?
Jessica Reyman
Before You Read: What images or emotions are conjured when you hear the phrases “plagiarism” and “allowable copying”? Consider what it means to “own” an idea.
Scenario 1
A student uses a template when creating a formal report for class. She has seen this method used for composing in her internship, where she writes letters, reports, and other documents for a company. She finds a model of a formal report on the Internet that closely matches the model she found in her textbook, and uses it as a template. She copies the headings and formatting, and even some of the sentence structures from various sections. She pastes her own content into the report. Is this stealing?
Scenario 2
A student is creating a website for his writing class. While he is confident in his ability to write the content for the site, he does not have the time or resources to learn advanced Web design and coding skills before the assignment is due. In order to submit a professional-looking website, he copies some source code from an existing website and pastes it into his own source code. The student has written all of the content for the website on his own, but the architecture, structure, organization, and user interface of the site is mostly derived from the source code he has copied from an existing website. Is this stealing?
Scenario 3
A student submits a research paper that summarizes and reports on information she has found in journals, books, websites, and blogs. In the paper, she cites many sources, but one website is particularly useful. From this source, she cites liberally, even copying and pasting whole paragraphs of text that support her points. She provides attribution in each instance, for both paraphrases and direct quotations from the source. Is this stealing?
Many students fear they may be “stealing” or committing intellectual property “theft” whenever they make use of any existing material in their writing. They have been warned against such uses by several sources. Instructors and university administrators tell them they must follow plagiarism policies or they will be expelled from school. In the news, they see their peers venture into the professional world and face public criticism for plagiarism. Consider the 2003 scandal surrounding Jayson Blair, a recent college graduate who was employed as a staff writer for the New York Times, who allegedly plagiarized an article from another newspaper; and, the 2006 accusations against undergraduate student Kaavya Viswanathan for allegedly plagiarizing passages for her novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life. Warnings against copyright infringement claims are also prevalent, as students are inundated by the messages from media companies and campus officials alike, who counsel them on the dangers of pirating music and movies from the Internet. Some universities have even aided the entertainment industry in pursuing legal action against individual students caught illegally downloading files, resulting in costly settlements. These stories and others have infiltrated conversations on many college campuses, warning students against copying with a seemingly simple message: “Don’t steal.”
However, the message is not that simple. Students often hold misconceptions about what constitutes theft of intellectual property. Such misconceptions have the potential to lead students to unwittingly commit a legal and/or ethical offense by assuming that all copying is acceptable, a great concern for college instructors and administrators. Alternatively, they can lead to students not using the material in question for fear of punishment, another serious problem that can frustrate students’ writing efforts and lessen the value of their work. Students will want to better understand the nuances inherent in defining what constitutes plagiarism and copyright infringement so that they can make more informed choices about when and how to use external sources. As a starting point, this chapter seeks to complicate the message of “don’t steal” in two ways. First, I show that what intellectual theft refers to is actually