Consequences of Plagiarism
"The Importance of Proper Citation"
By Sarah Keller, English Team Director
The Scenario
The plagiarism policy at Jack, John, and Lucy's school was strict. Because of repeated student offenses and the school's adamant desire to remain a competitive and credible institution, the school decided that its penalty for plagiarism would be academic probation for any culpable student, a probation which would be noted on the student's permanent transcript. As juniors, Jack, John and Lucy each had to write a huge final paper for their advanced English class. The paper could be about any aspect of American Literature that the student found particularly engaging, and had to be twenty pages long. The paper had been assigned the first day of school, so as to allow students the time to properly choose a project idea and research.
Lucy read all the assigned texts for the class, and took copious notes during class time. She wanted to be sure that she chose a perfect topic, one that wouldn't bore her or be too difficult to research. By Christmas break, she decided that she wanted to do a comparison paper that showed the similarities and differences in the writing styles of Emerson and Thoreau. She spent many days during the December break at the library, researching her topic. She talked to her teacher about what she had discovered thus far, and how excited she was to write her paper. She started drafting the paper in February, and worked on perfecting it until the day it was due. When she found ideas in some of her books that well-articulated the points she was trying to make, she eagerly incorporated them into her paper, thinking that they bolstered her argument. She did not think that she needed to cite these ideas, since they were basically the same as her own, and she did not want to deal with confusing citation manuals unless it was absolutely necessary.
John waited until April to start the project. He chose to write about America's gothic writers, focusing on Poe's short stories. A little overwhelmed by the enormity of the assignment and pressed for time, John went online to copy and paste whole paragraphs of websites about Poe into his paper. He did not think that his teacher would be able to tell that the inserted material was not his own, and knew that there were too many websites for his teacher to recognize them all immediately.
The night before the project was due, Jack signed online and went to BuyAPaper.com, a popular website that catered to students who would rather pay for a twenty page research paper than write one themselves. After entering a credit card number and paying ten dollars, he was able to download a generic research paper about the Scarlet Letter that matched all the assignment's criteria. He wrote his name on the upper left side and handed it in the next day.
The teacher reported all three students' papers as being questionable in some way, and after further investigation, all were found to have included material that was not properly documented. As a result, all three students suffered the same penalty—academic probation, a stain on their transcripts.
The Point
Most readers can probably see how Jack's offense, downloading the entire paper from the Internet and calling it his own, was far worse than Lucy's, who did not mean to plagiarize. This will often happen in a school environment—people will plagiarize, intentionally or not. SourceAid is working to help those students who do not mean to plagiarize, students like Lucy who may not know when citation is necessary, or how correct citations should look. SourceAid strives to give students the tools they need to avoid plagiarism by making citation easy to understand and easy to do. Most schools have reacted to students' ability to copy and paste research-quality information on the Internet into their papers with strident plagiarism policies that do not always make concessions for students who plagiarize unintentionally. For students not wanting to plagiarize and not wanting a hassle when trying to cite properly--SourceAid can help.
