Plagiarism:more to say….

This means cheating by effectively ‘stealing’ someone else’s work and claiming it as your own in submitting it to be marked.

This applies equally to copying the work of colleagues (with or without their knowledge) and to copying and pasting or paraphrasing (yes, even small amounts) from the web / books / other sources without acknowledging them in the text and in a bibliography.

The consequences of Plagiarism

See my video on the basics and the consequences:

BASICS:   https://youtu.be/vl4p8D5TQmI

CONSEQUENCES and CASES:    https://youtu.be/J6Ee1Pqhg3M

The web makes this so very quick and easy to do that any number of weaker students resort to it, (and indeed some better students looking to save time have taken the risk in the past) but you must be aware that:

·         at best you risk being given a zero for the work, failing the unit and having every other piece of your work re-examined for plagiarism with the possibility of a more dramatic outcome if further plagiarism is discovered. An automatic unit failure and a resit could well be the best outcome for which you might hope.  Your actions will not endear you to your teachers or indeed your peers who have worked long and hard to earn their marks.

·         at worst you could find yourself in front of a disciplinary hearing, immediately ejected from your module (and possibly your course) and barred from further programmes at UHA and even blacklisted across the University sector in general.

Why do we take Plagiarism so seriously?

For any number of reasons:

·         Intellectual property. Teachers, journalists and professional writers earn their money by thinking, doing research, checking their sources, analysing and evaluating the content thoroughly then agonising over how to express and present their thoughts and findings then submitting them to the peer-review process and finally publishing their articles, books etc. What is written belongs to the writer and he or she deserves recognition.

·         Reading for / earning your degree.  Learning is about assimilating knowledge and received wisdom from all appropriate, valid and reliable sources.  This is an activity which requires your active engagement in seeking out such information (not just one source), bringing it together, establishing what it means and how it relates to the subject in question, forming judgments and opinions and then offering them (in essays, dissertations, theses, reports, presentations etc) to demonstrate your understanding.  An uncritical copy-paste is not only plagiarism; it represents a complete absence of learning or intention to learn.  You should be earning your degree by learning – the operative verb, in English, is reading for a degree (as in: ‘I’m reading English at Mulhouse’). In the absence of such learning (i.e. plagiarism) you should expect nothing more than a complete absence of marks!

·         It is cheating. Cheating on:

o   The system: Education. Plagiarism involves others’ education (the researchers’ / writers’) not the plagiarist’s: the plagiarist says: ‘I’m not interested in being educated – I’m not interested in actually learning’….  An academic institution gives marks and awards to named individuals and certifies to all (employers especially) that the bearer of the certificate is worthy thereof having earned it. A plagiarising cheat devalues the certificate and, by extension, those of others who have earned them properly if employers can no longer trust them.

o   The teacher. A plagiarist lies in putting his name to work that is not his/hers and asks the teacher to accept it. It is a betrayal of the teacher’s trust.

o   Student peers. If other students learn to earn their marks: they expend, time and effort generating information, reviewing it, thinking about it, analysing and evaluating it, organising it, structuring and presenting it: striving to understand it …. whereas a student who plagiarises does none of this and devalues the efforts of all other classmates.  No-one will want an exposed cheat as a colleague or team-mate.

o   The plagiarist him/herself. This is the worst of such cheating. Having chosen an academic programme (presumably because of interest in the subject and the potential support for a future career) the plagiarist refuses to learn but just to seek a shortcut to a good mark and the certificate. But the mark is NOT the end product, neither is the degree certificate: it is the learning that is to be carried away that counts. The plagiarist is simply cheating on himself/herself.

Catching Plagiarists

Catching plagiarists is getting far easier nowadays: universities [UHA now included] have access to software that checks all dissertations, theses, academic reports, published books and web sources. All dissertations, theses and PhDs are required in digital form and will be routinely submitted to this system. This could also be easily applied to any coursework element – we can scan even handwritten coursework with OCS software and submit it to our plagiarism-check facility. Even humble teachers can usually spot language, expression and thinking which simply does not ‘fit’ with the rest of the student’s work and check it in less than one second via a search engine.   We are seeing increasing numbers of attempts at plagiarism in both coursework and, somewhat incredibly, in exam rooms under the noses of invigilators. Sometimes the means of plagiarism are so convoluted with so much subterfuge and use of multiple technologies that, frankly, one would imagine it easier to actually read, work and revise rather than cheat for a qualification.  How can it ever be worth the risk?

You can ‘catch yourself‘ by the way.  You should be using GRAMMARLY and setting it to English to check your work – if you don’t, then go off and search for it and install it NOW.  It is free, take 30 secs to install and it works behind any programme where you are typing in English.  It can show you your errors and offer corrections AND it also shows you why you have made the mistake and the rule to learn to not make it again….  Ah, yes, and it also has a FREE plagiarism check service, so you can double check whether you have accidentally forgotten to attribute your sources somewhere….

Reporting Plagiarism and other forms of Cheating.

 As teachers, we try to reduce the chances of plagiarism or cheating in the questions we choose to pose and in the way we invigilate exams.  Perfection is not possible however.  We perhaps don’t catch every cheat.  Perhaps there is cheating going on that you know about as students because you have the evidence of having seen it – which we don’t.  You then are faced with a choice.  If I get slightly Shakespearian, the question you will be faced with is: ‘To dob them in or not to dob them in’ (i.e. to report it/them to the staff or not).  There seems to be a code of silence operating: ‘We know some cheat – we’ve seen it…. but we’re not going to say anything because we are all students and they are staff: we don’t dob-in student colleagues’.  But why do so?  Appeasing cheats only means two things:

1. they are more likely to cheat knowing they won’t be reported by their colleagues … and probably therefore more likely to get caught as their luck is bound to run out at some point (which won’t help them in the long run).  It will also annoy and even anger you as long as they get away with it.
2. if they leave with a pass certificate – it will effectively devalue the certificates of everyone else who has earned their own the hard way by reading and learning.  Employers simply won’t trust the certificate or those who hold it. That is not going to help graduates seeking work or the reputation of the University for that matter.

So stand up for yourselves, for the value of your own certificates and for fairness and honesty. Whatever may happen to those who cheat is on their own heads – not yours.  They choose the risk – they must take the consequences.  It’s a simple equation. Be sure of your facts, but do tell the staff -byes: put your hand up in an exam situation if necessary.  We may not be able to do anything about what you may or may not have witnessed, but it will put us on notice for the future for a start.

The way to avoid plagiarism (and be credited for having done good research) is simple:

• ·     Choose your sources well: make sure they are authoritative, can be trusted and are preferably up to date (as opposed to just being first on the first search-return page
• ·     Put the phrases / sentences you want to present in italics for effect [we will give you due credit for having done good research and for finding vital information/insight and highlighting it], « put them in quotation marks » and at the end of the citation give the name of the author with the date of his work in brackets, thus:  Jolley (2012).  Then in the bibliography/references list provide the reader with the full details necessary to find the source online or in a library.  A simple way of doing this is as follows:

o   For a book:  Usunier, J-C. Marketing Across Cultures. 2000. Third edition. Financial Times / Prentice Hall

o   For an online source:

About Tonyversity. http://www.tonyversity.com/students/a-propos/ . Accessed 12.08.12.

You can’t go wrong if you use one of the two recognised referencing systems hereunder:

·         French MLA (Modern Language Association).  

o   http://www.library.cornell.edu/resrch/citmanage/mla

·         American Harvard System.

o   http://libguides.bournemouth.ac.uk/bu-referencing-harvard-style

This, Bournemouth University version is a really good, condensed, easy to use, online guide to just about every type of source you might want to cite and acknowledge – so there is no excuse for not citing and attributing or for not citing and attributing correctly.

And as for Excuses…..

Well, there aren’t any … and we’ve heard them all, believe me [I once had a student say to me that he had not plagiarised … he had got a colleague to write his assingment for him: he must have plagiarised!!] .  A colleague in the USA has very helpfully put together a list of all the excuses he has ever heard with the academic reaction to each of them under the heading of:

‘The List of Things I never Want to Hear Again‘.

Do READ IT… otherwise it might come back to haunt you…. it will haunt others we have already found out.

What it feels like on the receiving end.

Have a look at this….. this is what a UCF university lecturer, Professor Richard Quinn, had to do to lay out the consequences of plagiarism before his students (one third of whom had cheated in the mid-term exams).  It is harrowing stuff.  This is a teacher who really cares: just look at his body language and the feelings he speaks about.  No student would want to be on the receiving end of this.