Plagiarism Discussion Activity

Read each of the following scenarios. As a group, decide whether each of the following

scenarios is:

A) Not plagiarism or academic misconduct

B) A clear case of plagiarism

C) Not exactly plagiarism, but dishonest or not handled correctly

1. The introduction to your paper is pretty boring, and you decide to start it with a famous

quotation, to spice things up a little. You find a quotation website on the internet and choose aline that suits your ideas perfectly. The website says that the line is by Friedrich Nietzsche, but itdoesn't say which book. You begin your paper with "As Friedrich Nietzsche once said..." butdon't include anything in your Works Cited.

2. You're having a really hard time with this paper assignment, and you're stuck with only a fewhours to finish. You have a good thesis, but you're having trouble proving it. You decide to lookaround on the internet for articles about the text, just to get ideas. Two articles make points thatrelate to your thesis, and you don't have time to think about how to expand upon them. You putthe authors' ideas into your own words and include the articles on your Works Cited page, butsince you're using their ideas so extensively, you end up making the other authors' ideas soundlike they're your own.

3. You have a really good idea for a paper topic, and you're happy with how it's turning out sofar. Today's class discussion relates to your paper idea, and one of your classmates makes a greatcomment about the essay you’re reading for class. It's something you never would have thought of on your own, and it'sa great example of what you're trying to show in your paper. When you get home, you add yourclassmate's idea to your paper. As you're incorporating his idea, you work hard to put your ownspin on it and put it in the context of your own thesis. Since your classmate has never publishedhis idea, and what you said is actually different from what he said, you don't cite himspecifically.

4. In addition to English 1010, you're taking a Women's Studies course this semester. For yourfirst English 1010 paper, you wrote about gender issues in a popular movie, and you and yourEnglish instructor agreed that the paper turned out very well. You even used some of yourWomen's Studies readings, properly cited, to strengthen your argument. Toward the end of thesemester, your Women's Studies instructor assigns you a paper in which you have to perform afeminist analysis of something from pop culture. Since you've already written such a good paperon exactly that topic, you decide to turn in your English 1011 paper, with a few changes, for yourWomen's Studies class.

5. You’re working on a homework assignment for your 1010 class. The instructor said that the assignment was “informal”: she told you not to worry about style or structure, but to focus on getting your thoughts down on paper. While writing the assignment, you realize you aren’t clear on the meaning of one of the terms that the author of your course text uses over and over. You search Wikipedia, and the article there clears everything up. Your instructor told you to avoid sites like Wikipedia, and it’s just an informal homework assignment, so you put the information from the article in your own words and don’t specifically name your source.

6. A search of the library's databases leads you to a great article on the book you're writing yourpaper about. The article's author is making a different kind of argument than you are, but one ofher points applies to your paper, too. You quote a three-sentence passage from the article andsummarize some of the author's other ideas. You're nervous about using this author's ideas somuch, so you're very careful to cite her properly and to make it clear which ideas are yours andwhich came from the article.

7. You're doing well in your English 1010 class: at midterm, your instructor says you have an Aaverage so far. Unfortunately, you're also spending more money than you expected to. Anotherstudent on your floor is struggling in her 1010 class, and she offers you $200 to write her paperfor her. This sounds like trouble, so you turn her down and resign yourself to a weekend ofdining hall food and studying. A couple of weeks later, the student is bragging that she got an Aonher paper, and you suspect that she paid someone for it. You don't know who to tell, though,and your evidence is circumstantial, so you keep your suspicions to yourself.

8. You're not very good at grammar, and you find it difficult to proofread your own work. Youask your roommate to look over your paper for you, and you specifically tell him to only correctlittle things like punctuation and spelling. When he gives it back to you, he's made a lot ofcorrections, sometimes changing around entire sentences. You read the paper over after you'veedited it, and it doesn't really sound like your writing style. You change some things back so theysound more like you, but you're afraid your instructor will notice the stylistic differences and getsuspicious. You decide to be honest with your instructor and hope she won't punish you toobadly for it.

9. You're a huge baseball fan, and you read a lot of books about baseball. As a result, you have alot of historical facts and statistics memorized, and you're not sure where you originally learnedmost of them. When you read the latest assignment for your English 1010 class, you realize thata paper incorporating your knowledge of baseball would be a perfect way to answer the question.Your instructor has explained that if a fact is "common knowledge," you don't have to cite it.However, you know more about baseball than most people do, and you're not sure if yourknowledge is really "common." But since you don't know where the information originally camefrom and it would be a huge amount of work to figure it out, you don't cite specific sources.

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