Plagiarism Policy

James M. Wallace

Cheating, obviously, is not permitted in college anymore than cheating is permitted in poker. Cheating in college is like cheating in any other endeavor in life: it happens when you break the rules in an effort to gain something that you have not rightfully earned. If you tuck an ace in your sleeve while you’re dealing the cards, you’re cheating. If you copy a classmate's test answers in order to get a better grade than you would have earned otherwise, that's cheating. 

And as with other dishonest acts, there are levels of severity in the kinds of cheating that go on in college. Plagiarism is one form of cheating, and it is considered one of the most serious academic offenses.   Plagiarism, which means giving your reader the impression that the words or ideas in an essay are your own when in fact they are not, is considered one of the most serious forms of cheating in college. Why? Because in college you are rewarded, among other things, for your ideas, for your ability to express those ideas in words, and for your ability to use the ideas and words of others to support your claims.  In whatever professional writing you do in your career, you'll be quoting other writers and speakers, integrating ideas and information from various sources, offering your viewpoints, countering or confirming the viewpoints of others, citing sources of evidence, and so on. A vital part of writing well is providing your reader with the means to tell which ideas and words are yours and, when necessary, which are from another source.    

Now, as with all human actions, not all acts of plagiarism are the same.  Some are terribly serious and can get you booted from college:   

• Handing in a paper that you did not write (that you acquired from an Internet source or that someone else wrote for you, for example).

• Handing in a paper with passages copied word for word from other sources without giving credit to the original writer or speaker.

 In both of these cases you are obviously attempting to give your reader the impression that you wrote the essay or came up with the wording in the lifted passages. Some students might counter that they had no idea it was “wrong” to buy a paper online or to lift entire passages from printed sources. Ok, fine. Let’s not even debate the wrongness or rightness of doing so, although I could not be persuaded that either act is justifiable. Let’s just stick to my definition of plagiarism: giving your reader the impression that the words or ideas in an essay are your own when in fact they are not.

Other acts of plagiarism are serious, but even good students can get confused sometimes: 

• Giving the impression that ideas are your own when in fact they have come from other writers or speakers. (But what, exactly, is an "idea," and when does an idea qualify as our own?)

• Failing to give credit to sources of information. (But isn't some information so widely known that it doesn't have to be cited?)

• Handing in a paper with information, ideas, words and so on taken from one source but attributed to another source. (Could be a simple error, or it could give the reader the impression that you’re trying to hide something.)

Other acts of plagiarism can be considered even less severe depending on the intentions of the writer:

• Taking words from a source and, while crediting the source, failing to put quotation marks around the words.

• Paraphrasing large portions of another writer’s work and giving the writer credit for only a small portion of the paraphrase.

You might say that these last two acts of “cheating” are similar to accidentally getting a look at your opponent’s cards. To help me, as a professor, distinguish between acts of plagiarism that are terribly serious and those that are "accidental," I try to decide whether the writer is attempting deliberately to deceive the reader. I ask myself this question: "Is this writer deliberately trying to give the reader the impression that the words and ideas in the paper are the writer's very own, when in actuality the words and ideas came from an unnamed source?" I'll admit that trying to determine someone's intentions is not easy, but there are clear cases of deliberate fraud (handing in someone else's paper) and, admittedly, cases that are not so easy to decide.

So here's the bottom line: do what you can to avoid forcing me to have to ask myself whether you have deliberately plagiarized. I can help you avoid giving the wrong impression and I can help you sort through the confusion of when it's necessary to credit a source and how to properly do so. I will help you learn how to use information in a paper, how to integrate the ideas of others with your own, and how to credit your sources so that you might avoid charges of plagiarism. If, however, you commit a deliberate act of plagiarism (hand in a paper that you found on the Internet or that a friend wrote for you, or copy whole passages word-for-word without acknowledgement, for example), you will fail the course.

On a more pleasant note: I assume that most students do not cheat and that, on the contrary, most students come to college to learn, among other things, how to think more deeply and clearly, how to write more forcefully and effectively, and how to join in on the conversation between thinkers and writers. I take it as an assumption that you have something to say and that you’d like to learn how to say it better. I don’t assume that every student enjoys writing or looks forward to practicing rigorously the skills necessary to become a writer, but I do believe that every student has opinions, insights and ideas worth developing and defending. My goal in this course is to help you discover what it is you’d like to say and to show you methods for expressing your ideas more effectively and convincingly.