Intentional and Unintentional Plagiarism

Dr. Jamie McKenzie, editor of the online educational journal, claims that many students engaged in plagiarism truly do not understand that the exercise of cutting and pasting into a paper without attribution is morally wrong. “They [students] don’t think of it as cheating. They are simply collecting information and don’t understand the whole concept of intellectual property”. Many academic experts on plagiarism concur with this point of view. In other words, students who have acquired a certain view toward intellectual property (if they recognize the concept at all) with respect to music, movies, email, jokes, photos, and other web-related content assume that there’s nothing illegal or unethical about taking or copying material from the web for the fulfillment of school assignments. Given that many teachers in secondary education often lack the familiarity and Internet-related skills that their students have, they are prone to misinterpret acts of copying as deliberate cheating. Teachers—particularly those working in middle and high schools—need to consider that their students’ use of content without proper attribution often represent inadvertent incidents of cheating.

Straw argues that educators must learn to discern “Acts of academic dishonesty committed with deliberate intent… [from]… the unintentional results of inexperience and ignorance.” He further observes that “…students are stunned to learn that the sites they’re using are created by individuals who need to be acknowledged. The structure of the Internet must be seen and just do my homework as a culprit in creating much of this confusion. A great deal of electronic information lacks the tangible physical presence of print sources.” If more than a century earlier Rhodes had to remind his fellow historians that “the study of history is a training in the handling of books,” we may find it necessary to alert all instructors that teaching and learning in the twenty-first century must include training in the “handling” of the rich technology-based information resources—including electronic books—available now.

Providing a simple definition of “plagiarism” is a good starting point for helping students gain a clearer understanding of acceptable uses of other authors’ writings. Pearson defines plagiarism as “Presenting someone else’s ideas or work as your own, without attribution.” Pearson from EssayProfy urges teachers to set clear expectations about the originality of schoolwork, and to discuss the importance of doing one’s own critical thinking in terms of the learning process. She pragmatically suggests that “those who cheat are going to do it no matter what I say…my job is to help (students) think about it, and to let them make their own informed choices.”

In short, the various types of plagiarism run the gamut from students’ not knowing at all about the need to properly acknowledge their sources, to believing a source to be common knowledge—thus committing an innocent error in judgment biased in favor of their own sense of “originality”—to a student’s submission of a paper entirely composed by another author, hence, consciously executing an overt act of academic dishonesty. Educators at the secondary level need to become aware of and learn to differentiate egregious transgressions from the more innocuous cases of cheating without an explicit intent. This could be accomplished through in-service opportunities focused on this cheating, or by making widely available information specifically developed for teachers to help them cope with this challenge.