Plagiarism Resources

Plagiarism Policy at Phillips Academy

From the Phillips Academy Blue Book, 2003/2004, page 33.

"Honesty is the basic value on which this community rests. Academic honesty is demanded by the very nature of a school community. Honest in the academic area means claiming as one's own only that work which is one's own. All scholarship builds upon the ideas and information of others; the honest person makes clear in written work exactly what the source of any borrowed information or idea is, whether it be library materials, the Internet, or classmates. Since words are the bearers of both information and the unique style of the writer, the words of others, if borrowed, must be properly acknowledged. In addition, work done for one course may not be used to secure credit in another. It is not acceptable to submit one piece of work (e.g., notes, computer programs, lab reports, papers, etc.) to more than one course without prior consultation with and written permission from all instructors involved."

Plagiarism FAQ

What is Plagiarism?

The Oxford English Dictionary defines Plagiarism as:

The action or practice of plagiarizing; the wrongful appropriation or purloining, and publication as one's own, of the ideas, or the expression of the ideas (literary, artistic, musical, mechanical, etc.) of another.

Plagiarism is the use of the words or ideas of others as though they were the writer's own. Wrongful appropriation or purloining is theft. Plagiarism is stealing. Plagiarism is academic dishonesty, and as such is considered a serious affront to academic integrity.

Specifically:

Plagiarism is including in a paper words or ideas from a book or other source without citing or acknowledging that source.

Plagiarism is including material found on, or bought through, the Internet or another medium without citing the source of that material.

Plagiarism is including another student's work in your own paper, with or without that student's knowledge.

Plagiarism is including part of all of a paper you have written for another course, without the express permission of your teacher to do so, or without citation of the previous work.

Plagiarism is including in your paper words or ideas freely offered by another person, be it a dormmate, friend, or a member of your own family, but not acknowledged as another's work.

Plagiarism is paraphrasing materials from a source text without appropriate documentation.

Is it wrong to use the words and ideas of others?

Unless the assignment forbids it, incorporating the words and ideas of others, properly documented, may be a useful strategy. The difference between plagiarism and scholarship is acknowledgement or citation. To use the thoughts of an authority to buttress your own argument is helpful, all the more so when the authority of your source is powerful. However, the quality of your paper will generally be judged by your own ideas and your own phrasing, to which the incorporated material is an addition.

Is it OK to get help on a paper?

Help from another person on a paper does not necessarily become plagiarism. If the help consists of criticisms of the words and ideas of your paper, rather than substitutions for those words and ideas, it is acceptable. At the point that you insert someone else's ideas or words into your paper without acknowledging the source of those ideas, plagiarism begins. If you use someone else's ideas or words, say so in your paper.

Is it OK for a friend, parent, or relative to write all or part of a paper for me?

Regardless of the motivation of the "helper," if you hand in work that has been done in part or whole by another without specifically indicating what help was given, you have committed plagiarism.

Can I use a piece of code from a friend's computer program in my own program?

You may do so only if your instructor expressly allows it, if your friend permits it, and if you acknowledge the code that came from another source.

Isn't the Internet in the public domain and can't I use information that I find there?

Material on the Internet is the intellectual property of its author, even if you do not know who the author is. As such, even if it does not inlcude a copyright statement or display a copyright symbol, it is copyrighted and may not be used without permission. In addition, you are plagiarizing if you use any material at all from the Internet - words, ideas, pictures, graphs, code - without acknowledging its source.

How to Prevent Inadvertent Plagiarism

Plagiarism can be deliberate or inadvertent. In the latter case, the fault typically lies with sloppy organization and note-taking. Many students lose track of the source of the notes that they have taken, and eventually come to believe that they are original ideas.

Whether or not you mean to plagiarize is ultimately irrelevant. If you use the intellectual property of another without proper attribution, it is a violation of the Phillips Academy honor code. Don't let that happen to you.

What do I do when I have a paper due and I just don't have any ideas?

Refer to Get Organized! step one in the OWHL Research Process, as soon as you recieve an assignment requiring you to use information sources. Make sure that you work through the process to define your task clearly and to specify your information need precisely. If you carefully complete the steps included in the section Get Organized! you will have a driving question that will organize your research and give it meaning. If you really are stuck, ask your instructor any OWHL Instructional Librarian for help.

A little front-end planning will prevent panic as your deadline approaches. Use the University of Minnesota's Assignment Calculator to determine how to break your task into parts, and to assign personal deadlines for each step. Whenever you receive an assignment that requires you to use source information, work through the steps in the OWHL Research Process.

How do I cite or acknowledge that I have used ideas or words of another writer?

Your teacher may specify how you should acknowledge your sources, and may have a style sheet or guide for this purpose. However, in any case you should mention in the paper itself the source of words and ideas that are not originally yours. A phrase like, "As Sarah Magog writes in Civilization's End,..." will show that you have borrowed material. To acknowledge the help of a friend, you might write "Bill Jones says that the population of Sweden is dwindling dangerously" or, as note at the end of a paper, "Shirley Smith helped me edit my sentences in this paper." If you are not sure whether or not to acknowledge something, do it.

TIP: Use the OWHL's Source Data Collection Forms to make sure that you record all necessary source information and keep the notes that you take from the sources organized.	TIP: Use the OWHL's Citation Guide to make sure that you are citing your sources in the prescribed format.
Style Guides for Electronic Sources

In addition to the resources provided by OWHL, many colleges have produced guides intended to help students avoid inadvertant plagiarism. The following are some of the best.

The Writing Center at Hamilton College offers guidance on Using Sources, including a discussion of how and when to use direct quotations, paraphrases, and summaries. Theresource also discusses borrowed ideas, the treatment of common knowledge, and correct practice for integrating source material.

UC Davis provides guidance to students wishing to avoid Plagiarism by Mastering the Art of Scholarship. This document emphasizes the correct citation of sources.

Indiana University has produced an excellent guide for students on how to identify acceptable and unacceptable paraphrases, as well as other strategies for avoiding plagiarism. This guide is titled "Plagiarism: What it is, and how to recognize it and avoid it."

How to Reduce Plagiarism

Suggestions for integrating plagiarism education into lesson plans

Tips for creating assignments that discourage plagiarism and encourage original thinking

Information on the causes of plagiarism today

Printable handouts for students on plagiarism, proper citation, and paper writing

How to Detect Plagiarism

The proliferation of electronic resources available over the Internet has been a tremendous boon to researchers. Today there are few, if any, topics for which insufficient information is available to conduct research. On the other hand, the profusion of information that may be cut-and-pasted with the click of a mouse has definitely increased the opportunity for students to plagiarize. A good offense is always the best defense. Paul Kalkstein, of the PA English Department, produced a Plagiarism Primer in 2001 intended to inform his colleagues of the potential for electronic plagiarism, and assist them in detecting instances of plagiarized writing. The material in this section draws heavily on Paul's work.

Researchers may plagiarize from the Internet in one of three ways:

1. the use of material available free and openly on the World Wide Web;
2. the use of material available to subscribers of pay services;
3. the use of papers bought through the Web and emailed to the buyer.

For the first, and most common, form of plagiarism, you can easily use a search engine to find a source for text that has been plagiarized. Copy a series of distinctive words, a seemingly-unique phrase, into the search box and look through the results. Google is one of the most popular search engines at present, and has one of the largest databases.

It is more difficult to detect the use of material available only to subscribers of fee-based services, since search engines like Google do not search those materials. If you suspect plagiarism and do not get results using Google, check with Elisabeth Tully or one of the OWHL librarians.

The third kind of plagiarism might appear to be hardest to detect, although one plagiarist was apprehended when he failed to excise from his purchased paper the phrases that the vendor had used in a synopsis on the web.The best defense against this type of plagiarism is by doing enough writing in class so that disparities of tone, diction, and competence are evident in a plagiarized paper. In addition, a series of intermediate products with associated deadlines will keep students on track.

Technological Help in Detecting Plagiarism

An excellent resource at plagiarism.org offers information designed "to help preserve academic standards in schools and specifically to fight plagiarism that occurs over the Internet". A variety of helpful resources are available at the site, including Resources specifically for instructors.

Just how easy is electronically-facilitated plagiarism, anyway?

Find out. Let's do some plagiarizing - you be the student. It is late at night; tomorrow, second period, you have a paper due on Chaucer's Knight. Sometime you really plan to get around to reading "The Knight's Tale," but, face it, it's sooo loooong. So you got to the World Wide Web, do some searching, and come up with - voilà - a paper on Chaucer's Knight! Go ahead and click on the paper - it will open a new browser window which you can close when you have looked at the paper. But where did PlanetPapers get this paper? Well, from - a database of term papers. If you want to log in to Coshe.com, you can get it, too. Honor among....

Here is a chance to do some sleuthing. You have assigned a paper on Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily." One of the papers looks a bit unfocused and somehow different in tone from the student's earlier work.Look at the paper and select what seems to you to be a unique stream of words (perhaps a phrase of five words or so). Copy the phrase and paste it into the Google box above. Ready? Click here to see the paper on "A Rose for Emily."

If you are not convinced that it is easy for students who want to cheat to do so, follow any of these links to paper archives. The sites that charge for papers are indicated with the $ sign. The others provide papers fo free. CheatHouse has modified it's name from the original "Evil House of Cheat." School Sucks has the catchy motto "Download your Workload."

Plagiarism in the News

Hansen, Brian, "Combating Plagiarism." CQ Researcher, September 19, 2003,
773-796

Harvard to Hornstine: No Way: New Jersey's most famous valedictorian loses her dream. A Newsweek (7-21-03) article on how Harvard "had rescinded Hornstine's acceptance after learning that she had used unattributed text from other authors in columns for a local paper."

Whatever happened to integrity? A USA Today (July 2003) editorial on how "integrity has gone by the board, especially concerning plagiarism. "

Hall of shame High-profile cheats point to a decline of social ethics An Asia Africa Intelligence Wire (6-12-03) article on how "cheating was becoming so casually commonplace that a survey last year of 12,000 high-school students by the Josephson Institute of Ethics found that 74 per cent admitted to cheating on an exam at least once in the past year, 38 per cent said they shoplifted and 37 per cent said they would lie to get a good job."

Additional Resources

Print Resources in the Oliver Wendell Holmes Library Collection

175 ET35 - Ethics, information, and technology

371.5 L34S - Student cheating and plagiarism in the Internet era : a wake-up call

808 H24P - The plagiarism handbook : strategies for preventing, detecting, and dealing with plagiarism

808 M29S - Stolen words : forays into the origins and ravages of plagiarism

Electronic resources

An excellent discussion of why students cheat and what to do about it is available afrom Minesota State University at Mankato.

Lemoyne University Library offers a comprehensive tutorial titled Electronic Plagiarism Seminar

The Center for Academic Integrity is a non-profit organization dedicated to providing information and training to schools implementing an academic integrity program.