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 and the consequences will be serious. 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 or 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:
If you are using MLA citation style, this program will
help you build
your bibliography. |
|
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.
Plagiarism
Guide from the University of Northern British Columbia
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. The resource
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."
The
Writing Place at Northwestern University has
developed an excellent site on avoiding plagiarism. The site
focuses on common mistakes of paraphrasing.
How to Prevent or Reduce Plagiarism
Presentation
by OWHL Director Elisabeth Tully on the prevention of inadvertant
plagiarism
The University of Maryland's Effective
Writing Program supports teachers in helping students to avoid
plariagism by designing
effective writing assignments, and coaching students in appropriate
research practices.
Tips
for creating assignments that discourage plagiarism
and encourage original thinking are provided by Turnitin.com.
The Online
Writing Lab of Purdue University has produced a set
of extremely helpful materials, including a self-test of whether
specific treatments are plagiarism or not. This site could be
used by teachers to teach about plagiarism, or by students for
self-instruction.
Many helpful resources for teachers are available
at Penn State University's Cyberplagiarism
Detection and Prevention Site.
Students
who are concerned that they may have inadvertantly plagiarized
can check their work online for free using Glatt Software's
Plagiarism Self-Detection program.
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:
- by using material available free and openly
on the World Wide Web;
- by using material available to subscribers of
pay services;
- by using 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 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
| Essay
Verification Engine (EVE2). This is a popular, inexpensive
plagiarism detection resource for teachers. |
MyDropBox.com
"provides the world's leading technology to detect and
prevent cases of Internet plagiarism." |
| Teachers can detect plagiarism of computer source code using
the free program JPLAG |
MOSS
(Measure of software similarity) is another program designed
to detect plagiarism in computer programming classes. MOSS
is free for teachers. |
T urnitin.com
is a subscription service featuring elaborate plagiarism
detection techniques. |
IntegriGuard
offers a subscription service called paperbin.com and also
maintains a free service called howoriginal.com. |
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 for free. CheatHouse
has modified it's name from the original "Evil House of Cheat."
School Sucks has the catchy motto "Download your Workload."
Additional
Helpful Resources are available at Plagiarized.com,
which advertises itself as the definitive guide to Internet plagiarism
Plagiarism
in the News
E.E.
CUMMINGS SCHOLAR ACCUSED OF PLAGIARISM
Boston Globe, The (MA) April 18, 2005
Author: Peter Schworm, GLOBE STAFF
Student
wins battle against plagiarism-detection requirement. CNN.com,
January 21, 2004.
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
Cheating
101: Paper Mills and You: "This
presentation is aimed at providing faculty with an overview
of the current state of Internet Paper Mills, how to locate
Paper Mills, how to detect plagiarized papers, how to track
down suspicious papers, and how to combat plagiarism."
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.
Plagiarism
in Cyberspace: Sources, Prevention, Detection, and other Information
Plagiarism
in Colleges in the USA. Ronald B.Standler
Plagiarism
Workshop at Eastern Connecticut State College
Sharon
Stoerger's Plagiarism Resources
