Plagiarism Issues

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Below is the English Department's Statement on Plagiarism:

Plagiarism means using the exact words, opinion, or factual information from another person without giving that person credit. Writers give credit through the use of accepted documentation styles, such as parenthetical citation, footnotes, or end notes; a simple listing of books and articles is not sufficient. Plagiarism is the equivalent of intellectual robbery and cannot be tolerated in an academic setting.

Student writers are often confused as to what should be cited. Some think that only direct quotations need to be credited. While direct quotations do need citations, so do paraphrases and summaries of opinions or factual information formerly unknown to the writers or which the writers did not discover themselves. Exceptions to this include factual information which can be obtained from a variety of sources, the writer's own insights or findings from their own field research, and what has been termed common knowledge. What constitutes common knowledge can sometimes be precarious, and what is common knowledge for one audience may be so for another. In such situations, it is helpful to keep the reader in mind and to think of citations as being reader friendly. In other words, writers provide a citation for any piece of information that they think their readers might want to investigate further. Not only is this attitude considerate of readers and establishes credibility, it will almost certainly ensure that writers will never be guilty of plagiarism.

 

Plagiarism and Composition Pedagogy: Balancing Education and Enforcement

The program administrators and the Composition Committee support the Mason Honor Code and the imposition of serious consequences for cheating on assignments, and we support instructors who enforce this policy.

In addition, we recommend that all instructors approach the complex, intertwined issues of plagiarism (cheating) and source-use or -misuse (error/ignorance) as an educational rather than only a punitive situation.

Acknowledging outside-source information while attempting to meet expectations of producing original, college-level prose is a cognitively difficult process, particularly for first-year students. It is also a culturally inflected process, creating difficulties for international students. In addition, students may have learned very different, incomplete, or confusing procedures from previous school work—and in our current culture, all Americans are constantly receiving conflicting messages about whether ideas/words/art can be "owned," and by whom, and with what consequences. "Just cite your sources!" can be a trickier task than it seems.

Steps for Preventing or Limiting Plagiarism in Student Writing:

We strongly encourage instructors to take several steps beyond putting the official plagiarism statement on their syllabi and/or telling students "don't plagiarize."

We encourage instructors to review the Committee of Writing Program Administrators' Statement on Plagiarism, and the GMU Composition Program's Strategies for Preventing Plagiarism, for more information about this approach to the issue of plagiarism. Additional links from the Writing Center's Plagiarism Page may also be useful or interesting to you.

 

What to do when you suspect a student of plagiarizing -- cheating -- on an assignment:

If you find evidence to support a complaint of plagiarism, you should file a charge of plagiarism with the University Honor Committee:

Lastly: please be assured that your colleagues in the composition program understand and sympathize with the emotional stress brought on by suspecting and/or discovering student plagiarism. Writing teachers often feel betrayed, angry, frustrated, sad, guilty, or otherwise distressed in such a situation. After all, we take the ownership of ideas and words very seriously, we invest a lot of time and/or trust in our students, and we make ourselves available for assistance in a variety of ways.

These emotional consequences can be significant, yet you are strongly encouraged not to take student actions personally, or to invest so much time or energy in a single case of student plagiarism that you lessen the effectiveness of your teaching for the rest of your students.

 

Composition Program Policy on Plagiarism

Instructors in the Composition Program recognize that learning to effectively--and ethically--blend one's own ideas and analysis with information and evidence obtained from outside sources is a significant challenge for college writers in the twenty-first century. We thus include explicit instruction in strategies for handling sources as part of our curriculum. However, students in composition classes must also take responsibility for understanding and practicing the basic principles listed below.

To avoid plagiarism, meet the expectations of a US Academic Audience, give their readers a chance to investigate the issue further, and make credible arguments, writers must  

Writers must also include a Works Cited or References list at the end of their essay, providing full bibliographic information for every source cited in their essay.

While different disciplines may have slightly different citation styles, and different instructors may emphasize different levels of citation for different assignments, writers should always begin with these conservative practices unless they are expressly told otherwise. Writers who follow these steps carefully will almost certainly avoid plagiarism. If writers ever have questions about a citation practice, they should ask their instructor!

Instructors in the Composition Program support the Mason Honor Code, which requires them to report any suspected instances of plagiarism to the Honor Committee.  All judgments about plagiarism are made after careful review by the Honor Committee, which may issue penalities ranging from grade-deductions to course failure to expulsion from Mason.