George Mason University

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."

* Acknowledge (to yourself and/or to your students) that students may make genuine mistakes in citation practices, as they do in paragraph structure or syntax, as they learn to work constructively with outside source material. Decide how you will distinguish mistakes from plagiarism.
* Spend class time early in the semester, and at several different times during the semester, discussing the intentions as well as the rules of citation: why are there rules about citing? what does it mean to "own" a sentence or an idea? how does citing an expert source increase the credibility of one's argument?
* Spend class time early in the semester, and at several different times during the semester, having students practice correct strategies for summarizing, paraphrasing, quoting, integrating quotations, and citing information.
* Design assignments or assignment-sequences that limit students' temptations to plagiarize; require students to submit photocopies of sources they cite when they turn in their essays.
* Explain to students what your expectations for each assignment are regarding citation, and create processes (and, as needed, penalties) for dealing with errors that may not yet constitute cheating (e.g., state in writing that there is a specific requirement for proper citation and/or a grade penalty for faulty or inconsistent citation).

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:

* Work within the Mason Honor Code wherever possible. The instructor's role is to file a complaint, and to allow the student due process, not to be the final judge and jury. If you are planning to file a formal complaint, try to avoid extended accusational conversations with the student, which increase everyone's aggravation without producing much benefit.
* You may consult with one of the program administrators for advice before returning the assignment to the student, and/or make a photocopy of the assignment before returning it to the student. There is no immediate deadline for making a charge of plagiarism; you may put a grade on an assignment and still be able to file a later complaint if you turn up evidence of cheating.
* To file a complaint with the Honor Committee, you must have evidence that a student has plagiarized. A search for phrases or sets of keywords via Google or Yahoo! (use quotation marks to pick up exact phrasings) may turn up the online source(s) that a student has used without citation. Colleagues or program administrators may be able to assist you with this.
* You may consult with a student about his/her essay to try to determine the process by which the student wrote the essay, or to discover more about the source material the student used. You are encouraged to have another instructor present or nearby during such a discussion; again, we recommend that you do not directly accuse the student of "plagiarism," since that accusation is likely to raise emotions without moving the discussion forward.
* If you do not find evidence to support your suspicion, consult your assignment prompt and/or grading guide. Many hastily plagiarized essays lack cohesion, include odd syntactical errors, and/or address a topic or question in a way that does not fulfill the exact assignment, causing those essays to earn lower grades even if plagiarism is not provable.

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

* Make two copies of the student's essay and of the evidence, one for Honor Committee and one for your files.
* Review and complete the Honor Committee form: you can download a copy here [click for PDF] or pick up a hardcopy in the main department office.
* Note that you can recommend the consequence that you believe should be imposed if the student is found to have plagiarized, though Honor Committee occasionally decides on a different penalty.
* Send the form along with a copy of the paper and of the evidence to the address specified on the form.
* Inform the student that you have filed a complaint about his/her work with the Honor Committee, suggest that the student review the relevant sections of the Honor Code, and explain that Honor Committee will contact the student with information about how to proceed.
* Aso inform the student that, while the student has the right to continue to attend and do the work for your class while the Honor Committee case is pending, you will not speak further with the student about this issue, since it is now the purview of Honor Committee; direct any further questions from the student to Honor Committee or to a program administrator or the Department Chair.
* Please note that, especially at the end of the semester, Honor Committee decisions may take several weeks; if you must file a final grade during this time, you should file an HC grade.

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

* put quotation marks around, and give an in-text citation for, any sentences or distinctive phrases (even very short, 2- or 3-word phrases) that writers copy directly from any outside source: a book, a textbook, an article, a website, a newspaper, a song, a baseball card, an interview, an encyclopedia, a CD, a movie, etc.
* completely rewrite -- not just switch out a few words -- any information they find in a separate source and wish to summarize or paraphrase for their readers, and also give an in-text citation for that information
* give an in-text citation for any facts, statistics, or opinions which the writers learned from outside sources and which are not considered "common knowledge" in the target audience
* give an in-text citation for any facts, statistics, or opinions which the writers know but which are not part of the "common knowledge" of their target-audience (this may require research to provide credible outside-source support)
* give a new in-text citation for each element of information -- that is, a single citation at the end of a paragraph of outside-source information is not usually sufficient to inform a reader clearly of how much of the paragraph comes from an outside source.

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.