Plagiarism a source of confusion for some students

Plagiarism. Let’s face it. We all know someone who has plagiarized at one point in his or her academic career. You could have done it yourself without even knowing it.

At VCU, plagiarism is expressly forbidden as a violation of the VCU Honor System, which defines plagiarism as:

“Representing orally or in writing, in any academic assignment or exercise, the words, ideas, or works of another as one’s own without customary and proper acknowledgement of the source.”

Sounds clear-cut, right? You would be surprised.

Alan Briceland, associate professor of history, identified three kinds of plagiarism: deliberate plagiarism, inadvertent plagiarism and plagiarism caused by ignorance.

Briceland said students have been told what plagiarism is in classes, but it “just doesn’t stick.”

Nicholas Sharp, former honor council faculty coordinator for the College of Humanities and Sciences, said most cases of plagiarism taken to the honor council fall into the latter two categories, and they tend to be students who don’t make a habit of plagiarizing.

“They aren’t very good at it; otherwise, they wouldn’t have gotten caught,” he said.

He described the students as “people who have gotten themselves into a situation where they are desperate, and they try something that they don’t know how to do very well because they don’t do it very often, simply because of that anxiety . . . that comes on in any human being (at the end of a semester).”

One solution the English department is considering would require students to submit their work through an online plagiarism-checking service such as turnitin.com. This, Sharp said, would involve a nominal $5 fee included with the cost of course textbooks and would function the same way the “digital drop box” does on Blackboard.

“It’s better to get that stopped early. Most of the kids I dealt with on cheating cases, the minute they were caught … they experienced a sense of shame and humiliation,” he said. “I know most of them never did it again, because they were so humiliated at the stupidity of what they’d done and the embarrassment of having to face me … not to mention the possibility of (their) parents finding out.

“So, the first draft that comes in. You run it through some kind of software. You figure out if it’s been plagiarized, and you say ‘This is plagiarism, you can’t do this. Rewrite this paper, resubmit it to me, write me a real paper and don’t let me catch you at this again.”

Anne Chandler, associate professor of rehabilitation counseling, said she hasn’t had an honor council referral since she’s been at VCU.

“(My) work is with people training to be counselors and therapists,” she said. “We have high expectations of ethical behavior because of the profession they’re going into. I never felt there was a real problem with (plagiarism).”

Yet she said the reality of using online plagiarism checks depends on the size of the class and number of papers to grade. If that’s the situation it probably makes some sense to do it that way and at least use it as a filter.

“Hopefully if you tell people you’re going to do that, it serves as a deterrent,” Chandler said.

Briceland described part of the problem with enforcement as VCU students who haven’t internalized the honor code or taken responsibility for its enforcement compared with students at other universities.

“Almost all cases (of honor code infractions) are brought by faculty,” he said. “If nobody reports, (the system is) useless. Reporting is where the rubber meets the road.”

Briceland also suggested that control of the honor system should be proportionate to the people reporting the violations.

“If 90 percent of the reporting is done by students, then students should have 90 percent of the responsibility,” he said.

Sharp cited one case of deliberate plagiarism in which a student kept a book from the library for four months to prevent him from investigating. He said he happened across the book months later and realized what had occurred, although it was then too late to bring the student up on charges.

Later that semester, Sharp learned that another professor charged the student for doing the same thing. The catch: this professor had the book in her personal library.

“It became clear this guy had cheated his way through college … he was eventually expelled from college, and there for a while his whole life went in the crapper,” Sharp said. “It turned out he wasn’t just cheating at school. Last I heard of him he was headed toward Baltimore.”

Sharp offered one last piece of advice for students.

“It’s better to just fail the course than to go through all the unpleasantness … of having to face the honor code coordinator,” he said. “We’re not nice people. It’s a lot easier to face an angry mother and tell her you failed the class.”

Editor’s Note: This is the fourth installment of an eight-part series intended to introduce and help students navigate VCU’s Honor Code. The series will be published every Thursday.