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1 Examining Teachers’ and Students’ Attitudes towards Plagiarism

Phillip Marzluf

Before You Read: In the following essay, Phillip Marzluf claims that students and teachers have “different assumptions about such concepts as originality, common knowledge, and collaboration.” How would you define someone’s work as plagiarized? Take a few minutes to articulate a definition of plagiarism in writing. Among many factors to consider, you might think about whether the writer meant to do it, and how much of another’s source a writer used as his or her own.

As the director of a writing program at a public university, I work with teachers who possess a wide range of attitudes towards plagiarism, ranging from nonchalance to hostility, and who rely upon varying definitions of plagiarism. As a writing teacher, I often work with students who appear mystified, scared, or downright cynical about what constitutes plagiarism and academic misconduct. Their confusion is easy to understand, given the conflicting definitions and suggestions they receive from class to class and from high school to college and university levels. In order to more fully explore the sometimes mystifying range of ideas surrounding plagiarism, for both students and teachers, I designed the “Attitudes towards Plagiarism” questionnaire, which prompts users to classify and rate ten scenarios describing possible plagiarism or academic misconduct cases. By asking us to reflect on our definitions of plagiarism, the “Attitudes towards Plagiarism” questionnaire encourages dialogue between teachers and students, allowing us to compare our assumptions about responsible research, the ownership of writing, collaboration, and the incorporation of outside sources.

In this brief study1 I examine how teachers and students classify the scenarios in the “Attitudes towards Plagiarism” questionnaire and, for the cases they regard as plagiarism, how seriously they consider them. In the fall of 2006, forty-four instructors, professors, and librarians who worked with first- and second-year students in a wide range of disciplines at a public Midwestern university completed an online version of the questionnaire, which also elicited written comments. In addition to their participation, 138 students from nine second-year writing courses completed a paper version of the questionnaire. For the student participants, either an experienced graduate teaching assistant or I conducted a brief feedback session and discussed their responses.2 Below, I first describe the questionnaire, providing the ten scenarios and defining the four variables that constitute them. Then, I summarize the study results and conclude with a few observations about how the questionnaire can contribute to teachers’ and students’ discussions.

The Questionnaire

While developing the ten scenarios for the “Attitudes towards Plagiarism” questionnaire, I kept in mind the various definitions of plagiarism (Howard 475), the reasons researchers have identified for why students plagiarize (e.g., Ashworth, Bannister, and Thorne 202; Love and Simmons 544; Roig 979), and the practices of collaboration and peer editing. The questionnaire asks teachers and students to read ten scenarios of possible acts of plagiarism, to judge whether these acts should be considered plagiarism, and then to determine the severity of each case. These judgments are made according to the following five-point scale:

1. Not plagiarism.

2. Although this scenario represents an act of plagiarism or academic misconduct, it is not serious. This act is incidental or possibly unintentional. The student does not deserve severe punishment.

3. This act is slightly more serious. There is more of a possibility that it was intentional. The student might deserve punishment.

4. This act is more serious. It is clearly intentional. The student definitely deserves punishment.

5. This is the most serious act of plagiarism or academic misconduct. This act calls for severe consequences.

The ten scenarios are listed below. In parentheses before each scenario appears the title by which we refer to it in this essay.

#1 (Friend’s Paper Scenario) Kathy is having difficulty finding ideas for her take-home history exam. After discussing her problems with a friend, she finds out that her friend had to write on a similar question the previous semester. Using a draft of her friend’s paper, which only got a “C,” Kathy rewrites it to make it sound more like her. Also, she completely changes her introduction. In the body of the paper, she includes a few new points.

#2 (Conclusion Scenario) John hates writing conclusions. Thus, instead of summarizing the paper himself, he reads his paper aloud to his friend and then asks her to briefly sum up the paper. John writes down exactly what she says. After making a couple of grammatical changes, he includes this at the end of his paper.

#3 (Vietnam Scenario) Sandra, who is writing about the Vietnam War, has collected ten newspaper articles that mention an important battle. As she writes her description of this battle, she makes sure to include proper citations whenever she uses direct quotations from the articles. However, she doesn’t cite the sources for names, dates, statistics, and geographical places. In her opinion, these are just basic historical facts.

#4 (Faulty Paraphrase Scenario) In The Concise Columbia Encyclopedia, Michael looks up a definition on “occupational disease” and finds the following:

Occupational disease: an illness resulting from the conditions or environment of employment. Some time usually elapses between exposure to the cause and development of the symptoms of an occupational disease. Among the causes of such diseases are toxic chemicals, such as benzene and dioxin.

In a report for his business communications class, Michael includes this definition by writing:

Occupational disease is an illness resulting from job-related conditions. Usually, there is an elapse of time between exposure to the cause and development of the symptoms of this disease. Toxic chemicals, like benzene and dioxin, are common causes (The Concise Columbia Encyclopedia).

#5 (Sight Gag Scenario) Margaret, in her paper that summarizes different techniques in film comedy, reads this definition about a “sight gag” in Noel Carroll’s “Notes on the Sight Gag” (from Andrew S. Horton’s Comedy/Cinema/Theory, page 26).

The sight gag is a form of visual humor in which amusement is generated by the play of alternative interpretations projected by the image or image series. Sight gags existed in theater prior to their cinematic refinement, and sight gags, although they are regarded as the hallmark of the silent comedy, can occur in films that are neither silent nor comic.

Margaret, however, thinks this definition is too complicated. She rewrites it as:

The sight gag, which is a common feature in many types of film, has been around since the days of theater. It involves a visual image that makes you laugh, especially when this image has many different meanings.

Since she has changed the definition so much, she feels that she doesn’t need to cite the source.

#6 (Shakespeare Scenario) The assignment in Cody’s drama class asks students to write a three-page interpretation of a Shakespearean play. Glancing through a book about Shakespeare, Elizabethan Playwrights, Cody finds an analysis of The Tempest that he likes. Cody then extends the analysis to write his paper on Shakespeare’s King Lear. Although he cites the Shakespeare anthology he is using, he doesn’t indicate his use of Elizabethan Playwrights.

#7 (Mother Scenario) In her opinion, Lindsay feels that she has a lot to say, but, at the same time, feels that she can never find the right words to express her thoughts. All her sentences are always the same length and start in the same way. Her mother, fortunately, is a retired high school English teacher. She reworks Lindsay’s papers until they sound more academic. “She only touches the grammar, and stuff like words and punctuation,” Lindsay says. “The ideas are mine. That’s the important part.”

#8 (Collaboration Scenario) In Frank’s writing class, group editing is emphasized. And, since Frank’s usual partners, Erica and Keith, are recognized as the best students in class, he thinks it is in his best interest to rewrite the final drafts of his papers by including the exact words and sentence structures they suggest. This is especially easy since the instructor tells his students to write, in a different color ink, directly on the rough drafts of their partners.

#9 (Salinger Scenario) Lynn’s favorite book in high school was The Catcher in the Rye. She liked the smart-alecky tone of the book and how the main character’s thoughts are depicted with mild swears and informal phrases. The first sentence of this book, for example, reads, “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born [. . .] and all that David Copperfield kind of crap.” In her first paper for Expository Writing I, a description of a real experience from her past, Lynn tried to imitate the tone of The Catcher in the Rye. Yet, though she wanted to make herself sound like the main character from that book, she was careful to only directly use single words or short, two-to-three-word phrases.

#10 (Downloading Scenario) Ashley, a Chemistry major, finds out that her final Expository Writing I paper is due on the following day. Since there is no time left to do research and plan her topic—and since she still has to study for her organic chemistry exam—she can think of only one solution to her problem: Ashley jumps on the Internet, finds the www.collegepapers.com site, and, after paying $42.50, downloads what is advertised as the “perfect paper.”

The scenarios consist of the four variables that appear most often in my discussions about plagiarism with teachers and students: the writer’s level of intentionality, the degree of appropriation, the borrowing of ideas and/or expression, and the status of the source. I hypothesize that though teachers and students make judgments based upon these variables, disagreements may arise in regards to which variables should be emphasized as well as how they should be interpreted. I describe these variables briefly below.

Intentionality and Appropriation

These two variables are grouped together because the intention of plagiarizers, their conscious desires to deceive their teachers, may directly relate to appropriation, the amount of the source text they use. The Downloading Scenario (#10), for example, indicates an obvious case of academic fraud: The student purchases an online essay and willfully submits it as her own writing; she has, therefore, acted with clear intentions and appropriated the source text completely. Not surprisingly, teachers react strongly to acts in which students are consciously attempting to deceive them, and I thus surmised that teachers would mark these types of scenarios severely.

Ideas and Expressions

These variables are implicit in American copyright law, which separates the ideas of texts from their specific forms of expression. This separation protects the interests of authors by making their particular expressions a property they own; on the other hand, by allowing the public limited access to the ideas of authors, copyright laws insure that society in general can benefit from exploring, extending, and distributing these ideas (Spigelman 246). In her research, Candace Spigelman explores how students working collaboratively in writing groups negotiate these complicated concepts of textual ownership. When students are confronted with the possibility that their ideas and expressions can be separated, Spigelman finds that they apply different ways of thinking about how textual ownership is decided, about when they can claim a text is their own, and about whether ownership can be based upon the origins of expression or that of ideas (247–48). Similar to one of Spigelman’s study participants (248–49), the writer in the Mother Scenario (#7) responds to these questions by indicating that ideas, not surface expression, are what make a text authentically hers.

Status of the Source

This variable refers to the type of source text that the writer has used. Writers may, as in the Friend’s Paper Scenario (#1), appropriate texts from their friends or, as in the Shakespeare Scenario (#6), borrow ideas from a published text on Shakespearean criticism. This consideration of the status of the source—in other words, the difference in power and status between writers and the types of texts they use—may influence how students and teachers determine the severity of the plagiaristic act. Teachers, in particular, will have to examine the differences, if any do exist, of students who borrow from credible, published texts from those who borrow from the texts of their peers.

Many of the scenarios reveal the assumptions and complex judgments that go into making determinations about plagiarism. Because most of the scenarios do represent the problematic gray area of identifying plagiarism, the variables quickly become messy and overlap with each other. For instance, Cody, the student in the Shakespeare Scenario (#6), can be regarded as acting with a high degree of intentionality (though the scenario does not provide us with a clear description of his desires), as appropriating ideas, and as borrowing from a high status source text. Furthermore, the scenarios rarely provide all of the necessary information in order for teachers and students to make definitive decisions about the writers’ intentions and about what rules of plagiarism and academic misconduct were already established in these hypothetical classrooms.

Study Results and Discussion

Overall, the questionnaire results indicate that teachers are more likely to judge the scenarios as acts of plagiarism. A larger percentage of teachers than students rate seven scenarios as plagiarism, although only four of these are statistically significant. Table 1 below lists these results. For each scenario, a higher percentage suggests more agreement that it represents plagiarism.

Table 1: Percentages of Plagiarism Ratings

Scenario	Teachers (%)	Students (%)
1*	100	94
2	93	85
3	64	73
4*	52	26
5*	91	70
6	88	93
7*	86	65
8	75	81
9	55	48
10	100	99

*Differences are statistically significant (p=.005).

Teachers are also more likely to rate cases of plagiarism more severely, though the differences between the teachers and students are less pronounced. Only two of these scenarios, the Friend’s Paper (#1) and Mother (#7) scenarios, are statistically significant, which can be accounted for by the fact that a larger percentage of students do not regard these cases as plagiarism. Table 2 lists the questionnaire averages for teachers and students. An average closer to 1 indicates that the scenario is either not classified as plagiarism or is marked as a less serious case; an average closer to 5 indicates that the scenario is regarded as a more serious offense.

Table 2: Comparison of Levels of Severity

Scenario	Teachers	Students	Scenario	Teachers	Students
1*2345	3.73.11.81.72.3	3.32.82.01.52.3	67*8910	3.02.72.31.85.0	3.22.22.61.84.9

*Differences are statistically significant (p=.005).

Below, I discuss the questionnaire results according to three categories, the scenarios that show the most agreement between teachers and students, the scenarios that show the most disparity, and the scenarios that show the most variance among teachers.

Scenarios Showing Most Agreement

Although teachers show a tendency to rate the scenarios as more serious and more likely to represent plagiarism, the results do suggest that teachers and students base their judgments upon a similar set of values. The results indicated in Table 2 confirm a strong consensus between teachers and students. It is also interesting to note that a larger percentage of students rate three scenarios as acts of plagiarism and score them more severely, yet the differences are slight and are not statistically significant. It is encouraging, though not surprising, for example, that the response to the Downloading Scenario (#10) is nearly unanimous. This case represents the most clear-cut example of a writer who intends to deceive her teacher and who completely appropriates the outside source. Furthermore, for a scenario such as the Friend’s Paper Scenario (#1), even though it shows statistical significance for both comparisons, the difference is weak. A vast majority of students (94%) agrees with the 100% of instructors who rate this scenario as plagiarism, and students, similar to teachers, rate this scenario as the second most serious act of plagiarism. A small group of students, however, interpret this writer’s attempts to rewrite her friend’s essay exam and “make it sound more like herself” as a suitable strategy for appropriation.

Scenarios Showing Most Disparity

The four statistically significant scenarios, the Friend’s Paper (#1), the Faulty Paraphrase (#4), the Sight Gag (#5), and the Mother (#7) scenarios, are interesting because they represent the most disparity between how teachers and students respond. These differences suggest how subtle interpretations of the variables, especially intentionality and ideas/expression, play a role in determining these judgments.

For example, the Mother Scenario (#7) suggests that students may privilege the writer’s ownership of ideas. In my discussions with student groups about this scenario, several students—though not all—have claimed that this writer is being responsible, in that she is seeking out editing help from a legitimate source, her mother, the same thing that all expert writers do. Although a statistically significant number of teachers deviate from this judgment, the responses to the online questionnaire hint that some teachers agree with these students’ less text-specific approach to defining plagiarism. One teacher claims that several of the scenarios illustrate students asking for advice on content or on editing, which is “exactly the kind of collaboration that workers will participate in in many job situations.” This teacher acknowledges the difficulty of judging these cases of collaboration, in that they describe exactly what writers do in real professional situations.

Finally, the two scenarios exemplifying examples of citation and paraphrasing, the Faulty Plagiarism (#4) and the Sight Gag (#5) scenarios, also reveal wide divergences of judgments between teachers and students. The fact that 74% of students, as opposed to 48% of teachers, determine the Faulty Plagiarism Scenario (#4) as not a case of plagiarism may suggest that students are willing to overlook the writer’s borrowing of exact phrases and sentence structure as long as he has clearly marked his intention not to deceive the instructor, which he does by citing his encyclopedia source. This writer, therefore, may be signaling he is working in good faith. Of course, the responses to the Sight Gag Scenario (#5), in which the writer adequately paraphrases the source but does not cite it, reverses this logic. In this case, only 30% of students judge this scenario not to be plagiarism, indicating that, for a majority of students, the writer’s failure to identify the source of her definition makes them suspicious about her intentions. As one of the comments on the online questionnaire demonstrates, some teachers respond emphatically to attempts to rationalize writers’ actions in these two scenarios. The teacher writes, “Intentionally lifting a word, phrase or sentence from a source without enclosing these words in quotation marks and citing them is ALWAYS [sic] plagiarism, only slightly less egregious than buying a paper from a term paper site.” Yet, the student responses may be hinting that interpretations of this adverb, “intentionally,” make these cases difficult to define.

Scenarios Showing Most Variance

Despite several scenarios that show strong agreement, the teacher responses demonstrate that there is little unanimity and consistency among how they judge the more complicated, less obvious scenarios. In fact, in three of the scenarios—the Vietnam (#3), Faulty Paraphrasing (#4), and Salinger (#9) scenarios—there is a statistically significant difference between teachers who determine them to be cases of plagiarism as opposed to teachers who do not. Additionally, an analysis of the correlations across all the scenarios suggests a lack of consistency for how teachers score one scenario as compared with another.

These data do not necessarily suggest that teachers are randomly making decisions on what should be considered plagiarism. Instead, these findings may indicate, especially given the variance evident in the Faulty Paraphrasing Scenario (#4), that a great deal of anxiety currently exists about how to label and judge writers who may be just learning how to incorporate outside sources. Consequently, of the 52% of teachers who indicate that the Faulty Paraphrasing Scenario (#4) depicts an act of plagiarism, 83% of these teachers mark it as the least serious type. The differences among teachers may reflect definitional, not pedagogical, confusion. The Collaboration Scenario (#8) also suggests a great deal of teacher variance, as 25% of teachers judge it to be “not plagiarism,” 30% as “plagiarism, not serious,” 34% as “plagiarism, more serious,” and 11% as either a “very serious” or an “extremely serious” case of plagiarism. Though a great deal of this variance is undoubtedly based upon different interpretations of the scenario, it is alarming that a case of peer collaboration provokes such a wide range of responses.3 Quite possibly, it is the teachers’ interpretations of the writer’s intentions to deceive and to completely appropriate his peers’ suggestions that influence this decision.

Conclusion: The Uses of the Questionnaire

The “Attitudes towards Plagiarism” questionnaire can facilitate conversations about the definitions of plagiarism and about how we—both teachers and students—hold different assumptions about such concepts as originality, common knowledge, and collaboration. It is also important for us to become aware that the definitions of plagiarism are messy and that, before we rely wholeheartedly upon textbook definitions, we should reflect upon the complex factors that make up our writing, research, and collaborative strategies.

In my experiences with using the questionnaire in teacher training as well as introductory writing classrooms, I discuss the following types of questions after teachers and students have rated the scenarios:

 Which scenario was the easiest one for you to respond to? Which one was the most obvious case of plagiarism? Why?

 Which of the scenarios troubles you? Why?

 Which case of plagiarism did you find to be the most unintentional?

 What do the cases you marked as plagiarism tell you to watch out for?

 How did you decide the severity level for each scenario you marked as plagiarism? What should teachers bear in mind when making decisions about punishment?

 In high school and in your college classes, what have you been told about plagiarism? How consistent has this advice been?

 What fears or concerns do you have about your own research and use of sources?

These types of questions, and the discussions they provoke, allow us to reflect on our responsibilities as researchers and writers. They can reveal the larger purposes behind citation rules and conventional formalities: Instead of seeing these aspects of writing as final obstacles to be hurdled before handing in a paper, teachers and students can consider research, the integration of sources, and collaboration as important elements throughout their drafting.

I have found the questionnaire helpful for teachers to understand the citation “logic” of their students and for students, meanwhile, to grapple with the judgments their teachers make. For example, students, I have discovered, focus a great deal of their attention on the variable of intentionality. While discussing the Salinger Scenario (#9), two student groups defended this writer’s use of the sarcastic voice of The Catcher in the Rye, arguing that this scenario did not represent plagiarism because the writer did not deceive the instructor and sampled a well-known text only to enhance a “sense of character.” It is also interesting to listen to student groups defend the scenarios, such as the Faulty Paraphrasing (#4) and Sight Gag (#5) scenarios, that indicate wide disparity between teachers and students. In my experience, students have not focused on the writers’ inability to paraphrase or on their lack of knowledge of citation conventions but upon the fact that these two writers were only attempting to incorporate definitions—not, that is, more important substantive ideas. According to this logic, “mere” definitions are not that important to cite; after all, who possesses intellectual ownership of a definition? The Vietnam Scenario (#3), similarly, highlights these issues of public knowledge, the status of facts, and their accessibility. Again, students have asked, who owns historical facts, such as names or dates? Alternatively, as one studentgroup implied, does the accessibility of these facts—whether it could be reasonably inferred that the general public had common knowledge of these facts—dictate whether they should be cited?

The questionnaire can also indicate how judgments about plagiarism differ among educational levels, disciplines, and institutions. I often ask students whether the plagiarism advice they receive from their teachers is consistent or if there were any differences in how their high school teachers, as compared with their college professors, talked about plagiarism. Not surprisingly, I have received several different responses. One student, for example, claimed he did not bother to read the university honor code because what constituted plagiarism had already been thoroughly dealt with in his high school. On the other hand, students indicated that plagiarism appeared more complicated at the college and university levels and that their high school teachers did not handle plagiarism cases too seriously. Regardless, the questionnaire may help students and teachers become more proactive in clarifying one of the main concerns in the scenarios—what constitutes the boundary between teacher-sanctioned collaboration and improper collaboration. For example, I have talked with students who expressed concern about how, in their geology, physics, or engineering labs, they could be accused of plagiarism simply because their final lab reports looked so similar to the reports of the peers with whom they had conducted experiments and discussed results.

As this brief study suggests, there are many uses of the “Attitudes towards Plagiarism” questionnaire, the most important of which I believe is to promote dialogue between teachers and students about such issues as collaboration, paraphrasing, and ownership of ideas. Because these scenarios may not address specific institutional concerns or technological innovations, I encourage teachers and students to create and talk about their own scenarios. In the online questionnaire, for example, two participants suggested that I should include a scenario that described a recent change in their institution’s honor code, one which classified work or research conducted in one class, yet submitted to another, as academic misconduct. These types of scenarios can contribute to how we perceive plagiarism and its consequences for writing and the teaching of writing.

Notes

1. I thank Elise Barker, Jerrod Bohn, Ron Downey, and Emily Merrifield for their contributions.

2. This study was a replication of an earlier pilot study I conducted at a different institution. Amy Martin has also used a modified version of the “Attitudes towards Plagiarism” questionnaire to test the fitness of The Council of Writing Program Administrators’ statement on plagiarism and to examine how faculty in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences respond to the scenarios differently.

3. Other studies that have deployed the “Attitudes towards Plagiarism” questionnaire demonstrate the variance of the Collaboration Scenario (#8). In the pilot study, 55% of the instructors considered this scenario as plagiarism. In Martin’s study, 81% of humanities instructors considered it plagiarism, whereas 100% of science instructors defined it as plagiarism (69).

Works Cited

Ashworth, Peter, Philip Bannister, and Pauline Thorne. “Guilty in Whose Eyes? University Students’ Perceptions of Cheating and Plagiarism in Academic Work and Assessment.” Studies in Higher Education 22.2 (1997): 187–203. Print.

Howard, Rebecca Moore. “Sexuality, Textuality: The Cultural Work of Plagiarism.” College English 62 (2000): 473–91. Print.

Love, Patrick, and Janice Simmons. “Factors Influencing Cheating and Plagiarism among Graduate Students in a College of Education.” College Student Journal 32 (1998): 539–49. Print.

Martin, Amy. “Plagiarism and Collaboration: Suggestions for ‘Defining and Avoiding Plagiarism: The WPA Statement on Best Practices.’” Writing Program Administration 28.3 (2005): 57–71. Print.

Roig, Miguel. “When College Students’ Attempts at Paraphrasing Become Instances of Potential Plagiarism.” Psychological Reports 84 (1999): 973–82. Print.

Spigelman, Candace. “Habits of Mind: Historical Configurations of Textual Ownership in Peer Writing Groups.” College Composition and Communication 49 (1998): 234–55. Print.

Questions for Discussion

1. Discuss with peers and your instructor(s) the “concepts of originality, common knowledge, and collaboration” that Phillip Marzluf discusses. Working in groups, talk about what you think each of those concepts means to you, and compare it to the definitions in Marzluf’s essay. How do your definitions compare to or contrast with those of your instructor? Why?

2. Marzluf writes, “The scenarios consist of the four variables that appear most often in my discussions about plagiarism with teachers and students: the writer’s level of intentionality, the degree of appropriation, the borrowing of ideas and/or expression, and the status of the source.” Now that you have read his chapter, go back to the definition of plagiarism that you wrote before you read the chapter. How would you rank the variables Marzluf discusses in terms of their importance in determining whether something is plagiarized? How does your ranking change your definition of what constitutes plagiarism?