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
