LIS 5100 : Avoiding student plagiarism

In an assignment for LIS 5100 this week, I was asked to discuss how I’d handle a student plagiarism case. As UCM’s policy on Academic Honesty (2017) points out, “[A]cademic honesty is one of the most important qualities influencing the character and image of an educational institution.”

Through carefully documenting my sources for quotations, I would attempt to avoid accusations of plagiarism, by attributing my sources.

A good first step would include reviewing what plagiarism is. For example, TurnItIn lists 10 types of plagiarism, arranged from most, to least, severity. It presents each type of plagiarism using “easy-to-remember” names from computer and social media lingo (TurnItIn, 2016).

Correspondingly, the list includes: at #1, the Clone, or outright submitting of another person’s work; #2, CTRL+C, which contains “significant portions” of a single source’s text; #3, Find-Replace, which changes some of the words but retains essential content, and so on down to #10, the Re-Tweet, which “Includes proper citation, but relies too closely on the text's original wording and/or structure” (ibid).

UCM’s Academic Honesty Policy defines plagiarism as the following: “the borrowing of ideas, opinions, examples, key words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, or even structure from another person's work, including work written or produced by others without proper acknowledgment” (UCM, 2017).

Steve Buttry, my mentor in journalism, media ethics, and fact-checking, has argued that there is no such thing as “low-level” plagiarism (Buttry, 2014).

Citing a book that he collaborated on with journalists from more than 30 journalism organizations, media companies and universities (Telling the Truth and Nothing But, published as an eBook in 2013 by the Reynolds Journalism Institute, University of Missouri), Buttry presented this definition of plagiarism: “Plagiarism is presenting someone else’s work as your own. Whether it is deliberate or a result of carelessness, such appropriation should be considered unacceptable because it hides the sources of information from the audience. Every act of plagiarism betrays the public’s trust, violates the creator of the original material and diminishes the offender, the craft and our industry” (ACES, 2013).

As someone who has both informally published, as well as worked in journalism, I consider it wise to even guard against inadvertently self-plagiarizing.

With all these issues in mind, the necessary course is to attribute everything! Better to err in citing too much, than to cite too little. By doing so, I hope to avoid an accusation of plagiarism.

Works Cited:
American Copy Editors Society. (2013). Telling the truth and nothing but. Reynolds Journalism Institute, University of Missouri. https://www.rtdna.org/uploads/files/aces_telling_the_truth_1.pdf

Buttry, S. (2014, Sept. 18). Fareed Zakaria’s plagiarism wasn’t ‘low-level;’ no one’s is. The Buttry diary. https://stevebuttry.wordpress.com/2014/09/18/fareed-zakarias-plagiarism-wasnt-low-level-no-ones-is/

TurnItIn. (2016). The plagiarism spectrum. https://www.turnitin.com/static/plagiarism-spectrum/

University of Central Missouri. (2017). Academic honesty policy. https://www.ucmo.edu/offices/general-counsel/university-policy-library/academic-policies/academic-honesty-policy/