Test Your Plagiarism Smarts
“Everybody’s doing it,” you say? Well you are so not going become a statistic. How well do you know the difference between plagiarizing and properly documenting sources? Take the Plagiarism Challenge – try this self test:
Three anthropology students are assigned a paper on the career options for someone in their field of study. Tara finds some good online articles on the topic, published by the U.S. Department of Education and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, so she cuts and pastes large portions of them into her paper. She adds a Works Cited list at the end of the essay, identifying some of the sources she copied.
Bonnie finds those articles, too, as well as several books written by prominent anthropologists. She considers the writers' ideas, picks those that would be useful, develops her own thesis, and then rewords all the ideas she read about very carefully. Although she doesn't identify the materials and authors she cites, she doesn't copy anything directly, either.
Eduardo also finds some good online articles as well as books on the subject. He copies and pastes and also copies some choice paragraphs from the books. Then, to make his paper sound more authoritative, he inserts phrases like “I think that…” Then he hands the paper in as if it presented his own ideas.
Who has committed plagiarism – Tara, Bonnie, or Eduardo?
See the answer here.