Thank you to everyone who has commented, whether privately or publicly, on my Beat the Witch-Hunt! guide for conscientious students on how to avoid and rebut accusations of plagiarism. [i] I'd like to take up some of the points that have been raised.

Is the term 'witch-hunt' justified? Please look at the situation from the point of view of conscientious, hard-working, law-abiding students. There are many of them. They're faced with regulations and warnings couched in highly emotive language: plagiarism is cheating, theft, stealing, dishonest, a crime. In some universities a threatening, intimidating atmosphere has been created.

Some first-year students have to sign plagiarism statements immediately on arrival saying they're aware of the seriousness of plagiarism and the penalties attached. So they turn up at uni, stand in a queue to register, are told 'sign here', given no time to read the small print. [ii] In effect, they are welcomed to the academic community with a message from their teachers saying: 'We regard you as potentially dishonest, a cheat and a thief, and we are watching you!' 

And the regulations and warnings are often highly confusing. There tends to be a common core - you mustn't pass off other people's work as your own, which is fair enough - but they all give rise to more questions. If you unintentionally don't cite a source, does that count as plagiarism? If you use two or three phrases that you dimly recollect from a lecture or some article you've read, without attributing them, does that make you guilty of plagiarism? How close to an unattributed original does paraphrasing have to be for it to be plagiarism? And what counts as 'common knowledge', so you don't need to reference it? There are very few standard answers to these questions: what happens in a particular case is likely to depend on who is sitting in judgment on you.

In effect, if you're a student, you discover first that you're in a game you don't know the rules of, and then you discover that you're in a game where the other side is able to make up the rules as they go along! It seems to me that 'witch-hunt' is a very apt description!

Isn't plagiarism cheating? Let me be absolutely clear about this. I abhor cheating. It's unfair on the conscientious, hard-working, law-abiding students, and understandably upsets them. But the word 'plagiarism' is interpreted by different people to mean different things, as the different answers that may be given to the above questions illustrate. And many academics would not regard unintentional failure to cite a source, or failure to attribute a dimly-recollected phrase or two, or paraphrasing of an unattributed original into which some work has evidently been put, or an error of judgment as to what can be treated as common knowledge, as tantamount to cheating.

There's a more subtle point here too. One of the dictionary definitions of 'plagiarism' is 'appropriating [the thoughts, writings, etc.] of others'. In this sense, plagiarism is actually integral to the Western system of propagating knowledge and ideas through higher education, because - as Diana Laurillard puts it in Rethinking University Teaching - 'it is a peculiarity of academic learning that its focus is not the world itself but others' views of that world'. [iii] You read and listen, you copy out, you make your notes, you paraphrase (that's to say, you translate academic-speak into language you can understand), and you absorb, you digest, other people's work. It's 'honest plagiarism', if you like. Far from being 'cheating', appropriating from others is central to academic learning.

Students know what plagiarism is: some of them admit to having plagiarized. We don't know what definition of 'plagiarism' those students had in mind: some may have based their answers on recollections of incidents that their teachers would have regarded as trivial (e.g. failing to reference a couple of phrases). Philip King reports on a survey of 138 pre-sessional international students who were asked: 'Do you know what plagiarism is?' Precisely half (69) replied 'yes' and gave an answer that 'generally made sense': the other half replied 'no' (32), 'not sure' (3), 'yes' but their answers 'showed confusion' (21), or 'yes' but their answers were 'totally incomprehensible' (13). [iv] Pre-sessional international students will not be representative of the whole UK student population by any means, but King's analysis is a warning against taking at face value an affirmative answer to the question: 'Do you know what plagiarism is?'

A case study. In a public mailing to the Plagiarism list, Guinevere Glasfurd argued that her university, Essex, far from disempowering students, empowers them in a number of ways, including providing web-based resources on plagiarism. [v] It's worth taking a close look at these. All pages were last accessed on 25 November 2003.

The opening page (1) unambiguously equates plagiarism with cheating: 'Plagiarism, or cheating, is a very serious academic offence and will be treated as such by the University of Essex.' Since cheating is usually thought of as a deliberate act (dictionaries associate it with deceit and deliberate misrepresentation), equating plagiarism with cheating could well lead students to believe that an involuntary act won't constitute plagiarism. But a link from this page takes students to another (2) which says: 'Plagiarism is a very serious academic offence but more often than not it results from misunderstanding rather than a deliberate intention to cheat. Many students simply do not understand what plagiarism is exactly (sic).' So here students are told that an involuntary act can constitute plagiarism. They might well infer from this that plagiarism is not necessarily to be equated with cheating.

If students follow a link from page 2 they find themselves at yet another page (3) which is headed 'What is plagiarism?' and reiterates 'Plagiarism is cheating'. It gives three examples, one of which is this: 'You will be plagiarising if you copy sections of someone else's work and just change the odd word or phrase.' Clicking on a 'more information' button takes the student to a further page (4) where the information is different, introducing the criterion of crediting: 'If you copy someone else's work but change the odd phrase or word, without giving full and proper credit to the original source, then you are cheating and will risk failing your assignment.' 

Another link from page 2 takes students to a page (5) headed 'University regulations'. It begins: 'The University has established very clear regulations against plagiarism. These are outlined below. Please read them carefully and make sure you understand them.' There then follow extracts from two of the University's regulations in which the word 'plagiarism' does not appear!

In fact the main regulation quoted is all to do with cheating. It begins: 'It is an offence for a student to engage in unfair academic practices or to cheat in any examination, or in any other submitted part of his or her university work ...' and goes on to say what is meant by "To cheat". One example is 'to use the work of others (whether written, printed or some other form) without acknowledgement, where a judgement is made that this has been the result of serious negligence or of intention to deceive'. So this formulation avoids the colloquial language 'the odd word or phrase' but gives students different information again about the perils of copying, this time introducing a third criterion, that of whether 'serious negligence' or 'intention to deceive' has been adjudged to have played a part.

To sum up. The University of Essex's web pages on plagiarism tell students in one place that plagiarism is cheating and in another suggests that they are not necessarily the same. The pages tell students that the University has very clear regulations against plagiarism and then give extracts from the regulations in which the word 'plagiarism' does not appear. And they give students three different definitions of the offence associated with copying, telling them in one place that they will be plagiarising if they copy sections of someone else's work and just change the odd word or phrase; in another place that they will be plagiarising if they do this and fail to credit their original source; in a third place that they will be cheating if they use the work of others without acknowledgement and are judged to have shown serious negligence or intention to deceive. 

All this would be laughable were it not for its implications for students. By any standards the advice given by Essex University to its students on plagiarism is confusing if not downright misleading. Its regulations on cheating seem to me to be basically sound (although I would question whether a finding of 'serious negligence' should be taken as determining that a student is guilty of an academic offence rather than as an indicator of a low academic standard), but its venture into the deep and muddy waters of plagiarism has created a situation of which it cannot be proud. Empowering its students? I think not. Confusion does not empower.

What's to be done? In my view, when it comes to plagiarism academics and managers have lost the plot. They have embarked on a search for the ideal definition of 'plagiarism' that is inherently futile because in practice it is invariably a matter of judgment as to whether plagiarism has taken place. They have issued warnings to students, at Essex and elsewhere, that 'plagiarism is cheating', which ignore both the element of judgment in decisions about plagiarism - if academics often have difficulty in judging whether plagiarism has taken place we cannot seriously expect students to find it straightforward to do so - and the centrality of 'honest plagiarism' to academic learning. 

Universities would do better, I suggest, to shift (or shift back) their focus from 'plagiarism' to 'cheating'. They should concentrate on minimizing incentives to cheat, by demystifying higher education and helping students to develop good academic practice: if you can get good marks through your own efforts you have no need to pass off other people's work as your own. And of course they should continue to develop methods of detecting cheating where it has taken place. As a useful first step in this direction, I would like to see the Plagiarism Advisory Service renamed without further ado the Cheating (or Anti-Cheating) Advisory Service. Can there be any reason why not?

Peter Levin

Notes

i       Beat the witch-hunt! Peter Levin's Guide on Avoiding and Rebutting Accusations of Plagiarism, for Conscientious Students can be accessed at <http://www.study-skills.net> 

ii      Email from Margarita Rainford to [log in to unmask], sent 22 September 2003. Subject: Re: students' consent. 'I have just registered for a programme of study and no-one explained the small print to me, nor was I given a copy of the regulations that I had by that time signed my agreement to! The queue behind me was so big that I felt under pressure to just complete the process and let the next one in the queue take their turn.'

iii     Diana Laurillard (1993), Rethinking University Education, London & New York: Routledge, Ch.1 & p.50

iv      Philip King (2002), Plagiarism: An informal investigation into international students' perceptions of the problem  <http://online.northumbria.ac.uk/faculties/art/information_studies/Imri/JISCPAS/docs/external/students_perceptions_questionnaire.pdf>  (Accessed 30 November 2003)

v       Email from Guinevere A. Glasfurd to [log in to unmask], sent 7 November 2003. Subject: Re: Conscientious students

1       <http://www.essex.ac.uk/plagiarism/>

2       <http://www.essex.ac.uk/plagiarism/Contents.htm>

3       <http://www.essex.ac.uk/plagiarism/definition%20of%20plagiarism.htm>

4       <http://www.essex.ac.uk/plagiarism/paraphrasing.htm>

5       <http://www.essex.ac.uk/plagiarism/university_regulations.htm>

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