Plagiarism vs. Poor Scholarship

Hi, this post comes around periodically because it is an ongoing problem for some students. I'm aware that many of the students do understand about plagiarism. For those students, please bear with me because these are issues that come up frequently. This is the reason for this posting.

This is is a link to University of Leicester's page on plagiarism:

http://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/ssds/sd/ld/resources/study/plagiarism-tutorial

The following is a link to a useful site at the Indiana University Bloomington that has a useful questionnaire for students who are uncertain about plagiarism:

https://www.indiana.edu/~tedfrick/plagiarism/

To clarify, all students at the University of Leicester should be aware of the university's policy with regard to plagiarism. Once you have read and understood this policy, that may be enough information for some students. However, this is not the case for all students.

Which students are at the most risk of plagiarism or poor scholarship? I have created a list below of conditions that indicate a student is in danger of plagiarism and/or poor scholarship:

1. Students who are lost and use online sources, without clear references, such as this one to help yourself:
http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/bloom.html

This is a poor source to use if you want to understand Bloom's Taxonomy. Notice that there are advertisements here. Notice as well that the taxonomy itself is not labeled. There are many similar websites on, for example, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

Research for your research papers should come from reliable textbooks, the University of Leicester's digital library and some online sources which are reliable. Sadly, Wikipedia cannot be numbered among these sources at the present time because it contains many mistakes and is not written by scholars.

Look at this source for doing research on the Civil War:
http://sunsite.utk.edu/civil-war/warweb.html

Notice that this source points the way to reliable primary (first hand) and secondary sources on the Civil War. This source is updated regularly. Other such sources would include university webpages or webpages such as the Medline.

Students often don't realize good research takes time. You need to allow yourself to have this time to do the kind of research that is expected in quality work.

2. Students who have difficulty writing.

When students can't write properly, they often use the words of others. There are resources such as:

Academic Writing: A Handbook for International Students by Stephen Bailey

to assist students who have difficulty in putting together a good logical argument. Additionally, the University of Leicester offers courses for students who have difficulties with English. Sometime, taking such a programme can make getting your degree easier and is a worthwhile investment.

Finally, I would add that students must understand that rephrasing the words of another author and not providing citations is a big problem. All ideas and concepts stemming from the work of others must be cited.

Students should be aware that if their work is found to be plagiarized, they won't get a second opportunity to submit it. This is why students who are told that their work has failed due to poor scholarship must be careful. They will be allowed to resubmit their work. However, their work will be scrutinized carefully for plagiarism. Additionally, module tutors/markers will expect that they have fixed this problem in the redraft of their assignment.

I hope that this is clear to all students.

KB

Thank you to all students

Dear Students:

I was very touched by the number of responses when I was forced to go off line for a while earlier this year. As you may have noticed, there have been a number of blog postings since then. The responses of my students has made me realize that this blog is being read. As we go into summer, I'm going to try and include blogs on grammar. I had considered dropping these blog postings but find that they are very useful for most students.

Thank you again. Every posting is appreciated.

KB