Plagiarism and Poor Scholarship

Plagiarism has been described as "the unacknowledged use of another person's work in the form of original ideas, strategies, and research" (Success Secrets of University Students; 185). In our programme, we use the terms poor scholarship and plagiarism. When the comments on a student's work mention that there is "plagiarism", we do not allow the student to redo the work. Hopefully, however, the student comes to understand what plagiarism is in spite of their problem.  It is better if a student discovers early in the programme that they have this problem rather than when they are trying to complete their dissertation.  Failure, of this kind at the dissertation level, is disasterous.

A paper that demonstrates "poor scholarship" can have a grade as low as 35%. We allow such a student to redo their work. One of the most important aspects of poor scholarship that a student must understand is that, the paper they have handed in has large pieces of "unacknowledged" work. This may mean, for example, that a student has reworded a passage from someone else's work that is relevant to their subject.  They have not acknowledged this work that they have borrowed from someone else.  This is "plagiarism" because the thoughts do not belong to them.

One of the problems I commonly see are three or four quotations in one passage. This leads to serious problems for students. When a quotation is included in a student's work, the student is supposed to explain the relevance of the quotation their work. The purpose of a quotation is to back up/show evidence for arguments that are being put forward in the student's paper. If a paragraph has three or four quotations, the students does not have the time and space to (a) make a clear argument about the subject (b) find a quotation that gives evidence to back up the argument (c) gives the student time to explain how the evidence puts the argument forward.

KB