Sample Scenarios

Analysis: This student has committed plagiarism.

Though it’s entirely possible that this student had perfectly innocent intentions when they chose to review sample essays on the topic they intended to write about, in the end they knowingly submitted a paper in which part of the intellectual work was done by someone else, and they didn’t cite these sources to make that contribution visible. It doesn’t matter that the student put the ideas from the sample essays into their own words; the fact remains that the student took credit for someone else’s ideas, and that’s plagiarism.

Analysis: This student has most likely committed plagiarism.

This student took credit for someone else’s intellectual efforts: they did not solve the homework problems themselves, but they led their instructor to believe that they had. This student may feel that they learned what they were meant to learn from the exercise, but that doesn’t entitle them to commit academic dishonesty or to circumvent part of the work that will determine their course grade.

Furthermore, it’s irrelevant that the assignment in question was “just” a routine homework assignment, since the principles that define plagiarism apply just as much to small-scale assignments as they do to large essays and projects. Any time you present someone else’s intellectual labor as your own, you commit plagiarism, and you risk the penalties associated with plagiarism, regardless of the value of the assignment.

The only way this would be acceptable would be if the student’s instructor explicitly told students that it was okay to consult answer sets for their homework. As we note many times on this site, different instructors have different standards, and sometimes instructors genuinely don’t care if students receive this kind of assistance on homework assignments. You should never assume this, though.

Analysis: This student has almost certainly committed plagiarism. 

It doesn’t matter that the text was originally written by this student, because it does not represent the student’s intellectual work for this assignment. By submitting work that was originally written for a previous course, the student has defeated the purpose of the current assignment—to learn more about the approaches to diversity in higher ed.The only way this reuse of old writing would be acceptable would be if the student received explicit approval from their instructor before they submitted the assignment. Instructors will sometimes allow this kind of repurposing, but students should never assume that this is acceptable and do it without asking the instructor.

Analysis: Student O has definitely committed plagiarism, and Student P may have committed an academic integrity violation as well.

It wasn’t necessarily wrong for these students to meet outside of class to discuss the reading and share ideas about their essays, as long as both students were contributing ideas equally and making an effort to write papers that reflected their own ideas and work.

In this case, though, Student O used Student P’s work in place of their own. It doesn’t matter that Student P technically hadn’t written the essay yet or that the ideas Student M used came out of an oral conversation, not a written text. The fact is that Student O wrote an essay based on Student P’s reading and ideas but presented it as their own work, and that’s plagiarism.

Furthermore, if Student P knowingly helped Student O to claim credit for work they didn’t do, then Student P also committed an academic integrity violation and could face penalties as well. In effect, this would be no different than allowing Student O to copy their answers on an exam.

Students A, B, and C have committed an academic integrity violation, and Student D probably has as well.

It’s entirely possible that Students A, B, and C didn’t think they were doing anything wrong here–after all, they didn’t invite Student D to join their group; Student D just happened to see them in the library and join their conversation. However, the students’ intentions don’t change the facts of the situation. Student D contributed to their project, and by turning in the assignment without acknowledging Student D’s contribution, Students A, B, and C took credit for Student D’s work.

Furthermore, if Student D knew that his classmates intended to submit their assignment without acknowledging their assistance, then Student D has also committed an academic integrity violation. They may have seen this as nothing more than a friendly conversation between classmates, but as soon as it became clear that Students A, B, and C were actually working on an assignment, Student D should have left, or Students A, B, and C should have asked Student D to leave so they could complete the assignment on their own.

Analysis: Student L has definitely committed plagiarism.
Student M and Student N have also committed plagiarism, even though they didn’t intend to.

The issue with Student L is obvious–by taking text from another author without crediting it, they presented someone else’s work as their own.

Student M and Student N are in a more complicated position. Strictly speaking, they didn’t know that part of Student L’s section was written by someone else, and thus they did not knowingly commit plagiarism. Nevertheless, they did technically take credit for someone else’s work by submitting an assignment that was partially plagiarized. This means that, at the very least, Student M and Student N might be called upon to prove that they didn’t know what Student L was doing, which might be difficult if Student L isn’t willing to take full responsibility for their actions. If they couldn’t prove their innocence, it’s possible that Student M and Student N would face the same consequences as Student L.

As this scenario illustrates, it’s important for every member of a group to keep track of how sources are used throughout a project and to make sure their group members are maintaining academic honesty. When you put your name on an assignment and submit it, you take responsibility for the entire content of that paper, even the parts that were written by your collaborators.

Analysis: Student J did not treat their group members fairly, but they probably did not commit plagiarism.

In a collaborative project, it’s ultimately the collaborators’ responsibility to divide the labor up in a way that everyone can live with. When people don’t fulfill their assigned duties, the responsibility falls on the other group members to deal with that as well. If the students in this group felt that Student J wasn’t doing their share of the work, they should have found a way to take that up with Student J directly or asked their instructor to step in. Either way, though, they would need to address this before they turned in the final version of the document. Since they didn’t do that, and since Student J did contribute something to the final project (no matter how slight that contribution may have been), then it’s not technically plagiarism for Student J to claim credit for the assignment alongside their group members. 

There is one important qualification to this, though. Sometimes, when instructors assign group projects, they will explicitly stipulate how much work each group member must do (e.g. “each student is responsible for writing one section of the final document”), or they will require students to describe in detail what each group member contributed to the final product. If that were the case in this scenario, the students would be obligated to point out that Student J did not complete their portion of the work, and failure to do so would constitute academic dishonesty (though not technically plagiarism).

Analysis: These students have not committed plagiarism.

Since this was a collaborative assignment, there’s nothing inherently wrong with dividing up the labor according to each collaborator’s interests and abilities. In professional scholarship, collaborative papers are typically written in just this way, and as long as each student does some of the writing and has the opportunity to comment/edit all sections, this is a perfectly fine way to approach the project.

Analysis:

This student has committed plagiarism, and the student’s roommate has probably committed an academic integrity violation as well.

Choosing and citing secondary sources was part of the intellectual work for this assignment. In this case, though, the student used their roommate’s lab report as a kind of map, which allowed them to avoid this part of the assignment by simply using the sources that the roommate had already chosen. Thus, the student used their roommate’s intellectual work, but presented it as their own.

Furthermore, by providing their old lab report for the student to use, the roommate enabled the student to commit plagiarism, which is also an academic integrity violation. There are many ways the roommate could have helped this student without doing part of their work for them; providing the student with a completed version oof the very assignment they were working on was not an appropriate form of assistance.

Analysis: This student may have committed plagiarism.

As we noted elsewhere in this guide, the rules for when you can use and how you should cite code written by someone else vary significantly, depending on the course and the assignment. The short answer is that, just to be safe, you should always treat code as an outside source that needs to be cited, unless your instructor explicitly says otherwise

Analysis: Desperate or not, this student has certainly committed plagiarism.

Not much analysis should be required here–hiring someone else to do your college coursework for you is the very definition of an academic integrity violation. The noteworthy thing about this case is the feeling of desperation that drove the student to such a poor decision. 

It’s worth remembering that we often make our worst errors in judgment when we’re under significant pressure, since pressure and anxiety make it easier to convince ourselves that we have no better alternatives. In reality, though, this student might face much more significant penalties than failing a single class, possibly including suspension or expulsion.

A much better alternative would be for the student to discuss their problems in the course with their professor and/or an academic counselor or class dean. If the student was really that far behind, it’s possible that none of these people will be able to help the student get the grade they want in this class, but they might be able to help the student assess their situation more rationally and find a viable path for success in future terms.

Analysis: This student has not technically committed plagiarism, but their use of another scholar’s graph is problematic.

For professional scholarship in most disciplines, a graph is generally viewed as too large a contribution to “quote,” even with attribution, without the author/copyright holder’s written consent. Since graphs and data visualizations represent the culmination of a significant amount of intellectual labor, using someone else’s graph is, in effect, the same as quoting several pages of another author’s text: even if you give the original author their due credit, you’re simply using too much of their work to do so without asking the author directly.

However, in some departments at Carleton, it is acceptable to use a graph in your comps project with the understanding that comps is a work in progress. The time available for you to complete your project is simply too short for you to ask authors individually for permission to reproduce their graphs, and so your department might accept a project with a reproduced draft (assuming you clearly cited the original author). But this practice isn’t acceptable in every department, and it’s not always acceptable outside of a comps project. So, once again, the best practice is to ask your instructor or advisor what practices you’re expected to follow.

Analysis: This student has committed plagiarism.

It’s easy to see, from the student’s point of view, why this might have seemed acceptable. After all, the student knows what their data “should” have looked like, and they wrote the lab report themselves, even if the data they used wasn’t technically from their own experiment. However, this logic only holds if the student assumes that the purpose of the assignment was to get the “right” result and that the intellectual work involved in running the experiment and recording the data don’t count. 

This is not the case, though. Running the experiment was part of the assignment, and it was the student’s responsibility to record their own data accurately and analyze their own results, whatever they may be. Thus, by using someone else’s data, this student took credit for someone else’s work and defeated the purpose of the assignment.

Analysis: This student has not technically plagiarized, but they have committed an academic integrity violation.

The term plagiarism doesn’t apply to this scenario, since the student is not taking credit for another person’s work (or for their own work in a different course). However, the student is certainly taking credit for work they did not do. Their assigned task was to record a specific set of data points, but they failed to do that, and by presenting calculated results in place of observed data, they have misrepresented the extent to which they completed this assignment. This is an academic integrity violation, and the student could face significant penalties for it.