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Case 2a :

Plagiarism—A Case of Copy-Paste

Ravi and Shen are working late in the office, trying to complete quickly the marking for their courses so that they can get back to work on their dissertations.

"Have you ever experienced déjà vu?", Ravi asked.

"Day jah vu… that is when you 'feel like you have been somewhere before but have never been to there?', right?", replied Shen.

"Right. I am almost done reading these essays for that Common Core Course which I am a course tutor for and I am certain I have read these same sentences before, but I just cannot figure out where", said Ravi.

"Oh, you think maybe you read the same essay? Or maybe the students used the same source? Did you put the papers into turnitin.com? I took library courses on it and I can show you how to use it. Come over here to see on my computer", offered Shen.

Ravi and Shen spent almost 45 minutes to upload all of the course papers to turnitin and generate the "originality reports", but as soon as the reports were finished, Ravi's suspicions were confirmed. He had read the same text—three times! Not only was the same group of sentences, which included a lengthy definition of a major course concept, found verbatim in each paper, the students had all organized the remainder of their essays in the same sequence as the original author!

As the two tutors poured over websites, their conversation turned to what each tutor believed to be the nature of the alleged fraud the students committed. Ravi argued that the copy-paste of text with no quotation or citation was a clear case of plagiarism. Shen argued that there was another problem: the students each based their essay substantively on the previous author's work without giving the author credit.

Ravi must inform the course instructor about these three suspicious papers, but he is not sure if he should report what Shen is concerned about.

"How many ways are there to write a paper?", Ravi muses on his way to the instructor's office.

But, in the back of his mind, Ravi thinks that Shen may be on to something.

• What are the problems here?
• What are Ravi's concerns?
• What are Shen's concerns?
   

Imagine you are Ravi and you are preparing to go to the meeting with the course instructor:

• What materials should you bring for the instructor to gain all of the knowledge you have about the cases?
• Does it matter that the only material directly "cut and paste" is a definition?
• Or does the composition of the essay in the same way also constitute plagiarism?
• How much text must be copied to "count" as plagiarism?
• What do you believe should happen to the students?