Plagiarism Should Be Taken Seriously

But that doesn’t mean throwing accusations around like confetti

This article is not about plagiarism. In a way, it is about the kidnapping of plagiarism, which is where the term originally comes from.

Plagiarism itself is a thorny topic. It can be obvious or subtle, blatant or unintentional, and the law varies around the world. Anywhere that produces written material will have its own guidelines, and there are plenty of good sources of information on plagiarism. This article is not about plagiarism per se, it is about spurious accusations of plagiarism.

An online world makes it physically easier to steal someone else’s work — copy, paste and bingo — but also harder to get away with. Matching software can check against thousands of sources, not only looking in online libraries but comparing one student’s work against others in multiple institutions and against the answers turned out by homework factories.

However, matching software does not — indeed cannot — find plagiarism, and careless use of it leads to baseless accusations of what can be a serious crime.

Matching And Plagiarism Are Not The Same

During my years teaching new students the skills they would need to succeed in higher education, one of the topics that caused the greatest anxiety was the use of matching software.

We taught them about plagiarism, about how to build on the work of others — a key plank in academia — whilst correctly citing the source of their ideas without copying (stealing) other people’s work. We taught them how and when to quote directly, when such quotes were appropriate and useful, and how to attribute them. We went right back to basics and discussed why plagiarism is wrong and the harm it can do.

They got all this. They understood it. Very often — as with many of us — they hadn’t previously looked at it in any depth. Once it had been explained, they understood the principles.

And then we asked them to use matching software…

Anxiety levels rose. Questions that cropped up every year were: What percentage is OK? Is there a minimum? Is there a maximum? They wanted to be told that if they put their work through the matching software and it came out between X% and Y% everything was fine. But that’s not how it works.

Matching software has nothing to say about plagiarism. It can’t. All it looks for is matching. Matching and plagiarism are not the same. Low matching does not automatically equal low plagiarism or vice versa.

Some counterintuitive examples

I have seen an essay showing 95% matching that contained no plagiarism. It’s an extreme example and at that level I was expecting to find that the whole essay had been copied from someone else. In fact, the student had unnecessarily added a huge set of appendices that included the original question and official documents that were the subjects of the essay. All these appendices had matched 100% to their original sources but the student wasn’t claiming to have written them, and no plagiarism was involved.

At the other end of the scale I have seen low single figure percentages that have constituted plagiarism — the low percentage all coming from a single copied block of text whose source was unattributed.

Determining plagiarism by looking solely at the percentage matches that come out of matching software, is like determining the temperature of your oven by looking at the dial on the washing machine. It makes no sense and will lead to burnt fingers or burnt dinner.

Plagiarism Is Serious

Plagiarism is not a minor misdemeanour. I have seen people sacked, their careers ended, over plagiarism. In one extreme instance, the perpetrator dropped off the radar for a decade then popped up on the other side of the world with a whitewashed CV and renewed his career, whereupon the original victims of his plagiarism sent the case papers to his new employer and he was sacked all over again, never to re-emerge.

Having stressed the seriousness, it might seem odd that I’ve also defended students accused of plagiarism. Where a new student, struggling with new concepts, has inappropriately used material but without it being a blatant attempt to hide the wholesale copying of someone else’s work, I have advocated leniency. Until it hits them in the face, people don’t always understand the implications of plagiarism. Telling a student they have failed a piece of work through bad academic practice comes as a shock, but it really brings home the seriousness of it when they are told that their bad academic practice could have tipped into plagiarism, and would have meant the automatic suspension of their course, and a charge of plagiarism forever on their record.

The Inappropriate Use Of Matching Software Leads To Ill-Founded Accusations

Everyone has access to matching software these days and the use of it by publishers is growing. A worrying trend is to see it being incorrectly applied, leading to a crop of spurious allegations.

Other writers have highlighted cases where they have been accused of plagiarism for work that is very clearly all their own, and where the accusation almost certainly comes from the inept use of matching software.

I had a similar experience myself. I wrote an article about writing techniques comparing Dickens to a modern day novelist. I was offered publication if I removed the Dickens quote, because the article was showing too high a percentage of ‘plagiarism’. As the piece revolved around Dickens, removing the quote would have rendered it meaningless, and in any case, the percentage clearly related to matched text, and not plagiarism. I published the article elsewhere but was disturbed both by the ineptitude with which the matching software had been used and by the casual tossing out of such a serious accusation.

Someone Will Be In Trouble If This Isn’t Sorted

I shall conclude by reiterating (not plagiarising) what I said about this in an article in The Shortform.

It’s not for me to say how people run their businesses, but if they use matching software, they should use it properly. I understand that no one wants to publish plagiarised material, and I applaud that. However, greater trouble might await the editor who throws a spurious allegation of plagiarism against the wrong writer. Not all of us will shrug and move on.