When dissecting the issue of plagiarism the different types of plagiarism caught my eye. According to Equityedu.com one type is "accidental plagiarism." Accidental plagiarism can be caused by poor references or citations. If students are unfamiliar with the expected citation formatting, such as MLA (Modern Language Association), then they might not understand that the lack of formatting qualifies their work as plagiarized. The problem with accidental plagiarism is the at the instructor might have a challenging time trying to figure out if the work was deliberately plagiarize or if it was purely accidental. There is another type of plagiarism that is not viewed that severely, this is "self-plagiarism." It is when you take work that you've previously submitted or received credit for and resubmit it, with out recognizing that it has already been used for something else. Because this form of plagiarism is mainly hurting yourself it is not dealt with on as serious of a level.
Both accidental plagiarism and self-plagiarism are forms of plagiarism, but the consequences they receive are far less severe than the consequences for "deliberate plagiarism." Deliberate plagiarism is when the plagiarist knows that they are copying a source while not providing credit. It could be someone being hired to write your paper, copying and pasting sections of an essay from the Internet, or taking credit for ideas that were not your own. These are just a few examples, but there are many others. Basically, deliberate plagiarism is when someone knows that they are taking information or material and not giving proper credit to the original source. This is the issue that is poisoning the schools, students are choosing to plagiarize and are ignoring the consequences. In the academic world deliberate plagiarism is considered taboo and, when detected, can receive harsh consequences. For the purpose of this blog when I refer to "plagiarism" I am referring to deliberate plagiarism. I am doing this because accidental plagiarism and self-plagiarism typically happen on accident and the consequences and penalties are much less severe.
You might ask, where do I draw the line for what needs to be cited and what is considered common knowledge. Thomas E. Payne says that Common Knowledge usually follows these criteria. You are able to locate the information in at lease five other documents and that it is not cited in those documents. It also qualifies as common knowledge if you think that the any reader would already know that information, for example, the alphabet is well known and would not need to be cited. You may also be concerned that you and a peer individually came up with the same concept, but because they are similar ideas it might appear to be plagiarism. This is called Simultaneous Inspiration, it commonly happens when multiple people look at the same source and have similar interpretations. If well explained then this will be excused from the suspicion of plagiarism. But, this is heavily examined because people try to use it as a trick to plagiarize, so if you actually had simultaneous inspirations then it must be well defended.
This video was created by Tori Hamachek. It discusses what plagiarism is and why it is problematic.
