Preventing Plagiarism or Policing It?

The Complexities and Perplexities of Plagiarism Policy Making

Organizer:
Gerald Nelms, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale

Participants:
Claire Lamonica, Associate Director of the Center for Teaching, Illinois State University;
Linda Sherwood, Kirtland Community College

Over the past twenty years, scholarship on plagiarism has increased exponentially.  Some of it has simply been impulsive diatribes, based less on research than on anecdotal classroom experience, interpreted through the instructor’s particularly colored lens.  Some scholarship on plagiarism, however, has involved serious research, and the findings of this work have revealed more complicated behaviors than previously thought.  We no longer understand plagiarism as a unified field.  Instead, what gets labeled as plagiarism are a variety of different kinds of behaviors that suggest a need for plagiarism policies to account for these differences.  We know now, for example, that mis-citations and misattributions can be intentional but are often unintended.  We know that developing writers, seeking to become discourse community “insiders” often will fall into what has come to be called “patchwriting,” a stage in writerly development.  We know that there exist “institutionalized” contexts where plagiarism is not only acceptable but even expected and encouraged.  We know, too, that the reasons behind unintentional and intentional mis-citations and misattributions are multiple and not always deserving of similar punishments—or even punishment at all.  We know that the domain of plagiarism and student dishonesty generally is shot through with affective responses and that emotion can play a crucial part in our understanding of plagiarism and plagiarism policy.

This panel, then, will explore with its audience the complexities—and perplexities—of developing sound plagiarism policy.