Explaining Plagiarism In Class Discussion
All students suffer from the pressures of academic life and may be tempted to take a short cut in their writing in order to save time or raise a grade. Multi-lingual writers are no more likely to consciously “cheat” on a writing assignment than their mono-lingual counterparts.
However, students who come from multi-lingual backgrounds, especially international students who have been in the U.S. for only a short period of time, may bring quite different views on intellectual property than those assumed in the American educational setting; these different conceptions of the incorporation of outside sources in writing may result in acts that appear to be intentional plagiarism but actually are the result of cultural misunderstanding.
Explicitly discussing what plagiarism is and why it is so important in a U.S. context given the norms of academic research and U.S. copyright law can help clarify this issue for both international and American students, as the latter group may have some sense that it is “wrong” but little idea why it matters so much to their professors.
Refer all students to their handbook’s section on plagiarism and multi-cultural perspectives on intellectual property. The handbook they bought for their first-year writing course contains a thorough explanation of these ideas.
