Plagiarism

Plagiarism is a cardinal sin in University. Many are tempted by it, some succumb to it, and some are expelled for it. In some subjects, there are online ways for the Profs to detect plagiarism that get better all the time, so what worked for your friend last semester might not work for you now.

The anti-plagiarism ethic is justified, both from the point of view of the students who might work hard for middling grades, and from the point of view of the University itself, its credibility, and its integrity.

Yet nothing is completely original. Sometimes, for an assignment or a project, only a limited number of approaches are possible. If ever you look at what someone else is doing, or you brainstorm together, you're using the other person's work. And if you read a book, decide to approach your work from the same angle, and use some of the same ideas, you're stealing the author's work, right?

So yes, there is a line somewhere that you can approach, but mustn't cross. And as in the rest of my own program, it all works a little differently from the way things are elsewhere. Here, work that already exists is referred to as “precendents”, and we are encouraged to use it. In fact, if we didn't, we couldn't get any decent work done at all.

You read, you look at the precedents and get ideas from them, you choose things that inspire you and use them, you borrow, you work with others, you try an approach out together with someone else. Maybe both of you use the same approach. Maybe it's the only approach that's possible.

Originality, creativity: they're not always possible. It would be possible to walk over to someone else's work when the person isn't there, look at it, and then do the same thing yourself. In my experience, though, that never happens. It would be stealing. What does happen is that the two of you look at someone's work together, you take the idea, and work on it by yourself for a bit. It's how you develop and exploit the complexities of the idea that makes your work original.

I can think of one example to make the point. We were working in groups on a project; each of us had the same assignment but we had to follow it individually, while maintaining some sort of dialogue. My friend Morgan had a good idea, so I pretty much incorporated it into my own project. I wasn't sure about doing it, so I went to the Prof, and said, “I stole this idea from Morgan.” “No, you didn't steal it,” he replied, “you appropriated it.” Part of the idea of the project was “appropriation”, so in fact I was following both the spirit of the assignment and the letter.

And that's what we're being taught to do. We use Precedents, and we appropriate. We do not copy and we do not present as our own something that was substantially done by someone else. That would be plagiarism.