My story about "plagiarized" essay

This English teacher gave me a really hard time... I had to write a political essay about the success and failures of the current president. I read some articles about the government, president Bush etc. I found one article that I really liked and I agreed with the author's points - it basically was written in a form of an essay. I thought - since I agree with the topic sentence and the author's points, I will paraphrase it so that I get an original essay.

I rewrote EACH AND EVERY sentence, for example:

Original: President Bush should have not been reelected.

I changed it to:

I don't think it was good for the nation to elect Mr. Bush to be the US president again.

I left the original author's ideas, but I completely reworded them. Unfortunately, my teacher had read this article before and somehow determined I plagiarized it and gave me an F!

I don't think it was fair of him... He didn't require us to include a reference page so I didn't write where I got the ideas from.

He was the hardest teacher I had to deal with throughout college... :( I still think I didn't plagiarize it.

Joy

Well, I think quoting somebody's ideas without referencing may be considered "a sign of plagiarism" - but I don't think the teacher was right to give you an F.

Beatrice

bring it up with the dean, explain there is no evidence that you plagarized and that paraphrasing is not plagarism!

Well, it would be difficult to persuade a professor that paraphrasing is not plagiarism... Check out this link:

facpub.stjohns.edu/~roigm/plagiarism/Paraphrasing%20and%20plagiarism .html

Beatrice

I wrote an email to the dean; he promised to "look into it." The problem is - I'm going to have two more classes with the same teacher who gave me an F so I also told the dean it's not that important - the most important is getting a good grade on the final exams...

Joy

Any news from the dean, Joy? Your case doesn't look like plagiarism at all.

Actually, I was going to make a post about it. My teacher told me he found out I contacted the dean. But he wasn't angry with me or something. Instead, he offered me to write another essay on a similar topic. I agreed, of course and this time I made sure everything was 101% original. I got an A- and I'm happy about it. I'm lucky the teacher wasn't malicious or something. Thanks for asking.

JOy

Some of these teachers are taking this anti-plagiarism stuff way too far. I wrote an essay about television. My opening sentence said, "Television is the most powerful form of communication ever created", or something to that effect. The teacher flagged it as "plagiarized" and demanded to know where I had stolen that sentence. I told her that if I was guilty of anything, I was guilty of not being very creative, but not of plagairism. Your sentence, "Bush should not have been reelected" falls into that same category. I could see a possible plagiarism issue if you listed specific reasons why he should not have been reelected, but those could be easily fixed by saying, "As John Smith observed, blah blah blah..." or by using a parenthetical citation. What's next? If I write, "The Earth is round", are they going to ask for a source in APA style?

workingonit
That's exactly what I'm talking about. The more information, the less anti-plagiarism software relevant is. One can hear stories on TV about respected authors accused of plagiarism. There must be something done about it.

JOY

Joy~you are lucky! I got an "F" several month ago. The reason is "late submission". Of course I'm not.... Just because they made mistake with my student number!

I argured it, but the professor told me there was no chance to change it because the term was almost finished (it's an one year Master course, I got the result in the last week) and I passed because I got B in the exam, so she will not change the result for me!! can you believe that!

So~~you really lucky!! He's a kind teacher

some teachers are indeed nuts ..........i have one teacher in College.....when we wrote our thesis she told us to pick some good topic , we gave her our topic and she turn it down , the next thing we do , me and my classmate think of another topic and she turn it down again, again we made another topic we asked our friend one PH.d and another Master Degree and to our horror she turn it down again....we are so furious already that topics made by Ph.D and a Master Degree were turn down.....Later we know that she have already have a topic in mind and she tells us to write bout it ....tsk........tsk.........tsk..........can't believe teachers are really nuts sometimes.......anyway we have been graded A+ ........lolz........

@Joy7 paraphrasing without reference is still plagiarism You were claiming the thoughts of others as your own. That is the basic concept of plagiarism and that is what you did. Stop trying to convince yourself otherwise. Plagarism detectors can easily prove such a case.

College professors fully understand the difference between coincidentally and innocently happening to write a sentence that's very similar to a source -- especially on a topic that's been written about countless times --- and actually plagiarizing. They don't make plagiarism accusations every time they encounter an isolated sentence that's similar (or even identical) to a source. They typically look very carefully to see whether the other sentences and the rest of the project also follow that published source too closely. If the rest of the work that you submit seems original, they don't suspect anything just because one sentence is too similar, unless it's a really unique sentence that had to have been copied. Conversely, if you were to entirely change the wording of a source but make all of the same substantive points of analysis or commentary and sub-points, and all of them are in the same (or recognizably close) order as the same points in the published source, that will get flagged, because the substantive points of analysis and commentary all belong to the original source, even if you substitute every single word in the essay.

Writers have been known to inspire one another. They borrow from each other's ideas by expanding on discussion points, debating issues, or writing original pieces based on what they learn from previously written pieces. They very rarely accuse one another of plagiarism because not all thoughts are original and nobody holds the rights to any given thoughts. Similar writing happens all the time. It is not automatically ruled as plagiarism by a thinking person. A plagiarism software is a different matter.

It is clear to anyone who reads your story that yours was a case of inspiration and writing based on what you learned. I but the dean and your professor studied your paper, with your professor eventually .His mistake gave you a second chance at writing. The subsequent grade could have been a product of the realization that similar topics maybe written similarly at times.

Congratulations on a job well done (twice) !

Obviously, nobody knows what anybody else's thoughts are until those thoughts are expressed. Once they're expressed, they're called "intellectual property" and their author most certainly does hold the rights to them; in fact, there's a whole body of law dedicated to the ownership of those kinds of rights.


If you didn't give credit to the original author for his ideas, that's precisely what plagiarism is. Based on your story, your professor obviously recognized that you did exactly what you've described in your post: you restated the ideas of the author without crediting that author for his ideas and you tried to pass off those ideas as your own ideas. That's called plagiarism.