Cheating is a broad category

This workshop will focus on what plagiarism is and how to avoid it, but plagiarism is just one type of cheating. We wanted to start this workshop with a wider discussion about the problems with cheating in college. There are lots of good reasons not to cheat and you’ve probably heard that it’s not fair to other students or it hurts the quality of the college overall if some students complete their degree by cheating. But we think the biggest problem with cheating is what it does to the student who cheats.

But cheating makes college assignments easier–so easy that you don’t get stronger by doing them. Similarly, if you were lifting big-looking weights that were really filled with air, it might make it look like you were training, but you wouldn’t actually be able to lift heavier weights even after lifting for years.

So it’s important for college assignments to be challenging and for you to struggle sometimes to do them. It’s that struggle that makes you stronger.

Types of Cheating

Sharing answers is a type of cheating that happens on homework and tests. It’s when two or more students work together or one student answers the questions and gives their answers to other students. Professors will tell you if working on an assignment or a test with other students is OK. So if your professor has not told you to work with a partner or with a group, they will expect that all of your homework or test answers are your own and they will not want you to share answers with other students.

To use our example of weight-lifting, sharing answers is like everyone working together to move a heavy weight. It may get the weight to move, but it doesn’t mean that any individual is actually strong enough to move the weight on their own. Your professor wants you to show that you’re able to carry the full weight of the homework assignment or test by doing it yourself.  That way you’ll be strong enough when there are opportunities to collaborate or help others, like when you join a team of colleagues, work on group projects for classes, become a tutor, or offer advice and support to your family, etc.

Plagiarizing is also a type of cheating. It is taking words or ideas from someone else and passing them off as your own in an essay or a speech. It can also be taking words or ideas that were meant for an old assignment and turning them in for a new assignment. Plagiarizing is like making the weights lighter but wanting to get credit for still lifting heavy weights. Plagiarism can even happen when you don’t mean to and you can get a failing grade and face college sanctions, meaning negative consequences, even if it was unintentional. That’s why we created the workshop in this packet, so that you will know exactly what plagiarism is and have the power to avoid it and get stronger as a student.

The range of possible consequences for academic misconduct like cheating and plagiarism are detailed in the Coastline College Student Code of Conduct.

What is the Difference Between Plagiarizing, Quoting and Paraphrasing?

As you just read, plagiarism is when you take words or ideas from sources but you let your reader think that they’re your own so that you get credit for them. But you can use ideas and words from sources without plagiarizing. There are two main ways to incorporate sources into your essay without plagiarizing them. You can quote them, which means copy them word-for-word, put quotation marks around them, and show where you got them by citing them. Or, the more common way to incorporate sources into your essays is to paraphrase them by putting them in your own words and showing where you got them by citing them.

In this workshop, you will see examples of direct quoting and paraphrasing. Pay close attention to the examples of paraphrasing because the types of unintentional plagiarism that we are trying to help you to avoid are most likely to happen when you paraphrase sources. We will focus on that type of writing in this workshop.

Here are two sentences from a research source that a student might want to quote directly or paraphrase. All of the research sources and other materials we use in this workshop are listed in the Works Cited at the end of this workshop.

Below the sample passage from a research source, you will see examples of how a direct quote and a paraphrase could look.

Sample passage from a research source written by Robert Keiter, a professor at the University of Utah:

The National Park Service’s ostensible goal was to enable people to see and experience these extraordinarily scenic places, which in turn would help secure public support for the new park system and thus needed congressional funding. The net result was to transform the national parks from a wilderness setting into a tourist destination, such that visitation today exceeds 320 million people annually and results in overcrowding in several parks at popular times.

Example of a student directly quoting phrases from this source:

One of the problems for national parks is “overcrowding in several parks at popular times” (Keiter 129). Attracting people to the national parks has actually always been one of the National Park Service’s goals because people who “see and experience these extraordinary scenic places” are more likely to “support the new park system” and the funding it needs (Keiter 129). But some of the parks are so popular now that they are being damaged.

Example of a student paraphrasing this source in their own words:

The National Park Service (NPS) has to balance the need to make the parks popular and the need to protect the environments at the parks. Crowded parks full of tourists can cause damage and also make the parks less enjoyable. But from the beginning, the NPS has worked to make the parks more accessible to people by building roads and letting hotels be built on or near the parks (Keiter 129). The reason is that getting people to the parks where they can see the beauty makes them more likely to support the funding that the parks need from Congress (Keiter 129). The NPS has to balance the support they get by being popular with the damage that is caused by being popular.

You can see in the paraphrased version that some words, like National Park Service and tourists are in the original and in the student example. Since these are such common words and the student did not use them in phrases that were the same as the ones in the original source, they do not need to have quotation marks around them. The student writer can consider these to be their own words but they still have to cite the original source where they learned these ideas about crowded national parks.

This excerpt by Keiter is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike License. This is the full MLA citation of the source that would appear at the end of your essay on the Works Cited page:

Keiter, Robert B. “National Parks: Preserving America’s Natural and Cultural Heritage.” The Environmental Politics and Policy of Western Public Lands, edited by Erika Allen Wolters and Bent S. Steel, E-book, Oregon State University, 126-145. open.oregonstate.education/enviromentalpolitics. Accessed 11 Dec. 2021.

To do paraphrasing correctly, you have to change both the structure of the information you are paraphrasing and the words you are paraphrasing. There is more information about this in the section below titled Paraphrase the Right Way. But first, let’s learn a little more about plagiarism.