What plagiarism, cheating, fabrication, and facilitating have in common is that all are forms of lying, of distorting the truth.
Cheating involves using material that is not authorized for an academic assignment. The key word here is unauthorized. If a teacher gives an open book exam, then students are not cheating when they use their books. If a teacher instructs students to put away all books or notes and a student consults a book or notes, the student is cheating.
Fabrication involves making up things that are not true. Falsifying the results of an experiment that one didn't do or submitting the program of a play one didn't attend as "proof" that one saw the play are two different types of "fabrication."
Facilitating involves helping someone else cheat, fabricate or plagiarize. For instance, the student who brought back an extra program from the play for his/her friend to submit is facilitating fabrication. The student who lets another look at his/her exam answers is facilitating the other's cheating. And the person who gives another an old paper to submit as his/her own is facilitating plagiarism.
What is plagiarism? Simply put, plagiarism is presenting someone else's work as ones own.
The most obvious form of plagiarism involves submitting a paper that someone else wrote. This could be a paper bought from a "paper mill" or "research service," a paper found in the archives at the student's fraternity or sorority, a paper written by the spouse, parent, or best friend of the student, or a paper downloaded from the internet. If the person submitting the work as his or her own didn't write it, then that person has committed plagiarism.
Other forms of plagiarism are more subtle. If a person includes in his work a sentence or a paragraph or even a phrase from another person's writing and does not put that phrase, sentence, or paragraph in quotation marks, it is plagiarism. Even if the person who copied the words into his/her work gives a citation which credits the original writer, the absence of quotation marks makes it plagiarism.
Another form of plagiarism involves taking a piece of writing and changing some of the words but not changing them enough. For example, if a person took the sentence, "Teaching is the art of leading the student to learn," and copied it into his/her paper as "Teaching is the profession that leads students to learn." or "Leading a student to learn is the art of teaching" or anything that followed the basic shape or word choice of the original sentence, that person would be plagiarizing. Even if the person credited the original source, the similarity of the sentence to the original would make it plagiarism. However, because the words weren't an exact quotation, they couldn't be put in quotation marks. In other words the only ways to avoid plagiarism when you are using another person's writing are to copy it word per word (and put in quotation marks) or to change it enough that the words and sentence structure are really your own.
Yet another form of plagiarism involves not giving credit for an idea or observation that the writer found in a source. Even if the writer paraphrases correctly, any idea or bit of information that is not part of common knowledge needs to include some sort of credit to the source for that information. When you are not sure if something is common knowledge or not, it is best to err on the side of caution. Unnecessary credit may be awkward, but it is not as bad as plagiarism.
Sometimes people commit plagiarism accidentally. They lose the quotation marks while cutting and pasting in a new word processor or they don't realize that they have not paraphrased properly or that something isn't common knowledge. While all of these are possible accidents, it is too hard to distinguish between them and intentional plagiarism. Just as it is the shopper's responsibility not to “accidentally” walk out of the store with a shopping cart full of stuff that hasn't been paid for, it is the writer's responsibility not to take ideas or words from other people's writings without giving credit.
If you are desperate about meeting a deadline or mastering the material in time to pass a course, your best bet is to talk to the teacher and explain your problem. Most teachers are reasonable and many times can give you extensions or incompletes. Sometimes they can give you special assistance to get you over the hump or recommend a tutor.
If your friend is desperate about passing the course, you should encourage him/her to get help, you might offer to tutor him/her or even assist by typing or proofreading his/her work. But if you go beyond proofreading and minor editing to writing the work for your friend, then you are guilty of academic dishonesty also.
In any case where there is proof of academic dishonesty, the offense will be reported to Judicial Affairs.
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Go to the English Department page.
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Regulations of Student Conduct