OK, you’re going for humor i see. I thought you were being serious.
If you don’t think that it is the job of university faculty to uphold the academic integrity of the university, to ensure that public money (in the case of my university) is not spent to support academic dishonesty, and to ensure that the honest students are not placed at a comparative disadvantage by the plagiarists and other cheaters, we should probably stop this conversation right now, because i’m only interested in conversing on a rational and reasonable basis.
My university library has a whole section of its website devoted to the issue of plagiarism: what it is; how to avoid it; how to properly cite information taken from other sources. Most universities have something similar.
The version at my university has rather extensive sections on paraphrasing, copying, the difference between common knowledge and material that must be cited, and a whole range of other aspects of plagiarism. The site not only identifies these issues and gives concrete examples, but offers considerable advice on note-taking, writing strategies, and the differences between acceptable and unacceptable paraphrasing.
Most universities have something similar. On my syllabus, i not only provide a link to our university’s plagiarism guide, i also provide links to the equivalent sites at Indiana University, Northwestern, Duke and (probably the gold standard for online guides) the Online Writing Lab at Purdue. The syllabus of every faculty member i know does something similar.
In the first class of the semester, and then in each class where i announce a new piece of written work, i point out the syllabus section on academic dishonesty, and exhort the students to consult the plagiarism guide before doing their essays. I also tell them that if they have any questions about the issue, they are welcome to come to my office hours (they can bring writing samples with them, if they want) and i will spend as much time as necessary helping them understand.
It depends what the assignment is, but for the most part paraphrasing is not, by itself, plagiarism. If they paraphrase a whole document but provide citations for the paraphrasing, they might get a poor grade, or even fail the paper, for producing an inferior piece of work, but they would probably not get dinged for plagiarism.
Earlier this semester, i had a student submit a paper that was little more than a summary of a chapter in the textbook., It was a competent summary, and it was properly cited. I did not charge the student with plagiarism, because there was no cheating and no attempt to deceive. The student did, however, fail the paper because she had completely neglected to analyze and discuss the six primary source documents that had been explicitly listed as essential sources for the paper.
Now you’ve gone from being funny to being a joke. This is just ridiculous.
I might be something of a moral arbiter, but i am only a moral arbiter of the issues directly related to academic ability and academic honesty, because that is the mission of the university. A student might use drugs to stay up and study, but the answers the student gives will still be a reflection of that student’s understanding of the material. Also, on a much more prosaic level, i have no way of knowing whether a student has done this, whereas i have very clear ways of knowing that a student has plagiarized. Your pencil example is asinine, and does not even deserve the dignity of a response.
And if you think that “an individual’s judgment” should not be used in these cases, then i assume that you must also believe in fairies. Individual judgment is a crucial part of what we do at university, as in so many other areas of life. My doctor makes an individual judgment about the best course of treatment. She has guidelines to work within, but there is a subjective component and a weighing of costs and benefits in medical decisions all the time. When i assess my students’ papers, i am using judgment built up over years of reading and writing and studying and teaching in order to assess their understanding of the subject matter. That same judgment comes into play when assessing plagiarism.
And some hard-and-fast numerical rule is simply impossible, because plagiarism manifests itself very differently depending on the subject matter. I’ve heard computer scientists talk about plagiarized code, but i wouldn’t know where to even start in order to determine whether a whole bunch of computer code were plagiarized or not. I’m sure that there is some code that is so basic or fundamental that it would be considered “common knowledge” in the computer science field, and would be expected to look almost identical in the work of most students. Similarly, computer science professors probably wouldn’t recognize it when a student plagiarizes George Fredrickson’s arguments about Abraham Lincoln’s racial ideology, but i can see that straight away because i’ve read Fredrickson’s work on multiple occasions.