Errors students make

Examples from Education

Consider the following examples involving three students writing essays on the subject of school discipline. Each uses a definition in the 1972 Dettman Report on school discipline, the original of which is as follows:

The discipline of a school is the state or condition of order or good behaviour among the students.

The following discussion explores the acceptability or otherwise of the use of this source:

Student A:

'Discipline' refers to the state of order or good behaviour in a school.

Student A fails to reference what is clearly an unacceptable paraphrase of the Dettman definition.¹ It amounts to plagiarism because it is not referenced: the inference is that these words and ideas are entirely the student's. It is an unacceptable paraphrase because, with the omission of two words and changes in the last three, the words are taken directly from the Report. An acceptable paraphrase involves rephrasing the same ideas in your own words which usually involves using synonyms and changing the grammatical structure (i.e. the sentence structure) of the original quotation. It is also poor academic work because the student gives no sign of realising that this is but one definition or way of regarding school discipline. But most of all, it is dishonest because it involves plagiarism.

Student B:

'The discipline of a school is the state or condition of order or good behaviour among the students.'

The quotation marks indicate correctly that this definition has been borrowed from another source, although the quotation is inexact because the word 'discipline' was underlined in the original, and the quotation has not been referenced (i.e. there is no in-text citation of the author, date and page number).² Since quoting from other sources is not the only reason why writers may put quotation marks around words, the present example is therefore ambiguous, and open to the charge of plagiarism.

Student C:

One definition says that 'The discipline of a school is the state or condition of order or good behaviour among the students' (Dettman, 1972, 7). This definition emphasises the external signs of control, but makes no reference to the state of mind of the students...

Correct. This student has quoted accurately and acknowledged the source as required. She has also given signs of independent thinking by indicating what she considers to be a shortcoming of the definition. She has not assumed that the mere fact that it is printed in a book makes it right.

It is surprisingly easy for assessors who know their subject to detect instances of plagiarism, sometimes running to long quotes which the student takes from a work not in a reading list provided by the lecturer. Most assessors regard the offence as sufficiently serious to warrant their searching for the original in their own time to confirm their suspicions. It can and has led to an automatic fail in that subject or even exclusion from the university.