Oftentimes in education we get hung up by two dilemmas: Sharing and Plagiarism. When is what you are doing “sharing” and when is it “plagiarism.” Oftentimes students receive misleading instructions from the various courses they may be taking (and certainly from the internships they may also be doing in the “real world”). I’m not going to try to definitely separate these two ideas today but I will try to lay out the difficulty students might find trying to apply these ideas effectively in the classroom (and beyond).
One of the difficulties students face is the simultaneous desire for them to work as a team and work as an individual. Students are asked to perform competent group work, hold study sessions for exams, share notes, engage in effective discussion while sharing ideas, and employ the work of others’ work in their own research through copious quoting. They are also asked to produce original work of their own, not borrow ideas or words from others, and (in the best cases) not parrot the instructor or the textbooks they’ve been assigned for the duration of the course.
The duality of the situation is apparent at first glance. We (instructors) are asking for two different things (often at the same time). While plagiarism most certainly IS a problem in education we also need to recognize that the best classrooms are an environment of sharing between the students and the texts, the students and other students, and the students and the instructor. What we term “engaging with the material” is often a springboard of one idea to the next, each emanating from the one before. Those types of discussions are engaging and, for the better, build on what came before.
So where, then, is the line for plagiarism drawn? I’m not justifying plagiarism (don’t put your name to something you know is someone else’s) but I’m also trying to recognize that the blending and adding to existing ideas is exactly what education aims for. In the best situations it achieves that goal. I am saying that we have something arguably confusing on our hands. It may never be completely clear but discussion certainly needs to take place for students to grasp the concept. Perhaps it starts with the question “where do ideas come from?”