Copying and cribbing, plagiarising and free-riding The aim of this leaflet is to make clear what is and what is not done when studying at a university. Unfortunately, it seems that not all students always study in the correct way: there are students who get their grades for an exam or a paper in a way that is unacceptable. That is to say, they get through a course by committing fraud. When these students are caught, they often claim that they did not know they were committing fraud, or that they had not meant to commit fraud. This leaflet is meant to put an end to this ignorance, because fraud is inadmissible! When you are caught at such inadmissible behaviour, ignorance cannot be used as an excuse before the Board of Examiners. After all, you have knowingly taken the risk that your behaviour would be considered as a form of fraud.
Copying and cribbing Copying and cribbing during exams is as old as teaching itself. Everybody knows that it is not allowed. Yet, new ways to get good results for an exam in a dishonest manner are constantly being invented. Copycats force educational institutes to take measures against such behaviour. Universities have installed scanners to intercept and interfere with mobile phone communications. These are very costly measures, and the money to pay for them could otherwise have been spent on education. Quite apart from the fact, of course, that students should not pass an exam if they are unable to complete a course on their own. So: ■ Turn your mobile phone off at the start of an exam, and put it in your bag. Or, better still, leave your mobile phone at home. ■ Do not yield to the temptation to copy or crib. ■ Prevent others from copying your work. ■ Prepare yourself well for an exam, so that you have a realistic chance to pass.
University of Amsterdam | Faculty of Economics and Business
Plagiarising Committing plagiarism means that you copy a text (usually literally, although this does not have to be the case to ‘qualify’ for plagiarism) that was written by someone else, and you then present this text as if you had written it yourself. No sources are included. Another possibility is that you literally copy not all, but large parts of someone else’s text and you do mention the source of this text. Strictly speaking, this does not qualify as plagiarism, but it is unacceptable all the same: it is called ‘copyright abuse’. Of course you make use of other sources, as indeed you should. However, the final result has to represent your very own creative body of ideas and can never be an example of a cut-and-paste job. So: ■ Never copy a text word for word, unless it is a direct quotation. Write your own texts, always. ■ A literal quotation should not be too long, must be functional, and always requires the correct acknowledgement of the source. ■ When using information from other sources, you have to paraphrase this www.student.uva.nl/preventfraud-plagiarism
■
information (you have to use your own words). Never forget to acknowledge the source correctly and adequately. If you wish to check how to deal with the acknowledgement of sources and quotations, you can consult, for example, Simon & Schuster Handbook for Writers (1996), by L.Q. Troyka, J. Buckley and D. Gates (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall).
Hitching free rides The term ‘free-riding’ is used to indicate a student’s joining in a group assignment while contributing hardly anything at all. Examples are not attending team discussions, not doing the required preparatory tasks, and not meeting one’s commitments as to appointed tasks. In brief: a ‘freerider’ dodges the work to be done and that way passes for a course with no or very little effort. To put it bluntly, freeriding is absolutely antisocial, but it is an often recurring problem. It is rather awkward for the team members to deal with the free-rider, for who dares say aloud that one member contributes substantially less than the others? Nevertheless, freeriders are parasites and free-riding should not be tolerated.
So: Make absolutely clear what you expect of each team member as to appointments, agreements and tasks. Take care that you yourself participate actively, and that the tasks are divided fairly. ■ Do not offer other team members the opportunity to hitch a free ride. By all means, call the free-rider to account, if necessary together with the other team members. ■ If a talk with the free-rider does not have the desired result, inform the course supervisor of the free-rider’s behaviour.
to answer any of the questions referring to content. The instructor smells a rat and starts looking for the original paper (all of the papers written for this course are kept in storage by all instructors involved). When it becomes clear that the paper was first submitted earlier by a different student, the student under discussion is officially caught at committing fraud. He then has to answer for his behaviour to the Board of Examiners and he is prohibited from following the course involved and from sitting for the exam for a period of six months.
Examples
A group of students is going to sit for an exam They have learnt from other students that the instructor for the course involved sometimes uses old exam forms. The group starts collecting such old exam forms from their fellow-students and they bring the keys to these old exams along to the exam involved. At the exam it becomes clear that the instructor has indeed once more opted for using an old exam form. However the students are caught at consulting the exam keys. They have to appear before the Board of Examiners and they are debarred from the exam involved for a period of six months.
■
A student has to write a paper He has difficulty finding a subject and working out the details in time. Pressed for time because of the deadline, he decides to fall back on a paper written by a friend, who passed the same course two years earlier with a mark 8.5. The student first submits a framework for the paper, and subsequently an introduction, a first draft (with some deliberate mistakes inserted by the student involved) and then the perfect second version. However, during the group discussion of his paper the student makes a poor show: he is unable
University of Amsterdam | Faculty of Economics and Business
Faculty of Economics and Business
Copying and cribbing, plagiarising and free-riding
Detection and Punishment Copying and cribbing, plagiarising and free-riding are official forms of fraud that will be punished by the Board of Examiners. You can be excluded from all courses and exams for a period of up to one year.
www.student.uva.nl/preventfraud-plagiarism
Because the Faculty wishes to guard the scientific quality of its graduates, measures are being taken that make it easier to detect and prove fraud. So, committing fraud is something you will come to regret: just don’t do it. Do you need advice? If in general you have difficulty passing exams, meeting deadlines, or studying actively, you should turn to the Faculty’s student counsellors. If you have specific problems as to a course, you should approach the course instructor. If you have problems writing papers, you can turn to the Skills Group.
More information Copying and cribbing, plagiarising and free-riding www.student.uva.nl/ preventfraud-plagiarism Student counsellors www.student.uva.nl/ studentcounsellors_feb Skills Group To make an appointment: ■ T (020) 525 4068/79 (Mondays through Thursdays) or ■ send your question or problem by e-mail to Mr R. van Hemert, MA (co-ordinator of the Skills Group): r.vanhemert@uva.nl.
The requested action is illegal. Do you want to continue with copying? Cancel
www.crasborn.nl | 09509
A student is about to write her master’s thesis She finds it extremely difficult but she also wishes very much to obtain a good grade. Besides, time is pressing because she is about to start a new job. When searching the internet, she finds three interesting papers on the same subject, written by students of the University of Chicago. She draws up a new title page, writes an introduction, and then combines parts of the various papers to form a new paper. She then submits the final result to her supervisor. The supervisor gets suspicious. He feeds some sentences of the thesis into the Google search engine and asks Google to find a match. Within a few minutes Google finds the papers that this student has stolen. Her thesis is declared invalid and the student is debarred from her studies for a period of one year.
Continue