Plagiarism is "deliberate adoption or reproduction of ideas or words or statements of another person as one's own without acknowledgement" (Buranen, L., & Roy, A. M. (Eds.), 1999). Thus, plagiarism includes behaviors such as turning in a paper written by another student or buying a paper from a commercial source and failing to properly attribute quotations within a paper. Depending on institutional policy, it could also include what might be called self- plagiarism: submitting the same paper for credit in more than one course without the instructor's permission.
Although there are many areas of agreement, students generally view plagiarism more leniently than do faculty members. However, faculty members tend to overestimate students' leniency. In contrast, students make accurate estimates of faculty members' attitudes. In addition, students' attitudes tend to move closer to faculty members' attitudes as they move through college from their first year to their senior year. Therefore, faculty members may perceive more experienced students to be more lenient on academic dishonesty than they really are. One attitude that faculty members and students both hold is that intentional dishonesty, such as conspiring with another student to copy from one another in an assignment, is a more severe ethical violation than opportunistic dishonesty.
Clearly differences in perceptions about what behaviors constitute cheating can cause problems, such as an instructor's believing that a student had cheated or plagiarized when the student sees nothing wrong with his or her doings. Also, differences between instructors can cause confusion for students when one instructor is indifferent to a particular behavior, such as collaboration on homework, while another assumes (but does not explicitly state) that students will work independently on such assignments. One way to prevent these kinds of problems is to state explicitly what behaviors are and are not allowed for each type of assignment.
