Handbook of academic integrity

Abstract

This chapter provides a framework for markers who suspect that work they are assessing contains deliberately plagiarised passages. Five guiding questions are provided to assist the marker move from the point of suspicion through to deciding on and imposing appropriate penalties. Answers to the five questions are usually complex and often contested. The principles of fairness and defensibility are central to decisions regarding breaches of academic regulations and those principles shape the framework proposed for making decisions about deliberate plagiarism. Fishman’s (2009) definition of plagiarism is used to help determine whether plagiarism exists in the submitted work. The second question revolves around the marker’s decision about intent: was the plagiarism deliberate? Finding that an attempt to gain unearned academic credit has been made leads to the third question which is around the severity of the cheating. This third section outlines criteria that should be used when assessing severity of a breach and stresses the importance of local or institutional agreement on the criteria and the need for them to be explicitly stated in policy documents. Having decided the extent of the breach, the fourth step is to decide an appropriate penalty. A tariff system is proposed that provides a framework for matching defined levels of seriousness with a small number of pre-determined penalties. The fifth and final question revolves around ensuring that decisions are fair, defensible and sustainable and presents five significant factors that should be considered when establishing a framework to deal with deliberate attempts to breach academic regulations.