Both within Ashland University and the larger academic community, we have high standards for honesty, and we take them seriously. This is the basic rule for things you write:
If you didn’t think it up yourself, tell the reader where you got it.
Here, in detail, are the plagiarism policies for our course.
These are the key words. In general, when a teacher is grading a paper, the question is “What is going on here?” If the student has used a few ordinary words from the source, the resemblance may be neither “substantial” nor “intentional.” Trouble begins when large chunks of the original (or perhaps the whole thing) show up without any credit being given or when there is an obvious attempt to mask the actual source.
The penalty for whole-paper plagiarism in this course is a zero on the assignment with no opportunity to revise.
Athletes are often dedicated to the idea of keeping everyone on the team eligible, and sometimes that leads them to helpfully loan out papers. At least twice in recent semesters, someone has loaned his paper to a buddy who wanted help writing, and that buddy submitted a paper which was substantially a copy. So here is my big brother advice about loaning out your papers, letting others copy your computer files, and so forth:
Don’t loan out your papers or let others copy them. If you loan out your computer, take steps (such as password-protecting your file) to keep your classmate from reading and copying your file.
When two papers come in which are so similar that they must be copies of one another, I am not in a position to judge who is the plagiarist and who is simply a fool. Here is the rule I will follow when two papers come in which are obviously so similar that one must be a copy of the other:
When two papers are submitted which are obviously copies of one another, both papers will get a zero with no opportunity for revision. This rule holds true even if the papers come from students who are in different sections.
Ashland University’s Academic Integrity Policy deals with this situation under the head of “Fabrication.” Fabrication is the intentional falsification or invention of research, data, citations, or other information. Examples of fabrication include:
Some students will cruise the Internet, picking up a few paragraphs here and a few there—again without giving the original authors proper credit—and stick them all together. This practice is known as “mosaic plagiarism” or “patchwriting.” It is a lot more work than simply lifting a whole essay from Wikipedia, but it is still plagiarism if you did not tell us where all this came from. It is not “research” because you did not do any of your own thinking—it is simply assembling other people’s work and claiming the credit for yourself.
The penalty for whole-paper mosaic plagiarism in this course is a zero on the assignment with no opportunity to revise.
There is more to the practice of plagiarism than simply copying sources verbatim or doing a word-for-word synonym substitution. If you find a source and do a close paraphrase (without giving the original author credit), you are still committing plagiarism. This is because you did not do any of the real research or critical thinking; you simply did some editing.
Most academic standards would call this plagiarism because you copied the source’s ideas and organization without giving credit. The paraphrased paper gets a zero without opportunity to revise.
This one is tricky. How much is too much? Is there any way to separate intentional plagiarism from poor citation skills? One source offers this criterion for judging plagiarism (in this case for academic papers submitted to journals):
Usually, a text similarity below 15% is acceptable by the journals and a similarity of >25% is considered as high percentage of plagiarism. But even in case of 15% similarity, if the matching text is one continuous block of borrowed material, it will be considered as plagiarized text of significant concern.¹
In this 15% to 25% area, grading will rely on the instructor’s holistic judgment of the paper. Did the student insert material without really knowing how to do it? Is the inserted material a whole page that is designed to pad the paper out to meet the length requirements? Did the student hope that the reader would not notice that page three was written by someone else?
Most students are unaware that there is such a thing as “self-plagiarism.” Here is the rule: If you wrote something to fulfill another assignment, you cannot simply resubmit it and get credit again.
(By the way, Blackboard uses SafeAssign, a software program which keeps track of everything you submitted, so it knows about that paper which you submitted to Professor Brown in the history course.)
Two exceptions to this rule:
Much of your writing in college will be papers which depend upon research. The research must be real: you cannot invent sources, nor can you drop a web address into the bibliography page and then invent material.
If you are writing a paper that responds to a source reading and you simply get some of the facts wrong, that probably counts as poor scholarship and you will lose credit, but if you invent material (for example, claiming that something is a quotation from the original when, in fact, it is not there), that is fabrication. You do not get to invent material and claim that your original source said it.
Most teachers will go to the websites you cite, and if it turns out that you have been inventing either the whole site or the content, you can expect your grade on the paper to be very poor.
In this course, fabrication will be treated the same as plagiarism. One or two small pieces of fabrication will definitely lower your grade, but a paper built substantially on invented “facts” or fictitious citations will get a zero with no opportunity for revision.
There is no currently-available AI detection software, and AI papers rarely have a “smoking gun” that screams at me, but AI papers often show several characteristics:
Because your instructor is a real human being, all of those indicatiors make me start wondering, and when I see that kind of stuff, I go back and examine the piece of writing more carefully. Things I missed on the first reading might jump out at me.
One step students who submit AI papers rarely take is simply to read over their own submissions. AI papers often have foolish errors that a careful reader would catch. The bullet points above plus the silly errors mean that the typical AI paper is worth a C minus at best, and I will grade the paper on its merits. There’s one killer, though, which will doom a paper to a zero:
Ashland has a very specific and well-articulated Academic Integrity Policy. Like the integrity policies of most other colleges and universities, it reads a lot like a legal document (and, in fact, that is what it is). Most instructors and professors consider this policy to be binding, so here is a link to a complete copy of the Ashland University Academic Integrity Policy. The material on this page is my way of applying and explaining the policies in that document.
We are not looking for ways to make you fail. The faculty at Ashland University would like to see you succeed, and we have already walked the path you are following. Librarians, Writing Center Staff, and any English teacher (indeed any of your instructors) will help you answer questions about whether you are within the rules and citing material appropriately. You only need to ask.
The views and opinions expressed in this page are strictly those of the page author.
The contents of this page have not been reviewed or approved by Ashland University.
Revised 8/8/26 • Page author: Curtis Allen • e-mail: callen@ashland.edu.