When College Students' Attempts at Paraphrasing Become Instances of Potential Plagiarism

In Study 1, undergraduates were asked to consider a scenario in which they were writing a paper and that, in the process of researching material for the paper, they had encountered a relevant paragraph from a journal article which they had to paraphrase. The students were given a two-sentence paragraph and were asked to paraphrase it to the best of their ability. Analysis indicated that between 41% and 68% of the paraphrased paragraphs were “plagiarized” to some degree, where plagiarism was defined as the appropriation of strings of 5 consecutive words or longer. In addition, 52% of the paraphrased paragraphs contained from minor to serious distortions of the original material. In a second study, another sample of undergraduates was asked to paraphrase a similar two-sentence paragraph from a textbook which was easier to read. This time between 9% and 19% of the paraphrased paragraphs evidenced similar amounts of appropriated text, although a comparable proportion of distortions (50%) occurred. The combined results suggest that plagiarism by college students may stem, in part, from their inability to process complex unfamiliar text.