I could really use some advice on a situation that I am dealing with right now. I submitted a paper for a psychology class I am in and I received a zero because my instructor said I plagiarized my paper and then he submitted me for a code of honor violation. I used proper in-text citations and even submitted my paper to the school’s plagiarizer checker before I turned the paper in. The results of the plagiarizer checker came back at 35% percent but when I reviewed it, I thought if the instructor looked at the report he would see that what was considered similar to other works was ridiculous. For example my citations and references themselves were flagged as possible plagiarism, and so were some common knowledge phrases. With the report the similarities were against 27 other papers with less than 1% similar on 24 of those papers and 2-3% similar on the 3 other papers. Another example of what was flagged as plagiarism was the phrase, “a combination of medication and therapy are used in the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease.” If someone is writing a paper the requires the discussion of treatment for a disease, is that not a common phrase? I have asked my instructor what his basis of plagiarism is and he only tells me to read the honor code and won’t address any of the questions I had with a helpful response. Now all he will tell me is that he submitted me and it’s out of his hands. I still have assignments I need to turn in for this class but since he won’t answer my questions, I’m too afraid to submit anything else because since I don’t know what I did wrong, I don’t want to repeat it again. Any helpful suggestions on what I can do or what I can say would help me out so much. I am less than 6 months away from getting my degree and I have cited this way all throughout my classes and have never been accused of this before.
One thing you can do is run the “common phrases” through a google search with quotes around them and see what comes up. For example, I put your example about the combination of medication and therapy in, and got a result that it matched no documents. You could print those out as documentation when you go talk to the honor code people.
The important thing is to put the quotation marks in the search, otherwise all the possible results get included.
So it seems like your professor was looking more at some of your paraphrases?
Paraphrasing is tricky because you want to not only change the words of a work but also the sentence structure. It’s really about taking in the information of the article/book/source/whatever and being able to put it in your own words (and your own style).
Medical-type papers are especially hard because you’re right: certain phrasing is common and expected. I worked at my undergrad university’s writing center where we had a type of plagiarism program, and a nursing student was sent in because she didn’t paraphrase symptoms such as “vomiting” and “diarrhea.”
Professors can sometimes be really picky like that, and I think it’s unfortunate that your professor isn’t being open with you. If you’re deciding to fight this, bring in all the sources you used and print out any evidence that helps show that you wrote the paper yourself. For next time, be extra careful to check your wording against other the sources’ wordings, and maybe have your professor look over your citations/paraphrasing just to make sure they’re okay with it.