Paranoia about Plagiarism

Hello everyone! I’m happy to report that I’ve adjusted rather well to college life, and seem to be in full swing of everything. But one little problem seems to loom over me, and that is plagiarism. Now, I’ve never plagiarized in my life, as I am a passionate writer. I fail to see the gain in taking someone else’s words when I could simply write my own. But for some reason, I’m having major anxiety over my papers being reported for plagiarism, even though I KNOW all of my sources are correctly cited and I’ve written everything from my own head.

I’ve gotten so nervous over handing my first papers in, that I’ve begun copy and pasting every uncited sentence into the google search bar to make sure I’m good, as all my sources were online sources. I’m to broke to afford a plagiarism checker, and I certainly don’t want to spend money to have it check my papers when it’s just irrational anxiety and paranoia that is building up in my brain. I expressed this issue with my roommate, and she suggested I see the school psychologist for help to get over said anxiety.

I’ve never second guessed or doubted my writing before, as it has always been a passion of mine. I’ve always been able to walk with confidence knowing I’ve written a well thought out, comprehensible, and, quite frankly, an excellent paper. I’ve always had doubts about myself, but this if the first time I’ve ever had a doubts about what I believe to be my greatest talent. Any advice?

Now that you have entered each sentence of your first paper into google, that should prove to you that your writing methods are fine. Perhaps you should talk to someone about this anxiety. But it seems clear that others have more to worry about than you!

I’ll tell you this right now, if the work is yours and you didn’t deliberately go out of your way to copy someone else’s work, you don’t have to worry about plagiarism. Even if you coincidentally write a sentence that has been written and published before, as long as your writing style and language is consistent throughout your papers, your professor probably won’t make a huge deal of it. (Usually a big flag on plagiarism is when your language use seems to change sporadically throughout your papers). If this anxiety is so overwhelming that it’s making you spend 2-3x more than you need on your work, then I would agree with your roommate to go see a psychologist.
Also, if you need a free plagiarism checker, here’s the one that I use: https://www.grammarly.com/plagiarism-checker
This way, you won’t have to keep inserting sentence fragments into google constantly. It also has a lot of other neat features as well. Hope you get this whole thing sorted out!

Most plagiarism that takes place in college (and I imagine it’s pretty rare) happens to be unintentional and most of the time, it is the product of not citing material or failing to cite material correctly (example: paraphrasing something too closely and attributing it to the author, instead of just quoting it with attribution) – if you are confident in your ability to cite sources, then there shouldn’t be an issue.

One of my professors is an advocate of the “CYA method” - i.e. the “cover your a…” method. If, for whatever reason you are unsure whether or not to cite something, do it anyways. Better to have unnecessary or excessive citation than to have inadequate citation.

If this is way out of the norm for you, talk to the Counseling Center about this. You may have some obsessive tendencies coming out.

@preamble1776 I just got feedback on a paper and my professor wrote:

I’d also caution you make sure you are completing these exams independently of any other student. You are not permitted to work with others, and doing so can result in failure of this course.

Does this mean that I unintentionally plagiarized somehow? My class is an online class through another campus and I worked on the paper on my own. It doesn’t sound like she would report me but I’m not so sure.

It means that your work dangerously resembles that of another student but it’s not so close that the professor can actually charge you. This could happen for any number of reasons, including that people are in fact working together, but it also could be because you and the other student both ended up using similar resources to complete the question.

Suppose, for instance, you need to write an essay about covered bridges. So you go to google and type “covered bridges.” The first thing that pops up is a Wikipedia article, which of course you don’t use in your paper because you’ve always been told not to. But you do read the article and you follow some of the links in it and use those. Then you follow a couple of other suggestions on the first page or two, and put together a nice (but probably uninspired) essay about covered bridges.

The chance that someone else in your class has done the exact same thing is pretty high. Even though neither of you plagiarized any of the sources, your papers are going to look suspiciously similar.

So your prof is doing you a favor and letting you know that you will need to dig deeper and be more creative in the future. It also wouldn’t hurt - assuming that you really didn’t cheat - to send them a reply thanking them and letting them know that you did in fact do the exam independently. Meet with them in person if you can. Document your process and find out if there’s anything you can do - like taking future exams in a proctored setting - to clear your name.

Because if it happens again, she probably WILL report you.

@stradmom What should I thank them for? I can’t meet them in person but I’m pretty sure I just need to dig deeper. It’s difficult to do so - this is a statistics class and it is all based on analyzing numbers and drawing conclusions. I hope that in the future my thoughts aren’t too similar to someone else’s…

@aishwar6 The feedback may also be standardized. If this is a first assignment for everyone in your class, he/she may give everyone the same warning. I have taken a few online graduate level courses for recertification, and everyone in the class had to post a response to the same prompt using the same reading assignments and the responses had to reflect that you had read the material. You’d be surprised just how similar everyone’s posts were.

Your work is apt to appear quite similar to classmates in statistics, do do that, dig deeper and make sure you use other resources in addition to the basic course material.