Plagiarism in a Written Response
A school-assessed written response in Portuguese requires students to write a 300-word opinion piece on an environmental issue, using at least two sources. The teacher notices that Sofia's piece contains a sentence identical to a phrase from a website she cited, unquoted and unacknowledged, and that the structure closely follows the source article with synonyms swapped. Sofia is a strong student who usually writes original work. She says she 'used the source for ideas' and did not realise the wording was too close. The task is worth 15% of her internal mark, and the teacher must decide how to proceed under the school's academic integrity policy.
1. How should the teacher distinguish between poor referencing and plagiarism here?
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The distinction turns on intent, extent, and what the task required.
- The unquoted identical sentence is a clear referencing failure at minimum; whether it is plagiarism depends on whether it was presented as her own wording.
- The close structural following with synonyms is more serious: it suggests the ideas and organisation were taken rather than developed, which goes beyond a citation slip.
- Intent matters for process, not for the definition: the work still misrepresents the source as her own, regardless of whether she understood.
The teacher should:
- Compare her text against the source line by line and record the specific overlaps.
- Apply the school's policy, which typically has a spectrum from educative response (reteach referencing, resubmit) to formal penalty for serious or repeated cases.
- Consider her record - a first, apparently misunderstood incident in an otherwise strong student usually warrants an educative response plus a requirement to redo the task with correct citation, rather than the maximum penalty.
- Record the decision and the reasoning.
2. What should the teacher do to reduce this risk for the whole class next time?
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The task design and prior teaching should make the expectation explicit.
Measures:
- Teach referencing in Portuguese explicitly - how to quote, paraphrase, and cite in the target language, with worked examples.
- Require students to submit a short source list with page or paragraph references, and to mark quoted material clearly.
- Design tasks that require personal stance or local examples, which are harder to lift wholesale from a source.
- Use a drafting checkpoint: review plans and one paragraph before the final submission so borrowing is caught early.
- State the integrity policy and the consequences in the task sheet, and have students acknowledge it.
- Keep the comparison evidence for any case that arises, so decisions are consistent across the cohort.