W 026 F

Introduction
'If a student passes a course or degree, as a result of submitting plagiarised work, s/he is intellectually devaluing the original work of other students and the academic community as a whole.' ( GL p.37 )

Studying at the English Department of JPTE, students have to improve their writing abilities, and hand in different types of written material (for example, essays or take-home papers).
These writings have to suit requirements both in form and content. These are all listed in the book called Guidelines for Writing Theses in the English Department of JPU (GL). Mostly, they have to be typed or word processed. The number of words is always limited, and they have to be prepared in time. There is a serious rule, probably the first that students have to learn: avoiding plagiarism.

According to GL, 'plagiarism is deliberately copying the work of another author, word for word, with no acknowledgment' ( p.37 ). GL differenciates four forms of plagiarism: copying an author's text without quoting it, writing down another author's ideas in different words, borrowing the work of another student and self-plagiarising. Of course, translating a text written in another language and handing it in as one's own is also plagiarising.

In my view, plagiarism is simply a kind of stealing and I can not imagine myself ever doing it. In my paper, my aim was to find out JPTE students' opinion on this topic.

Method
I asked eleven English Majors to answer my questions on plagiarism. As I found the topic too complex to be put into 'yes-or-no' questions and brackets, I went down to the main hall one morning, interviewed students and noted down their answers. I asked them in Hungarian and they answered in Hungarian as well.

I had only five simple questions about the meaning of the word 'plagiarism', their attitude, and also about the consequences they knew. My aim was to see if they are familiar with this notion and if they are, how seriously do they take it.

Among the interviewed students, there were three seniors and eight freshers. I asked four boys and seven girls altogether. They were all helpful and answered all my answers.

Results and discussion
First, I asked if they were familiar with the meaning of the word 'plagiarism'. I was not surprised to hear that except for a first-year student girl all of them knew the meaning well. All of them said something like 'copying somebody else's text and handing it in as one's own', which is a short but correct explanation. They also said that this was the first thing tutors explained them before writing the first essays. Eight students connected plagiarism only to writing, but three also mentioned oral presentations. One girl told me that plagiarism is often noticeable in music, too.
My second question was if they have ever plagiarised. The answers were more different, than for the first question . Four students, three freshers and a senior stated that they had never done such a thing. These four students were out of those eight, who connected plagiarism only to writing. They also gave some explanation; one girl said that she was afraid of the shame. The others said that they rather wrestle with the topic for a while, but they would never sign anything that is not their own work.

The other seven students said that they had plagiarised sometimes, but five out of seven told me it was only an accident (forgot to put the quotation mark to the right place), or wrote only one or two sentences of others.

This was the point where many of them asked : who can say where the limits of plagiarism are? All that one knows is that s/he must not copy somebody else's work without quoting but can anybody be sure that his or her thoughts are not pieces of memory from someone's writing? As Pennycock says in his writing: '... meanings are in a sense in circulation ,[...] language is cycled and recycled (p. 211).

All of those seven students mentioned high-school in-class essays, as the first place where they had plagiarised . A girl's explanation for plagiarizing was: 'In high-school, most teachers want students to write down what they had learnt from the book by heart, or not?' Another girl said that she always tries to avoid plagiarism, but sometimes she can not remember if she had read an idea somewhere or it was a thought of her own.

Next, I asked if they had ever been caught of plagiarism or knew somebody who had. Five students said they do not know any case like this; four students said they knew somebody in this situation; two said they had gone through this already.

I asked them what the results of these cases was. I heard different answers; two of them said it had no negative result at all; one girl said she got mark one for her essay; a boy had got mark 2 instead of mark 3. A girl told me about one of her groupmates who had not got the tutor's sign at the end of the semester.

Last, I asked their opinion on plagiarism. I could divide their answers into three groups. One boy said that plagiarism is not bad at all, because it can better, for example, an essay. In this case, I was not sure if the boy knew the meaning of plagiarism correctly; maybe he thought that quoting is a kind of plagiarising. The other two groups were 'Bad' and 'Bad, but...'. Five students belonged to each group.

Those who started their answer like 'It is bad...' said that plagiarism is the worst kind of stealing. They all said that it shows the lack of thinking and in the case of university students; it can be the result of bad time-arranging. A girl's advice to avoid plagiarism was the following: 'When you are planning to copy out some ideas from a book, just imagine how you would feel seeing your lines in someone's essay...She said that this always helped her. These five students were those who had never plagiarised or, at least, had not done it consciously.

The 'Bad, but ...' answer was continued with sentences like '...somebody may do it unconsciously...' or '...it can be the result of carelessness...'. A fresher's answer was the following: 'Sometimes I have to speak or write about topics that had been discussed, drafted and reasoned perfectly already. All I have to do is not forgetting to put the quotation marks to the right place.' These students were those who knew that plagiarism can be the result of a small accident but all of them agreed that it is hard to testify (and believe) these accidents.

Conclusion
As a result of my survey, I found that plagiarism at university is not a 'good joke'- like many of my formal high- school classmates thought. It is noticeable, it has its results. It is a shame. Much bigger shame than asking one or two more days from the tutor, or handing in a writing which is shorter than the requirement says. I saw that it is something that students know well, and that it does not only mean a few lines in the GL for them.

The fact that many students mentioned (the limit lines of plagiarism) made me think the whole topic over again. But I found that it is not such a big problem I never heard of anything like untestified plagiarism. Tutors' attitude also depends on the student's previous attitude in classes.

I found it interesting and useful to work on this topic. I heard other students' opinion, and found that they think almost the same way as I do. It was good to hear that almost all of them takes plagiarism seriously.