Written by Sifan, 2021 Cohort
Many things are essential in our academic career, such as being on time, communicating, or reviewing. In this process, completing assignments or papers is undoubtedly the best way to show the results of our studies. However, this brings us to a hot topic, which is plagiarism. We discussed this in this week’s boot camp, and we studied the plagiarism rules SFU had in the class. It comes down to a simple question: are there any differences in the interpretation of plagiarism between China and Canada? I also thought about this when I first came to Canada to study.
The general content is the same. For example, the official website of SFU mentions “misrepresenting someone else’s work as your own; copying sentences or paragraphs without properly citing their source; paraphrasing incorrectly,” which I believe are common standards in many countries. However, I still noticed two points that may not be quite the same.
First, SFU’s language is viewed as a whole. For example, SFU says, “Misrepresenting someone else’s work as your own.” which sounds like the plagiarist did not mean to cause this result. Moreover, such content throughout the site prompts readers not to get too stressed out if they are pressured to write. They can ask for help from their professor and learning centres. Nevertheless, on a Chinese academic website, the Academic Misconduct Website, we can see that it seems like China would be much more harsh and concise in its tone, about this kind of behaviour. He would assume that the person was intentionally causing this kind of result.
Another point is how to define plagiarism. In China, we usually go to on websites to check our paper’s similarity rate before submitting it. Generally, the lower, the better. According to an organization named “Yan Xuan Growth Plan,” who posted an answer in Zhihu (A high-quality Chinese Internet Q&A community and original content platform for professional creators) to the question “What is the standard of repetition for a paper?” She mentioned that the strictest standard is less than 5% for Ph.D. dissertations. It seems like SFU does not have such a standard. However, an official account called “New Wind Academic” expressed the view published in Zhihu that North American universities do not like too low repetition rates. Because without authoritative literature to back up the thesis, it may be nothing more than empty rhetoric.This view does surprise me.
In fact, during the group discussion, my classmate and I talked about how difficult it is to define whether some content is plagiarized, common knowledge, or does not require citation. Her former professor told her that if there is any content you are not sure of, just mark it as cited.
Reference
McKenzie, J. (n.d.). Avoiding plagiarism | SFU Library. Simon Fraser University. Retrieved April 19, 2021, from https://www.lib.sfu.ca/help/academic-integrity/plagiarism#how-can-i-avoid-plagiarism
New Wind Academic. (2020, August 17). Foreign university dissertation’s repetition rate standard! Zhihu Column. https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/187490974
What are the classifications by length of plagiarized text in thesis? (2019, November 28). Academic Misconduct Website. http://www.cnkis.net/html/8521732737.html
What is the definition of plagiarism in thesis? (2019, November 28). Academic Misconduct Website. http://www.cnkis.net/html/940678442.html
Yan Xuan Growth Plan. (2019, September 21). What is the standard of repetition for a paper? Zhihu. https://www.zhihu.com/question/347102511/answer/1786665089