https://www.mdu.se/

The substantial and growing body of research into plagiarism includes good coverage of student views, understandings and attitudes (e.g. Crocker & Shaw, 2002; Pecorari, 2003; Shi, 2004). Less attention, though, has been given to the perspectives of university teachers, possibly because the received view of plagiarism as the worst of academic crimes is so widely established that it has appeared to be safe to assume that teachers strongly and consistently object to it as an act of academic dishonesty.

There are, however, indications in the literature that teachers’ views of plagiarism may not in fact be homogeneous. For example, Sutherland-Smith (2008) found that some of the teachers she studied categorized plagiarism as always involving dishonest intent, while others took the view that it could occur unintentionally. In response to specific instances of source use, sharply differing responses to quite similar student writing strategies have been documented (Pecorari, 2008). When academics are accused of plagiarism, the charge is often the subject of heated debate, with their colleagues taking opposing positions on how to regard the act (e.g., Leatherman, 1999; Smallwood, 2002; Yilmaz, 2007). There is reason, therefore, to think that individual academics may differ widely not only in terms of how they handle cases of plagiarism which arise in their classrooms, but also in terms of which textual acts they consider to be plagiarism, or how serious they consider acts of plagiarism to be for students in various situations.