Plagiarism Experts and Academics, Weigh in here

[AzzarTheGod]

The word plagiarism came up in another thread, and this has been bothering me for a decade now.

I thought maybe we'd have some college guys here weigh in and give me final closure. This is missing details and just a summary, but the framework is all you should need to weigh in yay or nay.


In a seminar 400+ class, I once cited someones work indirectly over 2,500 times on the final project. I used someones Graduate thesis as a "research tool" to help me bulk up my sources, by citing his sources that he found, while ALSO citing the Graduate thesis itself as a source indirectly. (definitely extremely poor academic hygiene to even turn something like this in, disrespectful to the Professor, and worthy of a D letter grade, I don't disagree there so lets get that out of the way)

Here's where I think I should have contacted the Dean/Educational law attorney: the Professor claimed that it was straight up plagiarism.

I argued that since I made no effort to conceal the Graduate thesis that was used to do the heavy lifting for locating my primary and secondary sources, that this was NOT legalistic plagiarism, but rather a very poor research effort on my part and a disgusting attempt at a shortcut, and I'd understand if he thought it warranted an F.

He argued that this was DEFINITELY plagiarism because I attempted to turn this in this work as a Research Paper and I didn't find my own primary and secondary sources, rather I used someone elses research to do the research for me. I said but I didn't copy anything directly and his sources are as good as finding sources through JSTOR and other methods? If you have an issue with the research method I used....then...".

He said "This is a research paper". "You turned in a research paper, without doing your own research". I said "I did do research, just with a gross shortcut. Its all cited, and I worked the Graduate papers information you spoke of into my own conclusions and ideas. Not one single conclusion was taken from the Graduate thesis in question. I only used the Graduate thesis to extract factual statements that were already researched and cited, and then I recited them again"

I continued to argue that, while it was possibly disrespectful to academia and to him personally, it was not plagiarism by the legal definition and therefore not by University policy. He didn't want to argue and said I was lucky hes being cool about it.

In retrospect, I am not sure I should have let it go as I think I had a real case for filing for a different result and winning this argument academically and legally.

Any experts here think what I did constitutes plagiarism?

Could make a very boring movie out of this case heh. Like Scent of a Woman, except make it about plagiarism at Yale. Great potential.