WPA Best Practices Statement on Plagiarism

Defining and Avoiding Plagiarism: The Writing Program Administrators (WPA) Statement on Best Practices

On the complicated and at times troubling subject of plagiarism, "Defining and Avoiding Plagiarism: The WPA Statement on Best Practices" (January 2003) appears to be a useful teaching resource for faculty and TA's who teach writing to consult. See the Council of Writing Program Administrators website to view/download an Adobe Acrobat PDF of the WPA Statement.

The WPA describes itself as "a national association of college and university faculty with professional responsibilities for (or interests in) directing writing programs." Among its members are instructors in Stanford University's Program in Writing & Rhetoric (PWR). N.B. Such membership in no way constitutes official adoption by PWR or by Stanford of the WPA Statement.

PWR maintains its own "Policy on Academic Integrity," (including the problem of plagiarism), which reads: "All written work submitted to PWR classes may be sent by the PWR instructor to one or more databases for the noncommercial purpose of checking the writer's use of sources. These databases check student writing against published works and other submitted student writing to ensure academic integrity, specifically that words and ideas have not been borrowed without appropriate citation."

See also "Plagiarism" in the "Students" section of this website.