I'm dealing with a student essay that references three books in support of a claim. None of the books referenced have authors listed, and, based on the contents of the student's essay, I can't find any information on these books online. I'm fairly certain they don't exist, but I'm not sure what to call this beyond academic dishonesty.
I read this from the Nebraska Methodist College:
Other acts of plagiarism are more limited in scope, but are nonetheless cheating. If you decide to make up a quotation or other material and an associated in-text citation, this is plagiarism. If you change or invent the author of a quotation, an idea, or a statistic to make your paper appear to contain more numerous sources, this is plagiarism.
I've run into a few other university plagiarism guides that mention the citing of fictitious sources as plagiarism, but I'd like to know if this is standard, fair, or legitimate to label this practice plagiarism and not just academic dishonesty.
The conflict is this: the student isn't citing these presumably falsified texts directly, but they are referencing finer plot points and characters in them. That is, they are talking about the fictitious dilemmas of the fictitious characters as a way to support their thesis. To me that's dishonest and shows a lack of integrity. I'm grading students on a rubric that awards points for organization, analytical treatment, and language use. If I treat this as academic dishonesty maybe I knock the person's grade down in the rubric criteria related to analysis, but if I treat it as plagiarism I'd give the student a zero.
