How to defend plagiarism in my bachelor's thesis

Question

I study at a university in Europe and recently received an e-mail from the exam commission regarding the submission of my bachelor thesis. I am under suspicion for plagiarism and to be honest I don't know what to do, as the consequences are severe and I had no intention of committing plagarism.

To give you some background information: I intend to start the Master Accountancy after summer and all I need to do now is pass my thesis. My supervisor got sick a couple of weeks before the deadline and therefore our final meeting was postponed until only a week before the deadline. In this meeting she told me that my thesis was too complex and it would be difficult to efficiently use SPSS. She adviced to change a lot of stuff and I eventually had to rewrite big parts of my thesis. Due to the limited time until the deadline I had left, I used an old student's thesis for inspiration (as we partially had the same research question and often made the same references). I had no intention of copying or being inspired this much by this thesis. As I said, my own research questions reflected his a lot and I read the thesis many times through. Naturally then, it took up a large portion of my working memory during these days and I appearantly was disproportionally influenced to the point my thesis started to reflect the paper too much.

I now need to send an e-mail back to the exam commission with an explanation with what happened. What scares me the most is that should the exam commission decide that I plagiarized my thesis, I am not allowed to resit the thesis for one whole semester (6 months) after the students who failed the resit re-do their theses. This would mean that I would be restricted for the thesis for 1.5 years. This would be such a shame, as I finished everything else, and already was planning to start my Master in a couple of months. All of this is really starting to affect me mentally.

Does anyone have any idea what is best to do next? Please keep in mind that I am under ''suspicion of fraud'' for now. I am not sure what to respond to the exam committe and how to convince them otherwise. It was never my intention to do this, but it was done unintentiolly in the rush of the nearing deadline and having to re-write a big part of the thesis in a short time span (due to my supervisor not being available for feedback, due to illnes). I now see that my thesis indeed reflects the paper disproportionally. I am out of ideas on what to do. I ideally want to convince the exam commission that it truly was not my intention, so that I don't have to wait 1.5 years to start my master's. I would be glad if I can convince them to reduce the punishment.

Answer 1

Tell the truth. It depends on how much you copied and how whether what you wrote here will count as an excuse or not. There is nothing else you can do.

Answer 2

Hard to say without knowing your thesis, the other thesis, and how you referred to this earlier thesis. But - working on a similar topic and therefore having a similar story and references isn't plagiarism, even though some automatic systems might set off a warning.

My suggestion, assuming that you didn't plagiarize and referred to other people's work accordingly, would be to (a) explain that you understand their concerns given the closeness of topics/questions, and (b) offer your availability to meet and cooperate in figuring out whether or not you crossed a border or not.

Before the meeting, if you get one, make sure to work through both your thesis and the earlier thesis and identify sections that could be seen as plagiarized, but also make sure you know where your work is different and unique. Be critical of your own work, but at the same time defend it (if you think that it is defensible) using scientific arguments, not emotional ones.

Answer 3

In general, we are not judged by our intentions, but by our actions.

What you are describing sounds an awful lot like plagiarism (though as others point out, this is hard to tell without actually seeing the two works).

You may not have intended it; you may not have realized you were acting in an unprofessional manner; you may have come with the best intentions. Ultimately, you took someone else's work and heavily relied on it (not sure whether your definition of "inspiration" means that you copied their words, or just their content) and it's also unclear whether you acknowledged the other thesis by citing it.

The best thing you can do right now is to be honest, explain what happened and hope that the disciplinary committee appreciates your honesty enough to let you graduate in time.

I personally am a lot more lenient with students who show genuine remorse and understanding of where they were wrong, rather than wasting my time with disciplinary proceedings. Perhaps your institution works in a similar manner, and you will be allowed to write your thesis again with no significant delays. In that case - make sure you do things right! Ask for deadline extensions rather than freak out and do something you'll regret.

Answer 4

Devil's advocate here.

First: tell the truth.

Based on what I read in your question, I assume you copied large part of the previous thesis, so either you are a poor poker player, or you are very clumsy and instead of defending yourself you are putting even more suspicion on your acts. You have nothing to loose by saying the truth, but by saying something that is percevied false, you have a lot to loose: please remember it is not a trial, but it is a commitee "judging" you. In fact, they must come to a decision based on what you wrote and how you will behave in front of them. I see two possible outcome:

• you will be judged as a student under a lot of pressure that may have copied,

or

• you will be judged as a liar and a plagiarist that tries to cover up the fact of copying from a previous thesis.

Second: 1.5 years is NOTHING

In that span of time you can learn a foreign language (spanish?german?Python?sql?) sufficently to be professionaly proficient in that language. So in 1.5 years you will have a lot of open doors, and even more after your master. Yes, you may need to work at McDonald for 1.5 years to sustain yourself. That is not absolutely wrong, you will start to get a couple of things about how big companies address account problem, and how the divide between affordable (and healthy food and working poor salaries is getting larger and larger.

Good luck, please remember that rules are often in place to protect someone from him/her/themselves ...