You can see a copy of the Turnitin report for Arday's thesis
linked at the bottom of this substack article. The matches to Zwozdiak-Myers are mostly in the interpretation/discussion/implication sections, contrary to claims that they are in the literature review. These sections also contain extensive plagiarism of other sources. The plagiarism is the type often seen in student work, where citations taken from the plagiarised source appear within one continuous segment of matching text. This can make it appear that sources are acknowledged, but the pattern matching report flags that the sources are actually taken secondhand from an unattributed source. This is not a matter of using quotes without correct conventions.
One question is why this was not picked up when the thesis was examined, as Turnitin would have been in regular use by then.
At every institution I have studied or taught in, it was clear that a finding of plagiarism does not require intent (although intent is considered when determining penalties). There is no way an undergraduate essay should pass with this much unattributed content, let alone a PhD thesis.
Tangentially relevant story. When I was around 13, it was announced in our English class that a Scotland-wide essay competition was being run for our age group. (I think it was an annual event.) I felt obliged to go along with entering, because reasons, but didn't take it too seriously. I wasn't really trying to compete, never mind win. I mean, every 13-year-old in Scotland? The task was to retell a particular bible story in our own words. I knew the story well enough. I read the passage in the bible, and as it happened I had
a Ladybird book which was a retelling of the same story, so I read that.
The essay was written under exam conditions, supervised by our English teacher, and written on to a special form provided. I sat down and started to write, just to get it done. Near the beginning I was thinking what to write next, and a two-sentence passage from the Ladybird book popped into my head. "A little maid! We do not even know her name, but the story of her sweet helpfulness has come down to us through the ages." I could have thought of something else, but I was only interested in getting something on the paper, so I wrote that down. I didn't even think it was fine prose - I thought it was twee and saccharine. I remember thinking, the judges will know about the Ladybird book and probably dump me for copying, but who cares.
All the rest of what I wrote was my own, to the best of my knowledge. I only realised afterwards that some of the girls had been taking it quite seriously, writing draft essays and memorising what they were going to write. One girl hadn't got to the end of the story in the time allowed and was quite upset. I shrugged.
A few weeks later the English teacher called me and my best friend to the front of the class. She turned to my friend first, congratulating her on having come fifth in the competition in the whole of Scotland. Then she turned to me, with a look of semi-incredulity on her face, and announced, "and you, my dear, have won!"
There were prizes, and a presentation, and worst of all the winning essay was published by the organisers. All I could think about was those two sentences. I think I confessed to my mother, who said, you read the Ladybird book, you've had it for years, you could easily have come up with these words without remembering where they were from. (But I did remember.) My piano teacher told me a long story about a music student accused of plagiarism in a composition exam, and it turned out he had heard the star student playing over his own composition in the college practice rooms, and picked up some phrases without realising it.
But nobody at school or in the organising society said anything. I could only conclude that the judges had
not read the Ladybird book after all. Then a little time afterwards another girl in my class, someone I didn't like (and it was mutual), challenged me in conversation with a number of classmates, saying that I'd copied part of my essay from the Ladybird book. I opened my mouth to explain, and I think I was going to tell the truth, that I was just trying to get the damn essay written, the sentences just popped into my head, and I wrote them down out of sheer inertia. But I didn't get to say anything. Almost immediately several other girls shushed my challenger, indicating that she'd said something crass and improper. That was the end of it.
You can probably tell I have felt guilty about that for most of the past sixty years. But now I don't know what was in anyone else's mind. Did the judges realise there was plagiarism, but overlook it because it was only a tiny part of the essay (which was about an A4 page long). What about the teachers? Did all the other girls know, but simply thought it was bad form to point out my heinous sin? I still wonder if these sentences might have been what swung it for the judges to give me first place. I thought they were twee, but what did I know, an adult had written them and they had been published in a book. The shame of it!
This is all pretty trivial, and it was two sentences out of a page. And I was about thirteen. But I knew very well that it was wrong to copy someone else's work and pass it off as your own. I still wish I'd written something else at that point, and let the chips fall as they may.
