Was I falsely accused of plagiarism?

Question

I am a high school student. I completed an essay for my English 2 class. I ended up receiving a zero for plagiarism. I also got a referral. The essay was based around the book called “Night” by Ellie Wiesel. The essay was spilt up into an organizer. The organizer is split up by paragraphs. In this case we had our introduction, body paragraph one, body paragraph 2, and our conclusion. Inside of each body paragraph the organizer had sections for example, Main idea, evidence from the text, analysis of the evidence. I was absent from school and did not have the chance to finish reading the book. I took it upon myself to use Spark Notes to better understand the story. For the evidence in my essay I copy and pasted some words from Spark notes. But i also used evidence from the book as well. I did not use any words from Spark Notes when filling out any other part of the graphic organizer. Only for the section labeled “evidence from the text”. Is this considered plagiarism? I analyzed the evidence in my own words as well as the rest of the essay.

Answer 1

There are several factors at play here: copying and pasting words from Spark notes, as well as evidence from the book. If you only copied individual words from Spark, and those words are common knowledge, then you would not have plagiarized. If you copied sentences or even just parts of sentences from Spark without citing them, then that would be plagiarism. Moving on to using evidence from the book, any summary, paraphrase, or quote must be cited properly or else it is considered plagiarism. If you did not properly cite anything that would be in any of those three categories, then that would be plagiarism. I hope that this helps you determine whether you accidentally plagiarized or not.

Answer 2

Copying and pasting from another source without attributing it, or taking the ideas from another source without crediting the author of that source, is plagiarism.