English Language Arts: Avoiding Plagiarism (TEKS.ELA.9-12.12.G)
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Texas High School ELA › English Language Arts: Avoiding Plagiarism (TEKS.ELA.9-12.12.G)
Original passage (125 words): Urban heat islands do not merely raise afternoon temperatures; they elongate the entire daily thermal profile. Dense surfaces like asphalt absorb shortwave radiation, then reemit stored energy long after sunset, delaying nocturnal cooling that ecosystems and human bodies rely on. Because warmer nights intensify ozone formation and strain cardiovascular systems, the public-health burden concentrates in neighborhoods already lacking tree canopy and reflective roofs. Yet mitigation is not a simple matter of planting trees anywhere. Species selection, irrigation capacity, and albedo tuning must be tailored to microclimates and to infrastructure lifecycles, or else well-meaning retrofits fail. Crucially, governance must align maintenance budgets with projected heat trajectories; without durable funding and targeted siting, pilot projects create photogenic shade while leaving thermal inequity structurally intact for decades ahead.
Attempts: [Attempt 1] Urban heat islands not only raise afternoon temperatures; they lengthen the daily thermal profile. Dense asphalt absorbs shortwave radiation and then reemits it long after sunset, delaying the nocturnal cooling that people and ecosystems need (Nguyen, 2022). [Attempt 2] Planting trees anywhere solves heat islands quickly, so governance and funding can be deprioritized. [Attempt 3] Nguyen (2022) argues that the greatest harm from urban heat islands unfolds at night, when heat stored in built surfaces keeps neighborhoods from cooling. Because elevated nighttime temperatures worsen ozone and health stress, mitigation must be targeted, pairing site-specific canopy, irrigation, and reflective materials with budgets that last beyond pilot phases; otherwise, inequities persist. [Attempt 4] Because hardscapes trap solar energy and release it after dark, the neighborhoods with fewer trees endure hotter nights and more health risk; lasting solutions require funding aligned with local microclimates.
Which attempt represents an acceptable sophisticated paraphrase that avoids plagiarism while accurately conveying the passage's complex ideas?
Attempt 1
Attempt 2
Attempt 3
Attempt 4
Explanation
Attempt 3 substantially rephrases and restructures the ideas, preserves nuance (nighttime heat, health impacts, targeted/maintained mitigation), and includes clear attribution to Nguyen (2022). Attempt 1 is too close to the source's wording even with citation. Attempt 2 distorts the meaning by oversimplifying solutions. Attempt 4 uses original language but omits attribution, which is unacceptable in advanced academic work.
Original passage (125 words): Texas's claim on the Rio Grande is increasingly mediated by hydrologic volatility and legal choreography. While the 1944 treaty with Mexico and interstate compacts nominally apportion flows, prolonged drought, intensified by warming, converts paper entitlements into contested scarcity. Irrigation districts that once planned by season must now plan by storm, shifting from calendar deliveries to opportunistic capture. Urban utilities complicate the ledger: conservation successes lower demand per capita, yet metropolitan growth expands the absolute baseline. Meanwhile, groundwater pumping in connected aquifers can reduce surface flows, blurring jurisdictional lines. The policy challenge is not merely allocating shortage, but synchronizing measurement, enforcement, and investment across institutions that answer to different voters and time horizons. Absent coordination, each fix ricochets downstream, redistributing risk rather than resolving it fully.
Attempts: [Attempt 1] Martinez (2021) explains that treaties and compacts settle the Rio Grande only on paper; drought amplified by warming, groundwater–surface interactions, and uneven urban growth turn allocations into moving targets. Irrigators and cities must coordinate measurement and enforcement across agencies with different timelines, or each drought response simply shifts scarcity elsewhere. [Attempt 2] While the 1944 treaty and compacts nominally apportion flows, prolonged drought converts paper entitlements into contested scarcity, and urban utilities complicate the ledger (Martinez, 2021). [Attempt 3] Because conservation lowers per-capita use, city demand is no longer a factor in river allocations; farmers alone must adapt to shortages. [Attempt 4] Drought, growth, and connected aquifers make water rights volatile, and the real task is syncing data, enforcement, and investment across governments.
Which attempt is the best example of a sophisticated paraphrase that avoids plagiarism and preserves the original passage's complexity?
Attempt 1
Attempt 2
Attempt 3
Attempt 4
Explanation
Attempt 1 significantly rephrases and reorganizes the ideas, keeps the nuance about drought, groundwater–surface linkages, growth, and cross-agency coordination, and includes proper attribution (Martinez, 2021). Attempt 2 is too close to the source language even with citation. Attempt 3 distorts the meaning by claiming cities no longer pressure allocations. Attempt 4 lacks attribution despite having original language.
Original passage (125 words): CRISPR's promise lies not only in therapeutic precision but in administrative decisions about where precision is acceptable. Editing somatic cells to correct blood disorders presents relatively contained risks, yet germline alterations weave experimental assumptions into descendants' biology. Meanwhile, the line between treatment and enhancement buckles under market incentives: when performance and prevention look alike, regulation must explain why they should be governed differently. Equity further complicates matters. If early interventions cluster among patients with access to specialized centers and clinical trials, the technology may widen, not narrow, disparities in morbidity. Ethical oversight that focuses exclusively on consent and safety protocols, while necessary, is insufficient; governance must also anticipate how insurance design, intellectual property, and reimbursement standards shape real-world distribution across regions and generations alike, fairly.
Attempts: [Attempt 1] CRISPR's promise lies in precision, yet decisions about where precision is acceptable matter; germline edits weave experimental assumptions into descendants, and equity concerns arise if access clusters among the privileged (Khan, 2022). [Attempt 2] As long as patients agree and safety rules are followed, policymakers need not consider insurance or markets when regulating CRISPR. [Attempt 3] Editing blood cells may be contained, but altering embryos raises generational stakes; rules must anticipate insurance and patent effects on who benefits. [Attempt 4] According to Khan (2022), the ethical stakes turn on deployment: somatic edits pose bounded risks, but inheritable changes bind future generations. Because commerce blurs therapy and enhancement, and access tends to favor well-resourced patients, oversight must reach beyond consent to include coverage, IP, and payment policies that determine real-world beneficiaries.
Which attempt is the most appropriate paraphrase for advanced academic work?
Attempt 1
Attempt 2
Attempt 3
Attempt 4
Explanation
Attempt 4 reframes the passage with original structure and diction, preserves the complex distinctions (somatic vs. germline, therapy vs. enhancement, equity), and cites Khan (2022). Attempt 1 is too close to the source's phrasing even with citation. Attempt 2 misrepresents the argument by ignoring market and policy dynamics. Attempt 3 shows original language but lacks attribution.
Original passage (125 words): In Houston, flood mitigation increasingly revolves around managing accumulation rather than merely accelerating drainage. Decades of paving and subsidence have lowered ground relative to bayous, so pushing water out faster can transfer risk to downstream neighborhoods already perched near capacity. Detention—on rooftops, in roadside swales, and beneath parking lots—works only if maintenance persists and if design anticipates compound events when rainfall coincides with high tides. Buyouts promise durable safety but sever social fabric and tax bases, prompting local resistance that planning spreadsheets often underestimate. Because federal funding flows episodically after disasters, the region's governance problem is temporal: institutions must fund dull, preventive work between storms, or else each "100-year" rain merely re-stages the same inequities under a different storm name again and again afterward too.
Attempts: [Attempt 1] In Houston, pushing water out faster can transfer risk to downstream areas; detention features work only with maintenance, and episodic federal funds make preventive work difficult (Alvarez, 2020). [Attempt 2] Alvarez (2020) contends that Houston's flooding problem is cumulative: paved, subsiding terrain and tide-affected bayous mean speeding runoff can heighten someone else's exposure. Real resilience requires maintained detention, socially aware buyouts, and steady between-storm funding; otherwise the same places flood repeatedly. [Attempt 3] Because buyouts reduce tax bases, the city should avoid them and instead build higher levees to move water out faster. [Attempt 4] The region must finance routine prevention between storms, or each big rain repeats the same harms under new storm names.
Which attempt is the best example of a sophisticated paraphrase that avoids plagiarism and maintains accuracy?
Attempt 1
Attempt 2
Attempt 3
Attempt 4
Explanation
Attempt 2 meaningfully reorganizes and rephrases the ideas, includes appropriate attribution to Alvarez (2020), and preserves nuance about accumulation, maintenance, buyouts, and steady funding. Attempt 1 is too close to the source language despite citation. Attempt 3 misrepresents the passage's cautions. Attempt 4 uses original wording but lacks attribution.
Texas, often framed as a land of drought, actually lives by a rhythm of extremes: multi-year dryness punctuated by sudden, infrastructure-straining floods. Because reservoirs capture only what falls upstream and because aquifers recharge unevenly, planners face a paradox: the state must store more water precisely when rivers occasionally rage. Yet expanding supply alone cannot solve inequities among fast-growing cities and colonias relying on fragile wells. The current patchwork of regional authorities complicates coordinated responses; voluntary conservation spikes during crisis but fades when rain returns. Analysts argue that resilient policy will blend demand management, targeted interbasin transfers, and incentives that value water for ecological services, not merely municipal delivery. In short, reliability will depend less on building bigger and more on aligning institutions with hydrologic reality.
Which student version represents appropriate sophisticated paraphrasing rather than plagiarism?
Version 1
Version 2
Version 3
Version 4
Explanation
Version 3 substantially rephrases and restructures complex ideas, maintains accuracy, and provides clear attribution. Version 1 is too close to the original wording even with a citation. Version 2 shows original language but lacks attribution. Version 4 distorts the author's claims by asserting centralization and that flooding is mostly solved.
Urban heat islands arise not only from dark surfaces absorbing solar radiation but also from waste heat emitted by vehicles and buildings. Proposals to cool cities often prioritize reflective roofs and tree canopies, yet their benefits depend on seasonal context, humidity, and nighttime heat retention. Increasing albedo can reduce air conditioning demand in summer but may slightly increase winter heating needs, and indiscriminate tree planting can exacerbate pollen or water stress. Moreover, cooling strategies interact: reflective pavements can elevate pedestrian glare while low-emissivity materials alter longwave radiation balance. The most effective programs integrate microclimate modeling with equity goals, targeting relief to neighborhoods with high heat exposure and limited green space. In practice, adaptive design means trading marginal efficiency for resilience across varying weather regimes locally.
Which student version represents appropriate sophisticated paraphrasing rather than plagiarism?
Version 3
Version 2
Version 1
Version 4
Explanation
Version 3 thoroughly rewords and reorganizes the argument, preserves nuanced tradeoffs, and attributes the ideas. Version 1 is too close to the original phrasing despite a citation. Version 2 shows original language but lacks attribution. Version 4 oversimplifies and misrepresents the passage.
Houston's bayou network was engineered to speed stormwater toward the Gulf, a logic that made sense when prairies and wetlands buffered peak flows. As pavement replaced sponge-like soils, that same design channeled floods into neighborhoods built along widened channels. Recent projects—detention basins, buyouts, and green corridors—attempt to hold water in place, but benefits accrue unevenly across the region's fractured jurisdictions. Bond elections fund visible projects where voters live, not always where risk concentrates. Moreover, conventional cost-benefit analysis discounts repetitive, moderate flooding that erodes wealth in working-class areas. A more equitable approach would pair basin-wide hydrologic modeling with social vulnerability metrics, prioritizing investments that reduce cumulative losses while restoring the ecological functions that once moderated torrents. Governance capacity, like drainage, flows unevenly across county lines too.
Version 1 is a too-close paraphrase. Which revision would best transform it into an acceptable original expression for advanced academic work?
Version 3
Version 4
Version 1
Version 2
Explanation
Version 2 meaningfully restructures and condenses the ideas, stays accurate, and clearly attributes them to the passage. Version 4 shows strong original language but lacks attribution. Version 3 changes the argument and introduces claims not in the source. Version 1 remains too close to the original wording.
Proponents of algorithmic test proctoring claim that automation levels the playing field by spotting cheating without human bias. Yet these systems encode assumptions about "normal" eye movement, gaze, and background noise that reflect the data they were trained on, not universal behavior. Students with disabilities, unstable internet, or crowded homes trigger more flags, and appeals processes often lack transparency. Moreover, the promise of neutrality masks a pedagogical tradeoff: designing assessments to be easily surveilled constrains what we ask students to do. Open-ended tasks, collaboration, and authentic research become risks to be managed rather than goals to cultivate. A fairer path would invest in diverse assessment formats and clear integrity norms, reducing incentives to cheat while acknowledging technological limits. Human judgment remains necessary, but not sufficient.
Which student version represents appropriate sophisticated paraphrasing rather than plagiarism?
Version 2
Version 3
Version 1
Version 4
Explanation
Version 2 accurately preserves nuanced claims, substantially rewords the passage, and includes attribution. Version 3 uses original language but lacks attribution. Version 1 is too close to the original phrasing even with a citation. Version 4 misstates the passage by asserting neutrality as a given.