Is it plagiarism to reference a fictitious source?

For example, Merriam–Webster defines plagiarism via to plagiarize, which it defines as:

: to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own
: use (another's production) without crediting the source intransitive verb

: to commit literary theft : present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source

This does not include inventing a quotation, which is in fact sort-of the opposite of plagiarism: passing off one’s own idea as somebody else’s. Other dictionaries agree on this and so does my understanding of the word plagiarism.

Moreover, defining plagiarism so broad makes the term rather useless and almost equivalent to the umbrella term academic misconduct. The reason why we have a word for plagiarism is to differentiate a specific kind of misconduct, not a specific severity.

The conflict is this: the student isn't citing these texts directly, but they are referencing finer plot points and characters. 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.

I fail to see why you would be more lenient about academic dishonesty than about plagiarism. I don’t fully understand what you mean by “referencing finer plot points and characters”, but I would classify what you are describing as fabricating evidence, which is roughly as grave as plagiarism. I say roughly, because I see no point in ranking the severity of those misconducts in general and the severity distributions of individual instances of those misconducts strongly overlap.

What is important at the end of the day is whether you are reasonably convinced that the student in question did not just work sloppily, but intentionally deceived the reader (i.e., you). The aspect of intention alone suffices for awarding them zero points, in my opinion.

I kind of like Teddi Fishman's (Chair of ICAI) definition of plagiarism from her paper “We know it when we see it” is not good enough: toward a standard definition of plagiarism that transcends theft, fraud, and copyright:

Plagiarism occurs when someone

1. uses words, ideas, or work products
2. attributable to another identifiable person or source
3. without attributing the work to the source from which it was obtained
4. in a situation in which there is a legitimate expectation of original authorship
5. in order to obtain some benefit, credit, or gain which need not be monetary.

I agree with Wrzlprmft: let's not muddy the water and include all sorts of academic misconduct in a definition of plagiarism. Plagiarism is one form of academic misconduct; all forms of academic misconduct should incur a sanction, which will, of course, differ according to the individual circumstances.

Plagiarism refers to a specific kind of dishonesty--in a nutshell, pretending to have written something that was actually written by someone else. Fabricating sources doesn't meet that definition, but it isn't necessarily a less serious offense.

Plagiarism in academia is wrong primarily because it is fundamentally an attempt to gain a grade that wasn't earned. Grades are typically given for a student's writing, and if a student tried to deceives you into believing that a paper is the student's work when it really isn't, then that is a serious offense worthy of a zero.

So what was the effect of the deception in this case? If you were giving grades primarily for doing research, and the student tried to deceive you to into believing that research had been done when in fact it hadn't, then the offense has essentially the same effect as plagiarism, and it merits a similar penalty.

If, on the other hand, the research itself was only a minor factor in the grade, then it might be a lesser offense. I believe that the penalty still needs to be sufficient to deter dishonesty in any form, but you might reasonably decide that reducing the grade to zero is harsher than would be necessary in this case.