The NYT has an interesting article on the apparent increase in plagiarism by college students. Why is this happening? One explanation the story offers is that “many students simply do not grasp that using words they did not write is a serious misdeed.” And this, in turn, is the fault of the Internet:
It is a disconnect that is growing in the Internet age as concepts of intellectual property, copyright and originality are under assault in the unbridled exchange of online information, say educators who study plagiarism.
Digital technology makes copying and pasting easy, of course. But that is the least of it. The Internet may also be redefining how students — who came of age with music file-sharing, Wikipedia and Web-linking — understand the concept of authorship and the singularity of any text or image.
I don’t find this explanation persuasive, and I reject calls to define plagiarism down. The mash-up culture is not a culture of plagiarism. Those who copy music, lift riffs, or appropriate images don’t usually claim authorship of the original source material or claim it as their own. They use this material in works of their own, while freely acknowledging its provenance. The creativity and originality comes from finding the right source material and putting it to good use, not from denying the original source. Whether such copying and appropriation should be legal, it’s not the same as plagiarism, as it’s sourced. Web links often serve as source attributions, and even Wikipedia pages demand footnotes. Even in the Internet Age, we recognize the difference between incorporating the work of another and passing it off as one’s own.
Another possible explanation for the apparent rise in plagiarism is that many college students are simply unprepared for the type of academic work that is expected of them and engage in plagiarism even though they know it’s wrong.
At the University of California, Davis, of the 196 plagiarism cases referred to the disciplinary office last year, a majority did not involve students ignorant of the need to credit the writing of others.
Many times, said Donald J. Dudley, who oversees the discipline office on the campus of 32,000, it was students who intentionally copied — knowing it was wrong — who were “unwilling to engage the writing process.”
“Writing is difficult, and doing it well takes time and practice,” he said.
I find this explanation more persuasive. I also think the apparent rise in plagiarism is of a piece with the apparent rise in cheating by students generally. The problem is not that academic standards are too strict for the Internet Age. Rather, it’s that students are not taught that such standards really matter.
UPDATE: Has plagiarism actually increased? I agree with some of the commenters below that technology has made plagiarism easier — that is, it’s easier to copy-and-paste on a computer than it is to copy something manually. So, like anything else, as the cost of copying has dropped, we should see more of it. At the same time, the cost of catching plagiarism has probably declined as well — I’ve certainly discovered cases by searching passages from a student paper on Westlaw or Google — so the detection rate could have increased as well. So, it is probably the case that both plagiarism and its detection have increased independent of any change in student perceptions of the morality of copying another’s work without attribution.
Houston Lawyer says:
Students have largely lost the respect for authority that existed only a few decades ago. Sure, we had problem children among us who caused no end of trouble, but even they knew who was in charge. If you try to discipline a student today, you will most likely encounter significant pushback from his parents.
So you start off which people who haven’t been taught that the rules matter. Then you add in a vast industry set up to help students cheat on papers. What a lot of students don’t realize is that schools now have programs that can check for cut and paste language against a database. End result, a lot of people caught cheating.
August 2, 2010, 10:32 amAnon321 says:
I should probably read the NYT piece before asking this, but I wonder if at least part of the perceived increase in plagiarism is attributable to better detection. Could it be that students today plagiarize only slightly more than they did twenty years ago, but that teachers’ access to searchable databases means that many more of them get caught?
August 2, 2010, 10:35 amuh_clem says:
My take is that it’s more prevalent because it is so much easier.
For instance, when I was in school ( after the obligatory 20 mile barefoot uphill trudge through the snow to get there) in order to plagiarize you would first need to find the source to steal from. Then you had to copy it by hand onto your notes and then type it out on your manual Smith Corona. It was actually easier to just jot a few notes and then bang out something in your own words than to do this laborious scribe-work.
Now, you just do an internet search, find some article somewhere, hit ctrl-A -> ctrl-C -> ctrl-V and you’re done. Since the technology makes it so much easier, it’s not at all surprising that we see more of it.
Of course, it’s also easier to detect, search engines being what they are. So that may be a factor in the rise too – professors are better at finding it.
August 2, 2010, 10:36 amBleh says:
Those are my thoughts as well.
August 2, 2010, 10:49 amPersonFromPorlock says:
Why not plagiarize? After all, a degree is just something you need before employers will look at you. You put on a tie to go to a job interview, but that doesn’t mean you have to make the damn thing.
(And yes, I’m being sardonic. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t a substantial number of students (and for that matter, employers) who regard a degree in exactly that light.)
August 2, 2010, 10:49 amDavid M. Nieporent says:
Also, the internet simply makes plagiarism easier. Google-cut-and-paste is so simple. (…a caveman could do it.) Moreover, the internet facilitates all commerce, including that in other people’s work; you can easily find someone else who wrote a paper on the same topic and appropriate it.
Of course, a cynic might argue that plagiarism was always rampant, but that the internet makes it easier to catch cheaters.
August 2, 2010, 10:50 amDavid M. Nieporent says:
And a cynic might also argue that I stole that idea from several of the commenters above me — but I didn’t. I didn’t read their comments before posting mine.
August 2, 2010, 10:51 amJuan Inukshuk says:
I agree with Anon321, better detection also probably has a lot to do with it. Yet the NYT article doesn’t even mention that.
The last paragraph is a dozzy too: “A student accused of plagiarism came to Mr. Dudley’s office with her parents, and the father admitted that he was the one responsible for the plagiarism. The wife assured Mr. Dudley that it would not happen again.”
August 2, 2010, 10:52 ambee says:
Put me down for the “better detection” explanation. Before the availability of searchable texts on the internet, I might not have been able to prove a suspected case of student plagiarism. Tracking down possible plagiarism pre-internet was also fairly labor-intensive. I had more than one e-mail from other faculty asking whether a given passage sounded familiar and whether I could place it.
Nowadays it’s much easier to settle the question.
August 2, 2010, 10:59 amcboldt says:
– Students have largely lost the respect for authority that existed only a few decades ago. –
August 2, 2010, 11:01 amNot just authority, also the sense that some things are fundamentally unethical, wrong, and/or immoral. We are now in a society where ends justify the means, and the only thing one need be sorry for (and skip the remorse, remorse is for sissies) is getting caught to the extent that punishment can follow.
The authority (the law) says, innocent until proven guilty, and so, unless caught, and proved, just deny, deny deny.
byomtov says:
I tend to agree with uh_clem. It’s easier, so there’s more of it.
Are students less well-prepared? Who knows? I went to a good public high school and did a lot of writing in English classes, and there was a lot of writing in the required Freshman English course at college. It was also a given that those first few freshman papers were going to be torn apart by the instructor.
The problem is not that academic standards are too strict for the Internet Age. Rather, it’s that students are not taught that such standards really matter.
Maybe. We had a strongly emphasized honor code, and it was stressed that plagiarism was a clear violation. Has this changed?
August 2, 2010, 11:01 amCurt F. says:
All the examples in the article are of plagiarism in college. Before giving credence to cultural factors such as respect for authority or the ease of internet access, I would like to know about plagiarism in high school. Has it risen in tandem with plagiarism in college, or has it stayed relatively constant? Theories that blame cultural shifts should predict increased plagiarism in high school as well as in college, right? On the other hand, another possibility is that the increase in college plagiarism is due to an increasing number of high school plagiarists who make it into college. Under this theory, the prevalence of plagiarism in high school should have been relatively constant over the past few decades.
August 2, 2010, 11:03 amnotaclue says:
A faculty colleague of mine made this complaint the other day (quoted from memory): “These students complain that no one ever asks them for their opinion. Then when I ask them to write an opinion piece, they go to the Internet and get someone else’s opinion.”
August 2, 2010, 11:03 amyankee says:
I’m going to come down on the side of the commenters who think better detection is probably a major factor in the “apparent” rise. uh_clem’s point that plagiarism used to be a lot of work is a good one as well.
August 2, 2010, 11:03 am1040 says:
this was exactly why the nyt piece a few months ago about how plagiarism was more prevalent in computer science was broken. errm, it is that the computer scientists built and use better tools to detect plagiarism.
August 2, 2010, 11:04 amSammy Finkelman says:
The New York Times article said nothing about it, probably because it was talking about a way of using other people’ss writing in papers that wasn’t possible 20 years ago.
Twenty years ago they used to buy papers that other people had written – these would be advertised in ciollege newspapers – or they used to have someone else write somnething or if they copied something it was out of a book or an encyclopedia.
This doesn’t seem to be talking about using a paper taht was entirely written by someone else but copying paragraphs. The article is actually about plagiarism and the qword cheating only appears once in this article as follows:
“Perhaps more significant, the number who believed that copying from the Web constitutes “serious cheating” is declining — to 29 percent on average in recent surveys from 34 percent earlier in the decade.”
People who do this probably did things this way in high school and Junior High school.
What I really “liked” in this article was from a A University of Notre Dame anthropologist, Susan D. Blum:
“If you are not so worried about presenting yourself as absolutely unique, then it’s O.K. if you say other people’s words, it’s O.K. if you say things you don’t believe, it’s O.K. if you write papers you couldn’t care less about because they accomplish the task, which is turning something in and getting a grade”
What! She actually wants people to write what they believe and not what is easy and not what readily available sources say? Students get asked imposisble questions, that you could compile a book which had top professors debatinbg different opinions. The questions are ridiculous and 7th graders get asked them.
Almost the only people who succeed in college are people who don’t care about what it says and who write things they don’t believe.
I had a whole lot of trouble writing papers because I didn’t want to write anything I didn’t believe. I was never satisfied.
It’s easy to cite things from sources if you don’t care whether the sources are right. That’s the problem. It does the job, but nobody who really cares about truth should be satisfied.
What is she thinking??? Does she think if an authority, or someone accepted as an authority, says somethinbg, it is right? Does she not care about how the authority knows, r what was said 20 or 30 years before? Does she think they are all so good and things are not gotten wrong?
August 2, 2010, 11:18 amflatlander100 says:
Juan I:
Ah, that reminded me of a student who plagiarized a paper for me in a history course about a year ago. Called on it, he said he was willing to accept an “F” on the paper, but he was not guilty of plagiarism because he’d gotten his roommate to write the paper for him, and he had no idea his roommate was going to plagiarize.
I’d been in the business 40 years at that point, and I thought I’d heard everything. That one left me speechless.
August 2, 2010, 11:18 amRonald C. Den Otter says:
Good thread so far. I second the idea that cheating on papers is much easier than it used to be but so is detection. I doubt that students in the past had more integrity. People have always been, and always will be, people. I also do think that some students are woefully unprepared for the writing that is required in the social sciences and humanities.
A few more thoughts. (1) When I assign papers, I try to make sure that the question(s) to be addressed are narrow enough that it would difficult to lift something from the Internet. As far as I know, this minimizes academic dishonesty. (2) Many professors –I’ve taught at four different universities– believe that documenting cases of academic dishonestly is time-consuming and a waste of their (valuable) time because administrations aren’t serious about cracking down on the problem. (3) Related to (2), most universities only give slaps on the wrist for first-time offenders. But I don’t know if most students know this. I doubt that they think very much about getting caught.
What to do about it, then? More serious sanctions? Immediate expulsion (w/ a possibility of returning in the future)? A permanent notation on the transcript?
August 2, 2010, 11:20 amAndie says:
I taught undergraduate writing to UCLA students on and off within the past 5 years and here are some of my thoughts:
For me and my fellow teachers, the internet doesn’t make detection easier, it makes proof easier. As writing instructors who see a lot of writing from a particular student and who require drafts to be submitted before final papers, a sudden improvement in writing is very easy to detect. The internet does, however, allow us to search for a phrase and print out the exact essay that the plagiarized section comes from. In theory, this should help the dean agree with us that something was plagiarized and hand out an appropriate punishment.
Since I was teaching writing, we spent several lessons on what constituted plagiarism and how to cite sources. (I like teaching from Using Sources Effectively by Harris, Pyrczak Publishing.) Citing sources properly is a skill, one that needs to be taught and can be learned. Having a strong honor code is a good thing, but doesn’t actually equip students with the skills to abide by it while writing. And yes, I feel that students are less well-prepared. UCLA is a very good university, and I continue to be shocked by the poor writing skills of juniors and seniors. A top 25 university should have or develop better students than this.
Some students, nevertheless, plagiarized. I tend to think that these students lack respect for authority and lack wisdom in general. They have basic priorities that preclude spending time doing the work of writing. Some grad students had more important lab work to do. Undergraduates had parties to attend and lays to score. Unfortunately, as far as I could tell, the threat in the syllabus to send students to the Dean’s office was a pretty empty one. Once I detected the plagiarism, documented the case, and gave it to my supervisor, it was out of my hands. Months or even years later I would discover that virtually nothing had happened.
August 2, 2010, 11:21 amArthur Kirkland says:
A related point (which is among the reasons I am skeptical about grades as a predictor of success or as a basis for admission decisions) is the increase in inappropriate parental involvement in students’ work.
A few years ago, a middle school student participating in a moot court program submitted a sparkling brief that included the term “demurrer.” I asked the student what a “demurrer” was; she responded with a blank stare. I asked whether her father was a lawyer, and she brightened: “No, but my mom is, for [big corporation].” She never even wondered how I knew.
A display of science projects, submitted by third- and fourth-graders, contains presentations that resemble the output from the slickest corporate PR shops. The student whose plain board contains uneven, crammed handwriting and pasted-on photographs — in other words, the student who did his own work — never wins.
My children have mentioned that some parents outsource the work by hiring tutors to help with everything from homework to admission applications.
Were I a teacher, I might not permit anything that occurred outside my sight to influence grading.
August 2, 2010, 11:21 amyankee says:
I broadly agree. I’d add that if the incidence of plagiarism is increasing, that may be changing students’ perceptions of how wrong it is. It’s difficult to have to condemn people you know and like as immoral, so if all your friends are doing it you’re likely to adjust your perceptions to see what they’re doing as not wrong, or at least as not very wrong. But if I’m right the greater incidence of plagiarism would be causing the change in students’ perceptions of morality rather than the other way around.
August 2, 2010, 11:23 amLTEC says:
The problem is well described here, although Paul Lynde is really plagiarizing Aristotle.
August 2, 2010, 11:26 amMercer says:
.
.
“As a professor of economics, one of the worst sins you can commit is to sign your name to something you did not write, but as a public official, it is a mark of effectiveness to do so as frequently as possible.”
[ -- U.S. Treasury Secretary Summers, Year 2000 ]
August 2, 2010, 11:28 amGov98 says:
When everyone lies, from the top down through successive administrations why should we be surprised when deceit increases. When everyone is lazy, from the top down through successive administration why should we be surprised when laziness increases. When everyone avoids responsibility, from the top down through successive administration why should we be surprised when blame shifting increases.
Be not deceived, God is not mocked whatever a man sows this too shall he also reap.
August 2, 2010, 11:30 amBoris Kearns Goodwin says:
What’s wrong with plagiarism?
August 2, 2010, 11:32 amGaryP says:
I would like to suggest two reasons for the rise in cheating and plagiarism.
August 2, 2010, 11:36 am1) The loss of the feeling of community with the people you physically interact with. Young people identify more with their “online” community than their school community and therefore care little about the mores of the school or the opinions of their classmates. Cheaters, indirectly, harm their fellow students (assuming “curve” grading) but not online friends who may attend school in another state. This is akin to the loss of concern about what your neighbors think about how you keep your yard, noisy parties, etc. because they are not really your neigbors, only faceless people who live nearby.
2) The lack of any consequences of bad behavior of highly visible people. Public scandels have always occured, however, we have gradually grown accustomed to a loss of consequences for bad behavior, making it seem normal and acceptable. High profile people now beat their wives, have sex with underage girls, etc. and the only consequence is that they get free publicity from scandel sheets. The man chosen to oversee the IRS is found to have purposely evaded taxes and still gets the job. A professor has a graduate student write a book, the graduate student plagerises most of the book and nothing happens to either (Harvard University Law School). A prominent popular historian is proved to have plagarised his books, he evasively apologizes, nothing much happens. The list is endless.
Young people are not stupid. When societal leaders show, time and again, that breaking the rules is OK (i.e. has few, or no, consequences), rational people will break the rules because the cost/benefit analysis shows it makes sense.
Irrational people (i.e. those with rigid, absolute belief systems that label certain behavior as wrong under all circumstances, ie. Kantians) are the only ones that will continue act according to outmoded social conventions. However, that group will continually grow smaller because they will ridiculed by the majority (the cheaters) and they notice that one is rewarded for “bad” behavior (and therefore, effectively punished for “good” behavior). This is how societal norms change. Social cost (being out of step with peers) and economic cost (work harder for less polished product that will probably get you a lower grade than the plagerist) plus (little downside if you are caught) equals “cheating makes sense.”
My brother (a professor at large university) caught students cheating on a test. He gave the students a zero on the test and they, in turn, dropped the course. No additional punishment was leveed by administration. Next time, they may have a less intelligent professor that does not catch the cheating or is more lenient as to his response. Since the cost of cheating is so low, it becomes economically wise to pursue it.
A simple example. The requirement to dress for dinner (i.e. black tie) was once so strong amoung the British upper middle class that they often did so in totally inappropriate surroundings (i.e. African bush, remote Indian postings). It was considered proper behavior and one would have not been invited back if you violated it.
Once it became acceptable not to “dress for dinner,” the formal wear disapeared rapidly because of 1) the cost (including inconvenience) of maintaining black tie clothing for every evening 2) The feeling that only old fogies behaved in that way (wearing formal clothes to dinner). Similar things happened with the wearing of ties, hats, dresses, etc. Changes in fashion may seem trivial but they illustrate how “easy” will always win out if it has little cost associated with it. Higher cost activities will only be maintained if there is a social cost associated with violating the social norm.
Honesty (the hard choice) is only an sound economic choice if dishonesty carries a higher average cost, enough to make the extra effort of honesty cheaper overall.
Schools and teachers have made cheating relatively “cheap” while the cost of “honestly” remains high (making honesty uneconomic). Only economic illiterates would find it surprising that cheating is more frequently chosen. This trend is only at the beginning. Without draconian action by schools, the trend will snowball as most students do the economic calculation until “not cheating” is seen as as “old-fashioned” as wearing “black tie” for dinner.
pete the elder says:
At least in my undergraduate experience a little over 10 years ago this seemed to be the norm from my professors. For most of the papers I was assigned I am not sure how I could have plagerized what was supposed to be a reasoned argument from specific material discussed in class, even though I did have access to the internet (pre-google and wikipedia). I heard secondhand of other students getting other people to write their papers for them, but did not hear of any cutting and pasting from online sources even though my classmates were pirating music and other things online all the time.
And the other option would be for students to have to turn in something, an outline or a proposal at least, days or week before the final paper is due. That probably results in a better paper by the student and at least somewhat limits the opportunity for cheating if the paper topic is sufficiently narrow.
August 2, 2010, 11:36 amDoc Merlin says:
I think its more that highschools have gotten significantly worse.
August 2, 2010, 11:40 amNathan says:
Possible workaround to this: more in-class essay writing. By hand. Midterms/final exams that involve less multiple-choice scantron forms, and more “here’s a blank book, go and fill it” would make all the ctrl-c/ctrl-v effectively go away. Plus, if teachers keep copies of those, it’s easier to do a side by side comparison of content written under known circumstances versus papers handed in. If the wording is suspiciously better for papers, it’s time to start asking questions.
August 2, 2010, 11:40 ammicdeniro says:
A significant part of my practice consists of defending college students brought before Student Judicial Services on charges of cheating, plagiarism and other forms of academic dishonesty.
The cost of failing to be exonerated on such charges is enormous.
Not only will convicted students’ transcripts bear notations of the violation of the Student Conduct Code and the sanction imposed, which sometimes but not always can be expunged after the passage of time, but for the rest of their lives those students will be faced with a question on job application and applications to professional and graduate schools as to whether they have ever been sanctioned for academic dishonesty or violations of the Student Conduct Code.
I believe the solution to the problem discussed in the NYT is to publicize the fact that conviction on a charge of plagiarism will result in a life sentence.
August 2, 2010, 11:42 amRonald C. Den Otter says:
“UCLA is a very good university, and I continue to be shocked by the poor writing skills of juniors and seniors. A top 25 university should have or develop better students than this.”
Agree 100%, Andie. I taught as a TA and as a lecturer for seven years at UCLA.
“Some students, nevertheless, plagiarized. I tend to think that these students lack respect for authority and lack wisdom in general. They have basic priorities that preclude spending time doing the work of writing.”
Some are lazy. Some don’t care. Others cannot write to save their lives.
“Some grad students had more important lab work to do. Undergraduates had parties to attend and lays to score. Unfortunately, as far as I could tell, the threat in the syllabus to send students to the Dean’s office was a pretty empty one. Once I detected the plagiarism, documented the case, and gave it to my supervisor, it was out of my hands. Months or even years later I would discover that virtually nothing had happened.”
Part of the trouble is that too many profssors don’t want to “waste” their time becoming involved in plagiarism cases. Btw, as someone who was involved in a number of them at UCLA, they’re not all that time-consuming. But it can be a major distraction if the student contests the charges.
August 2, 2010, 11:42 amPQuincy says:
I have to disagree, here — though my perspective may reflect the university I teach at — an R1 with a high proportion of 1st generation college students. While there are disrespectful, challenging, and obnoxious students in every group (that’s just a human thing), I find the students today far more willing to pay attention to authority figures as long as the professor, TA or administrator involved shows qualities that make the students feel they deserve respect. These include listening as well as talking, showing respect for students, and taking both students’ situations and learning seriously. In nearly 20 years, moreover, I have had only one parent of an undergraduate contact me, though I have handed out plenty of bad grades.
I also notice a fairly sharp distinction among plagiarizers (whom I accordingly treat differently), though I realize that a considerable number are probably still slipping by.
1. There are the intentional plagiarizers who know full well that they are breaking the rules, but don’t care or expect to get away with it. They may copy extensively without citation, steal work from other students in their class, or simply buy a paper on line. My guess is that we generally catch most of the stupider ones in this category, but miss the smarter or richer ones. The giveaway is often work that is simply too polished for that student’s record.
2. A much larger category is the oblivious plagiarizers, who copy paragraphs from Wikipedia or other sources. These turn up immediately if the professor uses plagiarism-detector software (which I do for my large courses), and the students are usually chagrined and penitential when they are caught (which is partly an act, I’m sure, but still serves its function). The rate is not that high: perhaps one in thirty that we catch, though again, some surely do slip through undetected. These students generally come from the “writing is too hard” category, something only amplified by my state’s three-decade agenda of defunding its public schools. They grasp at Web-resources because they are intimidated and scared. We call them out, punish them moderately, and hope that they learn not to do it, instead of learning to do it more carefully.
August 2, 2010, 11:44 amRonald C. Den Otter says:
“And the other option would be for students to have to turn in something, an outline or a proposal at least, days or week before the final paper is due. That probably results in a better paper by the student and at least somewhat limits the opportunity for cheating if the paper topic is sufficiently narrow.”
I have students run their topics by me as well and I look over outlines and rough drafts. This forces most students to not write papers at the last minute, where plagiarism is more tempting (when you’re running out of time). But this isn’t feasible in large classes.
August 2, 2010, 11:46 amDG says:
I don’t think there’s a real increase in plagiarism. I think there is a decrease in certain styles of dishonesty, and an increase in others.
My plagiarism story comes from when I was teaching graduate school. I had few problems with my US born students. My students from Asia, were a different matter. Chinese students frequently struggled with English, but almost always turned in original (and technically correct!) work. Students from the Indian subcontinent, however, had real issues with plagiarism. I suspect that this is because of the rote memorization aspect of Indian undergraduate work – they had been punished for original thought. I would give these students one warning – I told them it wasn’t acceptable and that they had better redo the assignment (maximum grade: C) with original work. All except one student did as instructed, and turned in some very nice work. This one guy plagiarized a second time, after a clear warning, on the same assignment.
My program head backed me up all the way, and I failed him in the course, which he seemingly did not understand would lead to his expulsion from graduate school.
My American students would copy each other’s homework assignments, which were 100% math, and would end up screwing them on their midterms and finals. I didn’t even penalize them for it – I would observe pairs of students, one of whom obviously did the work, the other of whom copied it. One would get an A on a midterm, the other would fail. Ah, justice!
August 2, 2010, 11:47 amDYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » Plagiarism 2.0 says:
[...] Read it. The NYT has an interesting article on the apparent increase in plagiarism by college students. Why is this happening? One explanation the story offers is that “many students simply do not grasp that using words they did not write is a serious misdeed.” Another possible explanation for the apparent rise in plagiarism is that many college students are simply unprepared for the type of academic work that is expected of them and engage in plagiarism even though they know it’s wrong. I also think the apparent rise in plagiarism is of a piece with the apparent rise in cheating by students generally. The problem is not that academic standards are too strict for the Internet Age. Rather, it’s that students are not taught that such standards really matter. [...]
August 2, 2010, 11:48 amCollegeED says:
“I also think the apparent rise in plagiarism is of a piece with the apparent rise in cheating by students generally.”
And why shouldn’t students cheat? Any young person who is even minimally familiar with the wider world, society, government, politics, celebrity, knows that cheating is rewarded, that cutting corners is celebrated, that dishonesty is one of the fastest paths to the top. American society today is based on deception, dishonesty and hypocrisy. There was just a report the other day which revealed how much cheating goes on inside the FBI on tests having to do with protecting privacy rights and civil liberties:
“agents across the country improperly took the training test in groups, shared answers or completed it in unusually short periods.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/28/AR2010072800619.html
August 2, 2010, 11:48 amA.S. says:
I know the article is about college students, but since this is a legal blog, I’ll add that, in law, plagiarism is not only NOT problematic, but it is ENCOURAGED. I know that when I sit down to draft an agreement, the first thing I do is look for another agreement to use as a precedent — preferably one that is close as possible to what I want to produce so I can change as little as possible. I’m sure the same applies on the litigation side. In fact, I think that a skill many lawyers lack is the ability to figure out the best document to use as a precedent to copy.
At some point between college student and practicing law, things completely switch from where plagiarism is bad to where plagiarism is necessary. Not sure what that point is and why, though.
August 2, 2010, 11:51 amAndy McGill says:
I have a different take. I might blame the internet, but not block-copy-paste.
I think the growing problem is that students are less skilled at writing long essays. They write a lot more in short bursts and text messages. But they do not string together paragraphs much anymore in high school or even college. Thus, the frustration at writing makes the plagiarism much more attractive.
I also think we have to recognize different gradients of plagiarism. Even the ridiculously footnoted law review articles do not acknowledge ALL the ideas that are not completely original.
August 2, 2010, 11:51 amRonald C. Den Otter says:
“2. A much larger category is the oblivious plagiarizers, who copy paragraphs from Wikipedia or other sources. These turn up immediately if the professor uses plagiarism-detector software (which I do for my large courses), and the students are usually chagrined and penitential when they are caught (which is partly an act, I’m sure, but still serves its function). The rate is not that high: perhaps one in thirty that we catch, though again, some surely do slip through undetected. These students generally come from the “writing is too hard” category, something only amplified by my state’s three-decade agenda of defunding its public schools. They grasp at Web-resources because they are intimidated and scared. We call them out, punish them moderately, and hope that they learn not to do it, instead of learning to do it more carefully.”
Good point, PQuincy.
Let’s face it. If the administration were more supportive –and more serious about cracking down in academic dishonesty cases– professors would probably be more motivated to detect plagiarism of different kinds. All of you realize that their are websites these days where a student can purchase a research paper, right?
August 2, 2010, 11:52 amguest890 says:
This is one issue I’ve run into; theoretically there are disciplinary procedures in place (of debatable effectiveness), but there is so much red tape in actually using them that tenured professors don’t want to bother.
I was a teaching assistant for a (technical, non-law-related) class. One student turned in a final project paper that was copy-pasted from several published papers. It was quite blatant–there were copy-paste errors (such as from broken “smart quotes”), the tone of the paper was all wrong (making suggestions as to what research teams should focus on), etc.
If it had been up to me, I’d certainly have failed the student, and possibly investigated disciplinary procedures with the university. However, the (very busy) professor said that either of those options would result in interminable paperwork from the university administration, and he just plain didn’t want to deal with that. He ended up giving the student a D for the class.
As long as the incentives are in place for students to “get by” while cheating, they’ll do so. A deterrent isn’t much of a deterrent if the barriers to its use are high. I support strict penalties for plagiarism, but a crucial addendum is that it must be practical to implement the penalties.
August 2, 2010, 12:01 pmMike P Wagner says:
The funniest story I know about cheating is that student in one of my sister’s finance classes plagiarized from a book my sister had written.
The book had been published under my sister’s maiden name – she wrote it before she got married. She uses her married name now, and that’s the name she teaches with.
She claims she was reading the paper and started thinking, “This sounds awfully familiar.”
August 2, 2010, 12:11 pmJoseph Slater says:
Another problem is the rise of paper mills — easy to find on the web — where one can purchase not only finished papers but drafts of the paper. With guarantees that plagiarism software will not detect the dishonesty because the paper was drafted specifically for the buyer.
As an historian, I tend to reject theories that rely on “morals today have gone to hell in a handbasket.” Houston Lawyer says “Students have largely lost the respect for authority that existed only a few decades ago.” Really? The respect students had for authority in the 1960s, 1970s, etc.? I don’t think the NYT piece proves that intentional dishonesty is on the rise, but if it is, I’ll join those who vote for “it’s just easier now” as the explanation.
August 2, 2010, 12:12 pmguest890 says:
I’m not sure I would call that plagiarism. I’m not a lawyer, but I imagine that there are fairly standard templates for all sorts of agreements. I don’t expect this to be the lawyer’s original work (indeed, if I’m hiring a lawyer to write up a contract for me, I’d prefer an “industry standard” contract to an ad-hoc one, since if many people are using very similar language odds are there have been many eyes on the text and loopholes are less likely).
Reusing things other people wrote isn’t plagiarism if you’re not passing it off as your own work; I’m not expecting the main points of a standard contract to be the lawyer’s original work.
But there are other aspects of the law profession where I do expect original work. I would want a judge’s opinion to be that judge’s own words. Though they can (and should) cite and quote others’ arguments, the crucial part is the judge’s own analysis of the relevant issues and the others’ arguments.
August 2, 2010, 12:21 pmFub says:
Besides, there is nothing new about mashups. See most any Pound or Eliot. Or just look anywhere in modern literature for an Andrew Marvell ruby hiding in plain sight.
Or even taught that such standards exist. Or taught the difference between artistic license, applicable to creative works; and the standards of attribution applicable to academic works.
Only if taught, can a student aspire to freely pass the iron gates between the two, and to let the worms try his scholarship’s virginity.
August 2, 2010, 12:24 pmHouston Lawyer says:
A.S.
I actually reviewed a form of contract that contained a provision stating that the form constituted intellectual property and required permission for re-use. I laughed at that provision. I think it is pretty clear that lawyers are free to copy any other lawyer’s contract and make that form their own.
In the legal world, a good form or memo from a good firm is its own currency. I have had lawyers from three different firms send me copies of the same article written by lawyers from yet another firm explaining difficult issues at law. I sent the same memo to the examiners at the SEC so that they could see our reasoning. Good legal work speaks for itself.
August 2, 2010, 12:24 pmqwert says:
should we blame the government? or blame society? or should we blame the images on TV?
August 2, 2010, 12:25 pmAndy Patterson says:
When FBI agents and senior FBI administrators are caught cheating on tests as to what is legal under wiretapping and other surveillance techniques, then it is difficult for students to refrain from plagiarism and other academic cheating.
August 2, 2010, 12:27 pmbbbeard says:
I think you left out an important part of the cultural context here. The way I remember the dictum is: “In the jungle you dress for dinner. And the deeper the jungle, the better you dress.” The idea here is that the formality is a pointed acknowledgment of civilization. Once we repudiate civilization, “The Heart of Darkness” is but a few steps away. It’s not just the continued supply of dinner invitations that is at stake — it’s our very humanity.
August 2, 2010, 12:36 pmUrso says:
In all fields but law, people are taught that argument from authority is the weakest form of argument. In law (or at least in common law), it is not only the strongest form of argument, but often the only form of argument. Lawyers break out in hives if you write so much as a single paragraph without citation or footnote.
August 2, 2010, 12:37 pmSarcastro's Little Brother says:
I blame George W. Bush.
August 2, 2010, 12:39 pmAngus says:
Among the plagiarism cases I have found in the last few years:
1. A student who submitted a paper via email with someone else’s name on it.
2. A student who turned in a paper with (This paper purchased from _____.com) embedded in the text every so often.
3. Several students who lifted whole paragraphs from online sites like Wikipedia.
Students #1 and #2 knew that they were cheating and neither can be attributed to the internet despite it assisting their particular form of plagiarism. Students in category #3, however, often did not know they were cheating. Multiple conversations went something like this:
Q: “Would you think it was right to copy a paragraph from a book?”
A: “Oh, no. A book has an author and costs money. That would be plagiarism.”
Q: “Then why would you copy a paragraph from a website?”
A: “It’s Wikipedia. It’s free and it doesn’t have an author. It can’t be plagiarism.”
As for the statistics given at UC-Davis, I don’t know if they are at all meaningful since they only consider cases where the professor pressed the case higher. I’m far more likely to send students like #1 and #2 to the Dean for formal investigation than I am students in category #3.
August 2, 2010, 12:46 pmDave N. says:
I think societal norms have changed to some degree. Many years ago (well over half a century) my father was a college professor at Ole Miss. He caught a student cheating on the first exam, resulting in an automatic F for the course. My dad announced that he had caught a cheater but didn’t announce the name of the culprit.
The student sat through the remainder of the semester, knowing he was going to fail the course, but not wanting his colleagues to know that he had been the one caught cheating.
I can’t imagine a similarly situated student doing that today.
August 2, 2010, 12:52 pmAndy McGill says:
I have a different take. I might blame the internet, but not block-copy-paste.
I think the growing problem is that students are less skilled at writing long essays. They write a lot more in short bursts and text messages. But they do not string together paragraphs much anymore in high school or even college. Thus, the frustration at writing makes the plagiarism much more attractive.
I also think we have to recognize different gradients of plagiarism. Even the ridiculously footnoted law review articles do not acknowledge ALL the ideas that are not completely original. Students have a hard time knowing exactly where to draw the line (which is one reason student edited law reviews are ridiculously footnoted). But this no excuse for extended passages of plagiarism.
August 2, 2010, 12:57 pmRonald C. Den Otter says:
“As for the statistics given at UC-Davis, I don’t know if they are at all meaningful since they only consider cases where the professor pressed the case higher.”
No doubt true, Angus. Plenty of students aren’t caught for a number of reasons. When they get away w/ it, they’re more likely to do it again.
August 2, 2010, 12:57 pmanother cynic says:
I’m surprised that only a few comments touch on the broader issue of non-student plagiarism and other fraud in academia in particular, and not just in politics and business.
What did Goodwin and Tribe suffer for theirs? Or any of the other popular authors or profs who got caught? Or if you look at politics, consider Biden: his multiple frauds included problems in school, then lying in his 1988 campaign about his academic record, on top of the stolen speeches. He got knocked out of the race then, but this record was pretty much a non-issue in 2008.
Then there’s Bellesiles’ whole fraud. Although it had a “happy ending” when his prize was stripped, etc., he never would have been caught without ankle-biting bloggers like Cramer.
So the students might reliabily conclude that cheating is rampant among their profs, and that it’s only about getting caught and about minimizing the wrist-slap.
August 2, 2010, 12:58 pmDavid M. Nieporent says:
Setting aside the portions of the opinions drafted by judicial clerks and signed by the judge, judges often borrow liberally from the briefs submitted by the parties. You’re not going to find that at the Supreme Court, but a trial court judge…
But we’re not testing a judge to see how well he can write or how well he has mastered material. We’re asking him to render a decision on a dispute. As long as the decision is correct, whether it’s his original work or not is unimportant.
August 2, 2010, 12:58 pmDavid M. Nieporent says:
While I would never defend a plagiarizing professor, I find it laughable to suggest a 20-year old college student is plagiarizing because some professor did so.
August 2, 2010, 12:59 pmMike P Wagner says:
This is my first thought as well. I write software for a living – if I didn’t use pre-existing code, I would spanked (properly so). Re-use of existing code within a product is not only encouraged, it’s required by most reasonable software development processes. I have attended code reviews where one of “roles” was the “library Nazi” – someone whose job it was to make sure that I had not re0implemented any algorithms that were available in a library we were using.
If I implemented something that was similar to a function available in an existing library, I would need to be prepared to defend that choice, and I would probably lose.
Actually, I expect that there’s a lot of “We have met the enemy and he is is!” in plagiarism issues.
Do you know your students well enough to understand whether or not a paper expresses their opinions?
When you teach, do you regurgitate material easily accessible on the Internet?
Are your exam questions so hackneyed that a student can cut and paste an answer from the Internet?
The most rampant plagiarism I encountered during my academic career was as a TA in a class of 490 students, where the professor couldn’t have picked out more than 3 of them from a police lineup, his notes were brown with age and hadn’t been clever or original before they turned brown, and he had given so little thought to his tests that you’s probably get 100,000 hits if you typed any of them verbatim into Google in quotes.
I suspect that some of the most important causes of student plagiarism are unmotivated by changes in student behavior: teaching student to write well is a challenging task, and from what I can tell, we’ve increased public high school class size the point where it’s darn near impossible to do so; professors appear to me to be primarily expected to fund raise for the university (through grants) and publish – actual instruction occurs in spare time.
I went to a small private high school where the classes were small enough that we turned in an essay every Friday and received it back, carefully critiques and graded every Monday – a teacher facing 200 students a week cannot do that. I went to a small college where I suspect any professor I had could have spotted any attempt by me to plagiarize – because they knew how I spoke, and what I thought about the material long before they read anything I had written.
Language is highly idiosyncratic – if a profess knows his or her students, any attempt at plagiarism should ring a “this doesn’t sound like Mike” alarm bell. What a student is going to say on an essay should be well known to he professor long before the paper arrives on the professor’s desk.
My theory is that plagiarism is on the rise not only because of the technological advances, but also because we save money by not teaching students to write, and because “instruction” is such an unimportant part of a professor’s job.
August 2, 2010, 1:06 pmRaynor K says:
I think the answer is pretty obvious: general moral decay. Kids today idolize laziness and choose heroes who epitomize this trait. Look at all the Paris Hilton wannabes and reality TV shows today. Do you think any of those people on those shows ever wrote a paper that they didn’t steal from the internet? Not to mention the fact that more and more kids grow up in single parent and/or broken households. I mean at what point did stories like this become common place: http://lawblog.legalmatch.com/2010/07/29/whos-your-daddy-when-paternity-is-an-issue/
August 2, 2010, 1:07 pmRonald C. Den Otter says:
I guarantee you that the vast majority of students have no idea about plagiarism or alleged plagiarism in the academic world. Bellesiles? They have no idea who he is.
Biden in 1988? That brings back memories. Boy, what a fool.
Anyone remember when Joseph Ellis lied to his students at Mt. Holyoke about being a Vietnam vet?
August 2, 2010, 1:08 pmRonald C. Den Otter says:
“My theory is that plagiarism is on the rise not only because of the technological advances, but also because we save money by not teaching students to write, and because “instruction” is such an unimportant part of a professor’s job.”
Worthy of its own thread.
Btw, I just don’t buy that this alleged rise in plagiarism/academic dishonesty is part of a more general moral decline.
After all, in “Animal House,” back in the 1970s, there was cheating on exams… :)
August 2, 2010, 1:13 pmSammy Finkelman says:
The New York Times arftixle said something similar. It seems that for many people the problem with plagiarism is that it breaks copyright law, or is unfair to the author. In academia that’s not the point. Nobody has any idea why anyone wants them to write these papers anyway. Maybe the professors also don’t know. They may not care very much about the content. Papers are written because papers are required.
How many papers are returned with the comment: “This is well written but I don’t think it’s right?” Or “The main source you rely on isn’t good.” At most it would be: “the source you rely on is not properly credentialed” with no other kind of evaluation as to its worth.
August 2, 2010, 1:17 pmJasonF says:
I once had a judge issue an opinion that was literally cut-and-pasted from one of the briefs, to the point where the opinion had a section entitled “Argument.” Unfortunately, the opinion was copied from opposing counsel’s brief, not mine.
August 2, 2010, 1:18 pmSammy Finkelman says:
???? Maybe for higher level work, but for college papers I would think that’s the only thing that counts.
August 2, 2010, 1:19 pmJardinero1 says:
It occurs to me that there are just too many kids going to college when they would be better off learning a trade, getting a job or starting a business. This would be the vast majority of kids in Liberal Arts and BBA programs around the country. Elimination of the Guaranteed Student Loan program would help get the numbers down and keep a lot of kids out of debt.
August 2, 2010, 1:23 pmRonald C. Den Otter says:
“Nobody has any idea why anyone wants them to write these papers anyway. Maybe the professors also don’t know. They may not care very much about the content. Papers are written because papers are required.”
Yes, I have no idea why I assign papers :)
How many papers are returned with the comment: ‘This is well written but I don’t think it’s right?’ Or ‘The main source you rely on isn’t good.” At most it would be: ‘the source you rely on is not properly credentialed’ with no other kind of evaluation as to its worth.”
I give extensive comments. I don’t know whether my students read them. That happens because (a) I care about helping them (b) I have a manageable number of papers to read. I cannot speak for other professors, obviously.
August 2, 2010, 1:27 pmpete the elder says:
I also think it is silly to blame cheating FBI agents or anything similar. Students cheat because it is easier than doing the hard work of writing a good paper and when they think they can get away with it. Either they don’t care that it is wrong or they do not care enough to let it stop them, but students have probably been cheating since the first tests and homework were given out thousands of years ago.
August 2, 2010, 1:28 pmAlex Haley says:
You might end up in a much higher tax bracket?
August 2, 2010, 1:33 pmClayton E. Cramer says:
Yes, copy and paste makes plagiarism a LOT easier. (I’m old enough to have typed college papers.) But students are getting out high school utterly unprepared for college–and a fair number utterly unprepared to be citizens. I’m shocked at the number of students that I have right now who don’t realize that Congress and the state legislature are different entities, with different responsibilities.
August 2, 2010, 1:35 pmbbbeard says:
As I write this, I am sitting in a Starbucks. The soundtrack playing overhead features a rap group — I think it must be De La Soul, judging from a quick trip to Wikipedia — whose song heavily samples Steely Dan’s “Peg”. I gather from Wikipedia that SD’s permission was not sought.
Anyway…
Well, a number of commenters seem to take the position that plagiarism has some kind of absolute unquestionable immorality attached to it. I can’t really see it that way. Not all cultures at all times in history have taken the attitude toward intellectual property that the 20th century West has adopted. You’re welcome to state your belief that it’s immoral to email your friends an MP3 from Metallica’s latest album, but not everyone agrees — and I would venture a guess that the majority of people under 30 would see nothing wrong with it. Now, copyright is different from plagiarism, but my point is that our mental model of information and the uniqueness that attaches to it are evolving rapidly.
And our notions of culture are evolving rapidly. We are awash in information, nearly all of it unattributed and unclaimed. Yes, Wikipedia prefers articles to have outside references — but they don’t censor articles that don’t accord with these standards. And most Wiki pages are created and maintained by people logged in pseudonymously or anonymously.
We are rapidly shifting to a social norm that is more typical of most cultures, I suspect — one where “culture” is jointly owned and individual authorship means little or nothing. In this view, the words of a Stephen Ambrose or a Thomas Childers arise from the cultural sea in which they both swim, and neither can lay immortal ownership to those words.
Here’s an interesting article on Stephen Ambrose’s plagiarism story. Ambrose was held to account for using words and phrases from another author’s work. It is striking to me how trivial some of these plagia were. “Glittering like mica”, “up, up, up”, “suspended beneath the plane, staring down between their knees at the earth”…. This isn’t just Wikipedia copy-and-paste. At what point do the words of others simply become part of our own mental tapestry? Did Childers really invent the phrase “glittering like mica”, or did he read it somewhere?
Of course, technology has been fundamental in this cultural shift — it’s easier to copy-and-paste on a computer than it is to copy something manually. [Hmm, that sounds familiar -- who wrote that?] But some of the most striking achievements of our technological age are collaborative efforts of thousands of unacknowledged coders — the people who refine the Linux kernel, who extend the GNU compiler suite, who wrote R, who compose Wikipedia pages. Is it any surprise that the generation which writes device drivers for Linux doesn’t footnote their term papers properly?
BBB
August 2, 2010, 1:38 pmAngus says:
I once stopped a class in mid-lecture and asked 48 freshmen and sophomores how many U.S. Senators each state had. A few ventured a guess: “One” “Three” “Five” “A lot.” Not a single person knew (or was willing to answer). Made it pretty much impossible to discuss how western expansion in the 1840s and 1850s became a heated issue in part over the Slave/Free balance of power in the Senate.
Presents me with a dilemma — do I devote a significant part of my semester to basic remedial work, or do I dumb down the lectures so that they don’t require detailed knowledge? Damned if I do, damned if I don’t.
August 2, 2010, 1:56 pmBen says:
When was this? I can only go back to ’95 when I started my degree, but they warned us that if we plagiarized, we’d fail the entire course, at a minimum.
I know some universities had honor codes, but I thought they were a relatively recent development.
August 2, 2010, 1:57 pmRonald C. Den Otter says:
“Presents me with a dilemma — do I devote a significant part of my semester to basic remedial work, or do I dumb down the lectures so that they don’t require detailed knowledge? Damned if I do, damned if I don’t.”
I hear ya… You try to strike the optimal balance. You can never assume that college students know what they ought to know by now.
Ben says:
“Professors used to deal with plagiarism by admonishing students to give credit to others and to follow the style guide for citations, and pretty much left it at that.”
I doubt that this is the case anymore. Certainly not where I teach.
August 2, 2010, 2:06 pmmikeyes says:
I seriously doubt that very many students could name those people or even know that they existed. Plagiarism is not stealing the work of others as much as it is unwillingness to do the work needed for an assignment. Granted there are those students whose motivation is to get a good grade, but most probably cut and paste out of laziness or lack of training/education.
I was listening to a pair of educators talking about this issue on NPR a while back. They thought that this problem was due to several reasons including poor preparation for college on the part of some students and at the other end of the scale the need for superior grades. They even went so far as to say the many students cheated in high school in order to get into an elite college/university because entry into such meant that they would be successful in the real world. Cheating then carried over into college.
I saw a lot of cheating and a lot of disdain for authority in college in the ’60s. It is nothing new. But it was harder to cheat on a wholesale basis in those days as you had to type everything.
As an aside, the professors on radio thought that if the old school plagiarism techniques were used today (taking verbatim notes from old books and repeating them) that they would be a lot harder to detect.
August 2, 2010, 2:38 pmanother cynic says:
Messrs. Nieporent and Den Otter -
I apologize if I overstated my claim; I did not mean that students expressly reason, “gee, if Tribe can get away with it for 20 years, maybe I can, too,” and I don’t think they’re recalling the particulars of Goodwin, Ambrose, Ellis, etc.
But I do think it’s likely that they see/hear enough of many fleeting headlines of “author caught cheating” to get a general sense that “everybody’s doing it.”
I think the same is true of politicians and corruption generally — most citizens can’t name names, even of Rangel or anyone in the news today, let alone the governors or congressmen convicted in the 80s. But they have a sense that the government is full of crooks.
Maybe the cheating profs aren’t “causing” the stdents’ own cheating, and maybe both are effects of some earlier cause. But I find it hard to believe that they’re entirely unrelated, either. Put another way, I could imagine a world in which profs almost never cheat, but a small set of students do, and are kicked out. But I can’t imagine a world in which students are the good ones while the profs are constantly cheating.
August 2, 2010, 2:39 pmanother cynic says:
Messrs. Nieporent and Den Otter -
I apologize if I overstated my claim; I did not mean that students expressly reason, “gee, if Tribe can get away with it for 20 years, maybe I can, too,” and I don’t think they’re recalling the particulars of Goodwin, Ambrose, Ellis, etc.
But I do think it’s likely that they see/hear enough of many fleeting headlines of “author caught cheating” to get a general sense that “everybody’s doing it.”
I think the same is true of politicians and corruption generally — most citizens can’t name names, even of Rangel or anyone in the news today, let alone the governors or congressmen convicted in the 80s. But they have a sense that the government is full of crooks.
Maybe the cheating profs aren’t “causing” the stdents’ own cheating, and maybe both are effects of some earlier cause. But I find it hard to believe that they’re entirely unrelated, either. Put another way, I could imagine a world in which profs almost never cheat, but a small set of students do, and are kicked out. But I can’t imagine a world in which students are the good ones while the profs are constantly cheating.
August 2, 2010, 2:39 pmClayton E. Cramer says:
One of my wife’s students turned in a paper that was obvious plagiarism. The opening and closing paragraphs were barely literate. Everything in between was polished and beautiful. It only took a couple of minutes to find the source on the Internet.
The quality of writing of many students lets me avoid having to search the Internet–because the writing is so clumsy and incompetent, that it could not have been plagiarized from anywhere, except websites in the world of Idiocracy. (And I thought that movie was a sci-fi warning about the future; I’m beginning to wonder if it is a documentary about now.)
August 2, 2010, 2:42 pmGuest 7 says:
After teaching at a liberal arts college for several years, I came to believe that students know a cut-and-paste paper violates the honor code, but don’t have any sense that it’s wrong. A lot of colleges have recently increased their involvement in enforcing drug and drinking laws. They’ve also found themselves trying to police file sharing on their networks. I think there’s a tendency for students to see cheating policies as just one more set of rules with no clear underlying moral significance. The leniency with which colleges treat cheating (especially compared with under-aged drinking, say) reenforces this view.
August 2, 2010, 2:45 pmClayton E. Cramer says:
Yes. The complete abandonment of any notion that right and wrong have some absolute meaning.
August 2, 2010, 2:45 pmtamerlane says:
Within the last five years I taught a graduate seminar at a major state university. While there were a few decent students (mostly foreign trained) the vast majority were incompetent and yet, at the same time, sublimely confident of their capabilities. One student, who had demonstrated on several occasions that she could not manage to write a single coherent and grammatically correct sentence in English (her native tongue). Topped off the semester by handing in a paper that consisted of large chunks of rather good writing bridged by her usual gibberish. A quick internet search revealed the sources. When I threatened to fail her for plagiarism she complained to the Dean’s office. I received a reprimand for racial insensitivity and was forced to give her a passing grade.
Not on topic but apropos what’s happened to higher education in this country: Another student in this same graduate seminar handed in a final paper that was not only so disorganized as to be unintelligible but also contained an average of about five sentence fragments per true sentence. This masterpiece was also dotted with erudite words used incorrectly. When I tried to criticize the student he informed me that there must be something wrong with my critical faculties since he was a prep student who had just graduated with honors from our illustrious state university’s English Department. I confirmed that this was actually the case. This sad case was an intelligent and likeable twenty-something white male from an upper-middle-class background.
August 2, 2010, 2:52 pmtamerlane says:
By the way, does anyone know if there is an avenue for punishing fiction writers who plagiarize other writers’ works. I recently read an NYT “best seller” whose authors incorporated several paragraphs (nearly a page) from Huysmans A Rebours (in English translation) into their novel. The plagiarized material was presented as the monologue of one character. No suggestion was presented anywhere in the novel that these words were taken from the works of another author. Only the quality of Huysman’s writing compared with the crappy styling around it was a dead give away that plagiarism was occurring. I contacted the authors who blew me off with the assertions that what they’d done was an homage and perfectly acceptable and I was clearly an ill-educated boor to think otherwise. They also suggested that they were considering suing me for defamation. They essentially admitted to what they’d done but seemed to assume they could get away with it.
August 2, 2010, 3:06 pmThe “Age of Plagiarism”? | Little Miss Attila says:
[...] don’t think attitudes have changed at all: I think it’s just a hell of a lot easier to catch students who plagiarize than it used to [...]
August 2, 2010, 3:11 pmLiam says:
As someone who just received my bachelor’s degree, I’d posit a few independent-yet-simultaneous forces are at play here.
First, as people have mentioned, students are just poorly prepared to write. I served on the editorial board of my university’s history undergraduate journal, and the submissions we received were cringeworthy. Worse yet, many of these papers had received quality grades from their professor’s or TA’s. Students are not well-taught on how to write papers. This has the obvious effect of making students less aware of what the standards are for plagiarism (I compensated by going crazy on my footnotes, citing things such as the 1990 federal budget just to be safe, but many don’t think about it that much) but then also because the papers are of uniformly poor quality, instructors (even at the university level) will give high marks to the “least bad” of the bunch. Very few professors of mine ever actually graded on an absolute scale, giving students even less of an incentive to improve or self-educate.
Secondly, and related, is I believe the rise in “core” requirements, lower-level classes in diverse subject areas that students must take regardless of their own major. My school required 3 science classes (math/formal logic, physical science, and “life science”) as well as a variety of liberal arts courses. The board of regents recently voted to add another few requirements, I believe. Even if students were uniformly skilled writers, a chemistry student is just not likely to care enough about a history class they are forced to take that they will take the time to develop any real expertise, while a history student will be much more likely to contribute serious time and effort. I never knew anyone in my advanced history classes who just flat-out blew off their papers that way, whereas for one of my bullshit english classes I made liberal use of Wikipedia in trying to get a grasp of some of the material. As a wider and wider array of disciplines are taught to students, the likelihood of them simply turning to experts in the ones least relevant to them increases. I would be extremely interested in seeing the breakdown of instances of plagiarism between in-major and out-of-major “core” courses.
Also, as others have said, greater ease of doing it, as well as continually weak disincentives, contribute, but these are what I feel, from my own recent experience in college,
August 2, 2010, 3:22 pmFrank Adams says:
I agree that plagiarism is unlawful and cheating in itself. But the student who does this is not only cheating the school but also cheating himself. They are at school to learn and in so doing the copy paste method does not meet the objectives of why they are at school. In any case they don’t care as long as they do get grades.
August 2, 2010, 3:23 pmClayton E. Cramer says:
Ah, memories. I taught Constitutional History, an upper division history class at Boise State. About five of the 29 research papers were written at college level. One 15 page paper used two sources. Worse, about one third of the sentences–weren’t. Another student told me that this was only the second research paper that he had ever been assigned. Not in high school at all, and barely in college.
I know I went to a very, very good high school (Santa Monica)–but I am beginning to feel like a fossil.
August 2, 2010, 3:23 pmRonald C. Den Otter says:
“I apologize if I overstated my claim; I did not mean that students expressly reason, “gee, if Tribe can get away with it for 20 years, maybe I can, too,” and I don’t think they’re recalling the particulars of Goodwin, Ambrose, Ellis, etc.”
Don’t let it ever happen again :) Seriously, I would bet my life that no more than 1% of my political science/pre-law students are familiar w/ any of the above names. Normally, they don’t read newspapers or follow what’s going on in academia.
But I do think it’s likely that they see/hear enough of many fleeting headlines of “author caught cheating” to get a general sense that “everybody’s doing it.”
I still doubt that that is the case.
August 2, 2010, 3:42 pm1040 says:
This is my opinion about the subject:
The NYT has an interesting article on the apparent increase in plagiarism by college students. Why is this happening? One explanation the story offers is that “many students simply do not grasp that using words they did not write is a serious misdeed.” And this, in turn, is the fault of the Internet:
It is a disconnect that is growing in the Internet age as concepts of intellectual property, copyright and originality are under assault in the unbridled exchange of online information, say educators who study plagiarism.
Digital technology makes copying and pasting easy, of course. But that is the least of it. The Internet may also be redefining how students — who came of age with music file-sharing, Wikipedia and Web-linking — understand the concept of authorship and the singularity of any text or image.
I don’t find this explanation persuasive, and I reject calls to define plagiarism down. The mash-up culture is not a culture of plagiarism. Those who copy music, lift riffs, or appropriate images don’t usually claim authorship of the original source material or claim it as their own. They use this material in works of their own, while freely acknowledging its provenance. The creativity and originality comes from finding the right source material and putting it to good use, not from denying the original source. Whether such copying and appropriation should be legal, it’s not the same as plagiarism, as it’s sourced. Web links often serve as source attributions, and even Wikipedia pages demand footnotes. Even in the Internet Age, we recognize the difference between incorporating the work of another and passing it off as one’s own.
Another possible explanation for the apparent rise in plagiarism is that many college students are simply unprepared for the type of academic work that is expected of them and engage in plagiarism even though they know it’s wrong.
At the University of California, Davis, of the 196 plagiarism cases referred to the disciplinary office last year, a majority did not involve students ignorant of the need to credit the writing of others.
Many times, said Donald J. Dudley, who oversees the discipline office on the campus of 32,000, it was students who intentionally copied — knowing it was wrong — who were “unwilling to engage the writing process.”
“Writing is difficult, and doing it well takes time and practice,” he said.
I find this explanation more persuasive. I also think the apparent rise in plagiarism is of a piece with the apparent rise in cheating by students generally. The problem is not that academic standards are too strict for the Internet Age. Rather, it’s that students are not taught that such standards really matter.
UPDATE: Has plagiarism actually increased? I agree with some of the commenters below that technology has made plagiarism easier — that is, it’s easier to copy-and-paste on a computer than it is to copy something manually. So, like anything else, as the cost of copying has dropped, we should see more of it. At the same time, the cost of catching plagiarism has probably declined as well — I’ve certainly discovered cases by searching passages from a student paper on Westlaw or Google — so the detection rate could have increased as well. So, it is probably the case that both plagiarism and its detection have increased independent of any change in student perceptions of the morality of copying another’s work without attribution.
August 2, 2010, 3:51 pmRonald C. Den Otter says:
“Rather, it’s that students are not taught that such standards really matter.”
For what it’s worth, when I was a college student (1985-1989), I don’t recall much discussion about plagiarism, as if it weren’t a serious enough problem to be addressed by administrators or professors. That could be my faulty memory. Today, where I teach, there is no question that just about everyone tells incoming students –and this message is reinforced in most syllabi– that these standards do matter. Whether this message gets through or if it does, students give it much weight is another matter. My impression is that the problem doesn’t lie in what students are being taught about academic dishonesty. Many of them don’t think that it is a big deal, and I don’t know why that’s the case.
August 2, 2010, 4:07 pmAlessandra says:
I totally agree. First, any university, and specially a top one, must have one or more writing support programs. You can blame high schools all you want, but the students shouldn’t have his college education penalized because they have difficulties in writing. So helping students to develop their writing skills is key.
Second, one can debate just how much writing should be done at a high school and at what complexity. A lot of students had mostly written assignments that were a few pages long, or the famous group project where each person writes a couple of pages and they sequence it together to make a big ten. However, writing a 25-page college research paper or an essay is a completely different ball game, requiring a variety of skills that you minimally need when doing a paper two pages long. So the students are completely at a loss and they need help. Having used one such program when I was in grad school, all I can say is that it was a total blessing. The tutors I had never did the work for me (which was a bit disappointing, given how much I was struggling), but they just gave me pointers and I had to go and work through all my writing difficulties. Needless to say, it was of great help.
August 2, 2010, 4:10 pmAlessandra says:
And this very problem today starts in grade school…
August 2, 2010, 4:15 pmAngus says:
That, I think, is one of the fundamental disconnects with students. Many of them are not there to learn, but because college is a hurdle they must overcome in order to get a job/career. They don’t see college classes in a broad sense (how will this teach me to think for myself in the future), but in a narrow sense (how will this help me to get a job?). Worse, administrators are now pursuing the same “standardized test” mentality so prevalent among K-12 grades, where student achievement has to be boiled down into numbers for pre-set “assessment outcomes.” You can’t really put a number on, for example, whether a student has become a good writer or thinker. So instead, assessment-minded administrators are pushing us to test for predetermined factoids, names, and dates that can be learned by pure memorization and easily counted on multiple choice exams. And scores showing “successful teaching” will increasingly involve teaching to the assessment test.
August 2, 2010, 4:16 pmRonald C. Den Otter says:
“However, writing a 25-page college research paper or an essay is a completely different ball game, requiring a variety of skills that you minimally need when doing a paper two pages long. So the students are completely at a loss and they need help.”
Excellent point. But do most schools have writing centers that have the resources to help all of the students that need the help? And if that’s the case –and I doubt that it is– why do so many students not take advantage of such a resource on campus?
August 2, 2010, 4:17 pmRonald C. Den Otter says:
“That, I think, is one of the fundamental disconnects with students. Many of them are not there to learn, but because college is a hurdle they must overcome in order to get a job/career. They don’t see college classes in a broad sense (how will this teach me to think for myself in the future), but in a narrow sense (how will this help me to get a job?).”
This has been my experience, as a professor, too. Most students, even the good ones, just want to know what they have to know to do well (enough) on the exam or in the course. They only see the short-term. They don’t see college as an opportunity to acquire and develop writing and critical thinking skills.
August 2, 2010, 4:22 pmAlessandra says:
Totally agree.
Another issue is that in the first years of college, there is still a lot about the teaching, the courses and the assignments that can resemble more a transition from high school to university, rather than the real university dynamics. Students are often referred to as “kids” or thought about in an adolescent way. The students themselves may not have any motivation to learn certain things, they just want the grade. Any time this is their attitude, there is no rationale to put in the effort to study and work. They themselves don’t see what they could gain by it, they just see a loss. They will be tempted to cheat to fulfill their grade objectives, when the motivation to learn isn’t there. Obviously, oftentimes, they are just too immature to realize why learning many things they find uninteresting could greatly benefit them in various ways.
August 2, 2010, 4:29 pmRonald C. Den Otter says:
“The students themselves may not have any motivation to learn certain things, they just want the grade. Any time this is their attitude, there is no rationale to put in the effort to study and work. They themselves don’t see what they could gain by it, they just see a loss. They will be tempted to cheat to fulfill their grade objectives, when the motivation to learn isn’t there. Obviously, oftentimes, they are just too immature to realize why learning many things they find uninteresting could greatly benefit them in various ways.”
Agreed. I just don’t know what can be done about this, sadly….
August 2, 2010, 4:32 pmMonte says:
What needs to happen is the public punishment of plagiarizers. Require those found guilty to publicly admit to their actions, and to reveal the sanctions they received.
What amazes me is not that people commit acts of academic dishonesty, but that they would be so brazen about it. In the age of Google, you would need to be insane to commit verbatim plagiarism and expect to get away with it.
August 2, 2010, 4:33 pmpete the elder says:
I can sort of top that. I met a history major who was a junior from a large, well known state school with a fairly good reputation who told me she had never been assigned a paper in college. I could sort of understand if she was a math major or maybe an engineer, but I thought that was particularly sad coming from a history major.
Part of it is what school you are talking about. I graduated from a small liberal arts college 10 years ago, where the vast majority of my peers were prepared for the level of work expected from them. Classes were small enough (usally 15-25 students, hardly ever more than 40) that you could not get away with not being prepared and professors could usually tell if you had done the reading. Everyone had to write papers starting your first semester no matter your major and one of the first things they did was require us to hand write an essay during the first week of a required class to see how well we could write.
One of the main skills a college education is supposed to train you for is the ability to think critically through difficult questions and to clearly communicate in writing the relevant information and your conclusions about it. Research papers are one of the better ways to do this, but the system breaks down if the students cheat, the professors don’t engage with what the students write, and if the administation does not care.
August 2, 2010, 4:36 pm4jkb4ia says:
This whole comment is scary.
August 2, 2010, 5:26 pmIt also relates to possibly having to explain to the people at FDL that voting in the state senate primary tomorrow, which is the election, because no Republicans, Greens, or Libertarians filed, has nothing to do with approving of anything the Democrats did in Washington, DC.
4jkb4ia says:
I agree that a 25-page paper and a 3-page paper are very different beasts. You have to have a sense of how much material can fit within the 25-page paper.
August 2, 2010, 5:37 pmNickM says:
In defense of faculty who don’t seek disciplinary sanctions against plagiarists, sometimes a 0 on the assignment operates as a sufficient academic sanction.
Case in point: A student in my Organic Chemistry classes back in college (lecture and lab were formally separate courses) got caught copying another student’s work on an experiment that was about finding the boiling point of a particular liquid. She was quite stupid about it, and copied a student from the prior year’s class, when they used a different chemical.
She wanted to be a doctor, and was very willing to tell that to anyone and everyone.
The professor gave her a 0 on the assignment and did nothing further about it.
Several students questioned the prof about it, and her response was “Don’t worry.”
What we didn’t know, but the prof did, is that the 0 had knocked the offender’s grade in the class low enough that she could not possibly pass the lab class with a C or better – and passage with a C or better was a prerequisite for the next semester’s O Chem classes, which were prerequisites for med school.
No fuss, no muss.
Nick
August 2, 2010, 5:45 pmFederal Dog says:
“Another possible explanation for the apparent rise in plagiarism is that many college students are simply unprepared for the type of academic work that is expected of them and engage in plagiarism even though they know it’s wrong.”
This is correct. There is no overstating how completely unprepared these kids are in terms of literacy and numeracy skills.
The bigger problem is that so many of them do not even begin to care about acquiring those skills: The only thing they seem to understand are grades and a diploma that will get them a job and income they want.
Education? Not even a thought. They will not even crack a book as a reader, much less actively produce their own written work product. They really seem to think that if they have a transcript full of high grades, no one will notice that they can’t write a correct sentence in their own language, or follow basic instructions.
August 2, 2010, 6:01 pmLiam says:
Mandatory writing workshop(s) for first-year students, that impose rigorous standards on both the quality of work and the technical detail, would be a start. Of course, they would also tarnish the all-powerful GPA of a bevy of students, so it’ll never happen.
August 2, 2010, 6:41 pmronbo says:
Having a strong honor code is a good thing, but doesn’t actually equip students with the skills to abide by it while writing.
This is an excellent point. My son is about to start his sophomore year at a high school that requires a great deal of writing. Fortunately, the school also provided a lot of information about citation rules and plagiarism, including an assembly for the entire school plus group workshops for freshmen. The announcement sent home to parents about the assembly emphasized its dual purpose: both to raise awareness of the seriousness of plagiarism and to reduce the risk that students who were familiar with the internet (Wikipedia was mentioned specifically) but not the rules of citation might commit plagiarism inadvertently.
In addition, teachers usually provided specific rules relating to sources (e.g., listed sources only, Wikipedia permitted, no Wikipedia, etc.) with each writing assignment. That strikes me as a really good way to learn the ropes, and not just for 9th graders.
August 2, 2010, 6:45 pmTeh Anonymous says:
Two thoughts.
I read a lot of non-fiction, for entertainment. (Some for popular audiences, some for scientific or academic audiences, some at an in between sort of level.) Proper attribution is … not common. Citing Wikipedia — in expensive hardcover books that were not self-published or produced by vanity presses — seems to be creeping to a point of acceptability. But more often than that, authors seem to think that footnotes or even endnotes or any kind of attribution make their books less readable and more intimidating. And so they leave them out.
But look at textbooks. I’m not a lawyer or law student, so I can’t speak to that area, but most undergrad textbooks rarely if ever attribute. Occasionally the author(s) of a specific study might be referred to or cited. But students are not growing up in a culture where attribution matters. At most there’s a partial or full list of sources at the end of the book, or sometimes the chapter.
Second — in America we don’t value history in anything more than a basic, dumbed down, pre-digested way. Or literature. (Probably other things too, but those are the ones that spring to mind most readily for me.) Students’ parents don’t care, and so students usually don’t either.
And yes, high schools are horrible. By the time students get to their senior year, if not before, they just want out. (I know I sound like a horrible bitter back-in-my-day curmudgeon, but I was born in 1980, to a fairly typical middle class family.)
August 2, 2010, 6:46 pmRonald C. Den Otter says:
At UCLA, a lot of students lied to me about why they needed extensions on papers. Has that been true since the beginning of time?
August 2, 2010, 7:22 pmArthur Kirkland says:
If the document constituted someone’s original work, what exempts it from standard intellectual property protections?
August 2, 2010, 7:30 pmKazinski says:
Speaking as computer programmer, the ironclad rule there is “plagiarize or perish”. If you find a snippet of code that works for what you want to do, grab it and take it, and don’t even worry about paraphrasing or footnoting.
In fact I’ll bet a good bit of the code in anti-plagiarizing or DMCA detection software itself is plagiarized.
August 2, 2010, 7:54 pmDaniel The Programmer says:
Just wait until the owner of the code snippet you just copied finds out that you have their code in your system without having followed the license terms. My company uses this tool (http://blackducksoftware.com/) to make sure we know all of the code that we have copied to ensure that we follow all license terms, and we rewrite anything where the license terms are not acceptable.
August 2, 2010, 9:04 pmBarb says:
Exactly. If there is no God, there is no ultimate accountability for dishonesty –and no teaching or inner principles strong enough to make youth honest.
Older secularists, atheists, agnostics, and liberal whatevers may have good moral standards in general because they grew up in a nation that is predominantly Judeo-Christian–and respectful of the Ten Commandments regarding honesty, property, theft, etc. Humanism was influenced by Judeo-Christianity’s good values. However, succeeding generations influenced by the non-religious educators and media are finding even less reason to adhere to moral values as the culture erodes the religious basis for righteousness.
Just watch today’s reality TV –the shallowness is pathetic. Look at how your grown children are shacking up –and sleeping together without commitment –and believing that gay is good. Look at what entertained this generation of young adults –Seinfeld, Friends –and movies like Sleepless in Seattle –a nice love story except for the fact that the main character had a live-in-like-spouse who was good enough –but she had to chase a radio connection. That’s like a justification for all the internet romances that break up marriages and homes.
Virtue is hard to find these days –but I still see it in some families and religious youth. The Church is alive and well –but just not getting the publicity.
August 2, 2010, 9:23 pmBarb says:
By the way, as a mother, I had to help my kids by proofreading their papers and suggesting ways to make sense. I had the impression that all the parents in a good school with advanced classes were helping their kids write their papers, do their science projects, etc. My husband was no writer but managed to get his degrees entirely on his own. I don’t know how. We place a lot of value on “verbal skill” as a sign of intelligence. But he could read the med texts which were incomprehensible to me. I taught my kids well how to do footnotes –and I help one young college student now. Their papers before proofreading were not as good before I suggested changes. I tried to teach as I went. But I felt that my influence on their final product was more than it should have been.
But now, as adults, my 4 can express themselves and THINK VERY well in writing or speaking. I, too, had trouble getting papers done in college –and gave honest reasons for why I wasn’t done (referring to the prof who said kids lie to him about reasons for extensions.) My husband thinks research papers are a waste of time –but they are not when it comes to learning to cite sources –he thought of them as exercises in how to rearrange the words in the sources to avoid word for word plagiarism –which they are –because students don’t know anything and don’t have any original thoughts about the subjects of the papers. All their info comes from the sources.
but we were diligent about citing sources and not copying anything verbatim without quotes.
August 2, 2010, 9:38 pmGaryP says:
Many others have good thoughts about the rise of cheating and plagarism.
August 2, 2010, 10:24 pmPoor preparation makes students feel unable to succeed on their own merits.
Never having had to write papers makes the constuction of a paper seem overwhelming.
Not having explicit honor codes that are stressed to students keeps students from understanding their obligations.
All true. However, I would observe that the concept of honor is considered old fashioned. The idea that “cheaters never prosper” is gone from our society. (In fact, quite the opposite). Poor preparation may make you want to cheat. Moral decay makes you willing to cheat without remorse.
That’s were we are. We made this world. Now we get to live with it.
leo marvin says:
College students everywhere cling desperately to the same claim.
August 2, 2010, 11:38 pmTexEd says:
Obama and all black students KNOW that no liberal instructor will take action against plagiarisers. Why should they or any other students be concerned by by faculty response.
August 3, 2010, 12:42 amObama refuses to release any of his student work product! Why? Because he knows that the work will quickly be attributed to some one else. Ultra-left wing faculty won’t catch any but white middle class bandits.
Perseus says:
I agree that the unwillingness on the part of many faculty and administrators in particular (who don’t want to upset their “customers” too much) to impose steep penalties for plagiarism and cheating is a significant factor. As I tell my students, in a game theory model of plagiarism published in one of the APSA journals a few years back, the optimal penalty to deter plagiarism is to give the guilty student a failing grade in the course, not merely on the assignment (let alone the even milder penalties that administrators tend to favor).
August 3, 2010, 12:42 amVinny B. says:
The amount of plagarism going on is exaggerated, although I agree that the unwillingness on the part of many faculty and administrators in particular (who don’t want to upset their “customers” too much) to impose steep penalties for plagiarism and cheating is a significant factor.
August 3, 2010, 1:33 amRichard Blumenthal says:
What’s wrong with plagiarism? Lying of all sorts is cool, these days. I lied about my military service, and on the strange end, claimed to have been captain of the Harvard swim team … even though I was never even on the team! LOL. … and I’m still leading in the race for Governor.
No one in this country cares about integrity.
August 3, 2010, 2:30 amepluribus says:
Richard Blumenthal says:
Are you related to the Richard Blumenthal who is running for U.S. Senate?
August 3, 2010, 5:40 amPQuincy says:
I think there is something too this, and particularly in the widespread and high-profile prevalence of ‘gaming’ and ‘formalism’ in public life.
“Gaming the system” is something that always happens, of course, but I do think the intensity and acceptable of transparent gaming varies over time and between societies. The old debates between the ‘spirit’ and the ‘letter’ of the law in any culture with laws is omnipresent, but there’s something repulsive about how shamelessly various public actors — politicians, corporations, and all the rest — rely on transparent gaming (and perhaps we’ve become more aware of it, too). Our legislative system is particularly rife with it now. Anyone who pays attention knows that something called the “American Safety from Dangerous Chemicals Act” was probably written by chemical-industry lobbyists and presumably carefully avoids all actual control over dangerous chemicals that costs anything, while most likely dumping any risk onto the public purse.
Formalism goes together with gaming: it’s insisting on the letter of the law even when that letter is manifestly unjust. All bureaucratic systems tend towards increasing formalism, as do most religions, I’d argue from history, but again, the level and visibility of formalism varies. When it becomes the dominant form of interaction with institutions, it generates cynicism and distrust, and a sense that ‘following the rules’ will not pay off.
These are subtle effects and hard to quantify, but I think they matter. And plagiarism of the cut-and-paste variety strikes me, in part, as a result of the cynicism that an excess of gaming and formalism produce.
August 3, 2010, 8:22 amFormer Army MP says:
My college has a turnitin account, and I use it for every class.
I have caught at least one every semester. The most popular is to cut and paste off an article off the net somewhere, and change the first few words in the paragraph.
It seems that in the old days that would throw off the comparision software.
I think now it is just easier to catch.
August 3, 2010, 8:27 amPQuincy says:
I teach at a university without a public honor code, but have begun applying my own in my smaller classes. I ask students to write the classic honor code statement — “On my honor as a student, I have neither received nor given uncited aid on this paper”, and add their signature. I explained to them that I was doing this instead of running all their papers through SafeAssign, because I prefer an atmosphere of trust and respect. Was there less cheating and plagiarism? Hard to say, though I didn’t notice any obvious cases while grading some 40 students’ work. Also, I noticed that some students started signing other assignments, where I didn’t ask them to, with the same statement.
There’s always a balance needed, I find. Sometimes one can teach the value of academic honesty not by punitive inspection or by apodictic injunctions — “Though shalt not cheat” — but by implicit and explicit exhortation. Respect generates respect, sometimes (though not, of course, always, and at the cost of making it easier for the genuinely dishonest to do well).
August 3, 2010, 8:29 amPQuincy says:
Clayton and others have commented about how poorly prepared many students are. I have the same experience, including students in senior seminars who have never written a substantial paper.
But this, too, is a result of a growing divergence in educational pathways. Elite schools today are far more rigorous, and students work far harder, then when I was a student in the 1970s. This applies to high school as well as college. Not surprisingly, such students are well-prepared, and perform prodigiously well in some cases.
In the 1970s, the best public universities sought to match this standard, had similar admissions criteria, and also taught at least their best students at the same level. But for 30 years, we have (at least in my state) been defunding first the public school system, then the public universities. Freshmen are much less well-prepared than they used to be, and get much less attention from overstressed professors and graduate assistants.
In short, what used to be a gradient from Yale to Podunk State has become two fortresses with a gradient in between. Looking at it historically (and there seem to be a lot of historians on this thread), I see us returning to a historical mean of social division, for which I use the shorthand “society of Estates.”
The privileged enjoy high quality everything, the masses are sharply separated in their formation from childhood onward, and thus much more likely to be excluded from upward mobility. The dream of universal education for citizenship and a society in which individual merit opened the path to high-value pathways is gone. To be sure, highly motivated and competent individuals may still thrive, but not in the high-status spheres of education and public life. At best, as in the Ancien Regime, they can hope to get rich and powerful enough that their children have access to elite perquisites.
August 3, 2010, 8:58 amFormer Army MP says:
I teach at a bottom tier public U. I actually have a lot of options. I can fail on the assignment or the course on my own, with right of appeal to the dean. I do have to formally advise them of their right of appeal.
I can also refer to the student trial system on my own call, and they really nail the kids if there is proof.
August 3, 2010, 9:00 amPQuincy says:
The GPA issue will never arise, because the cost of doing this will ensure that administrators, starved of funds, will never do this in the first place. Despite the well-known reality that students have poor literacy and numeracy skills, my large public R1 has been wildly CUTTING writing classes and support — not because the institution’s leaders are evil, but because funds are desperately tight and they are rewarded for high profile projects like a new medical school, not for educating highly qualified undergraduate students.
August 3, 2010, 9:02 amRick says:
I have a number of my own thoughts and stories to share on this.
First, why not plagiarize? After all, a degree is just something you need before employers will look at you. You put on a tie to go to a job interview, but that doesn’t mean you have to make the damn thing.
OK, just kidding. But I do think societal norms have changed to some degree. Many years ago (well over half a century) my father was a college professor at Ole Miss. He caught a student cheating on the first exam, resulting in an automatic F for the course. My dad announced that he had caught a cheater but didn’t announce the name of the culprit. The student sat through the remainder of the semester, knowing he was going to fail the course, but not wanting his colleagues to know that he had been the one caught cheating. I can’t imagine a similarly situated student doing that today.
The last paragraph is a doozie: “A student accused of plagiarism came to Mr. Dudley’s office with her parents, and the father admitted that he was the one responsible for the plagiarism. The wife assured Mr. Dudley that it would not happen again.”
Put me down for the “better detection” explanation. Before the availability of searchable texts on the internet, I might not have been able to prove a suspected case of student plagiarism. Tracking down possible plagiarism pre-internet was also fairly labor-intensive. I had more than one e-mail from other faculty asking whether a given passage sounded familiar and whether I could place it.
And a faculty colleague of mine made this complaint the other day (quoted from memory): “These students complain that no one ever asks them for their opinion. Then when I ask them to write an opinion piece, they go to the Internet and get someone else’s opinion.”
This also reminded me of a student who plagiarized a paper for me in a history course about a year ago. Called on it, he said he was willing to accept an “F” on the paper, but he was not guilty of plagiarism because he’d gotten his roommate to write the paper for him, and he had no idea his roommate was going to plagiarize.
My final thought: “As a professor of economics, one of the worst sins you can commit is to sign your name to something you did not write, but as a public official, it is a mark of effectiveness to do so as frequently as possible.” – Larry Summers
August 3, 2010, 9:40 amTamerlane says:
PQuincy:
In my state — Massachusetts — the funding for higher education per student has increased steadily as have the number of students until very recently over the period you mention. The Same is true in many other states. [I'm curious what state you live/work in that is bucking this trend.] The money goes to fund administrators, fancy public-works buildings, and incompetent, elitist faculty, who then work together to lobby for even more funding. That many of these administrator-faculty lobbyists use the same arguments as you for pouring more tax-payer dollars into the resulting cesspit makes me think that your argument is contradicted by the experience of Massachusetts and many other states.
August 3, 2010, 10:29 amMercer says:
`
| “Steal a man’s idea, and it’s plagiarism. Steal ten men’s ideas, and it’s a term paper. Steal a hundred men’s ideas, and it’s original research.” |
August 3, 2010, 10:47 amMark Horning says:
Half of college classes (at the undergraduate level) are at the “I’m taking this class because it’s required” variety. The engineering student sees the required history, philosophy, and english classes as a burden. Likewise, the english major has the same perception of his wattered down science and mathematics courses.
Of course they cheat. They don’t want to be there in the first place.
Honor codes work when you have a small class of students who care about the material. We had one professor who gave us take-home, timed, closed-book exams. The professor was concerned that one student may have cheated as he actually finished the exam. (the rest of us wrote ‘Ran out of time’ about 80% of the way through).
Several of us assured the professor that no, that’s just Bob, he really is that smart, and we believe him that he finished within the alloted time.
That would never work in a general education and breadth course.
This was in the mid 90′s. We had the internet, but web browsing was text based, and I believe that most cheating on writing assignments was paying someone else to write a paper for you, rather than failing to properly atribute the work of others.
Let’s face it, it really is easier to properly cite a work when you have to actually go to the physical library, find the real dead-tree book in the stacks, and then copy a paragraph or two by hand.
Now in physics, we have a trick. If we don’t want to cite something we say “it is well known”. Most people would write “it is well known that E=mc^2″, not cite Einsteins 1905 paper where he first wrote that equation.
Also the so-caled rise in plagarism may simply be an observer effect. Right now, the universities are hyper-sensitive to the issue. When I was in grad school, (2-3 years ago) we had one student called into the Dept. Chair’s ofice where he was accused of plagarism because his research paper was very close to a paper that had just been published in a physics journal.
The university was using some fancy software or some-such. The student was incredulous, lauged and said “you can’t be serious?”
The chair responded that they take plagarism varry seriously. The student’s response “Um, did you notice who wrote the journal article?”
The paper was the cumulation of a semester long research project. Final papers were supposed to be “of publishable quality”, so the student had submitted it for publication.
One of the graders on my paper thought I had gotten someone else to write my paper for me. he couldn’t find any evidence, it was just that “this paper is too well written for a grad student to have written it.”
The professor was half right. It was too well written for most of our 22-24 year old students to have written it. As a returning non-traditional student, I wrote much better than any of my peers, and better than several of the professors.
Probably a good thing that I heard this second hand from my advisor, as I doubt I would have reacted well had I been accused to my face.
August 3, 2010, 1:05 pmAlessandra says:
I was also thinking that ironically the rise at cheating and plagiarizing has happened at the same time that universities censor freedom of speech, by imposing increasingly restrictive speech codes.
August 3, 2010, 1:09 pmRob Berra says:
Tiresome, Barb; you’re becoming tiresome. Your ongoing insistence that All Things Good stem from the Judeo-Christian worldview and nothing good can come without it is not only insupportable, it’s clearly counter to fact. Unless, of course, you’re not trying to imply that Confucian ancient China or pre-Christian Norse, Celtic, Greek, or Roman cultures did not have strong moral values?
For myself, it’s not fear of a particular deity’s wrath that makes me honest, but the fact that I can consider myself a person of honor and integrity only if I maintain high standards of honesty. Your mileage may vary…
Actually, plenty of people learn moral values separate from (your) religious values. The one is not dependent on the other, which is why one has principled atheists, agnostics, and people of other cultures and faiths.
Yeah, because we never had shallow TV before reality TV came along.
Yes, yes, we know, Barb, we know. You’ve informed us ad nauseam that you don’t like these things. Utterly irrelevant to the subject at hand, of course, but don’t let that stop you…
I don’t find it hard to find at all. I know plenty of good, honest, decent, honorable, compassionate people. Some are Christian, some are not: in my experience, a person’s religious faith has nothing to do with how decent a person they are.
Yeah, some of that publicity you can probably do without. Jimmy Swaggart, George Rekers, Pat Robertson, Bernard Law… I look to someone’s heart and actions for virtue, not whether they’re associated with a particular organization.
August 3, 2010, 1:33 pmRob Berra says:
Actually, speaking as one who went to college back in the 1980s and who is now finally getting a degree, it’s much easier to cite works now. I can do a couple of hour’s work on teh Intarwebz, find my sources, and use Word 2007 to (APA–yech) format my citations properly for me. If I had to go to the library and hunt down actual paper books and journals for every citation, the same work would take me half a day or more. Since I’m a non-traditional (49 years old, full-time job, married with young child) student, that would be effectively impossible for me.
I don’t plagiarize because (a) I like to think of myself as an honorable man, (b) I don’t need to. If I had to, I could create a paper that loosely strung together a bucket of quotations (cited, of course) followed by a summary/conclusion, but I can generally grasp the material at hand and write a paper with citations to support my thesis. It’s beyond me why those who are busy plagiarizing don’t just take the first route: your paper looks good with all those citations, you fulfill the requirements, and you don’t get an F for plagiarizing. Doesn’t seem that hard to me.
August 3, 2010, 1:45 pmRob Berra says:
Puts me in mind of a story from my (first) undergraduate days. One fraternity (pre-Internet) required that all members submit a copy of any paper they wrote to the frat’s library. Ostensibly for “research,” of course, but realistically? Yeah.
So this one student discovers he just doesn’t have time to do the research for a particular paper. Goes to the library, finds a paper on the subject, copies it out, puts his own name on it, and turns it in.
Gets it back with an A and a notation “This is an excellent paper. It was an excellent paper when I wrote it twenty-eight years ago, and it’s still an excellent paper.”
Not the kind of thing you want to encourage, but I thought it might give people a chuckle…
August 3, 2010, 1:50 pmvelville in atlanta says:
Have you opined that theft of materials (intellectual and physical) shows the decline in honesty and other standards by today’s students?
Consider the following:
1. During Army basic training in the late 1960′s, testing was conducted and the powers that be decided we were short of time. The sergeants would say, “Men, we are about out of time, so we have to deal with questions 20-25, which [are] a; c; d; a; and e, and write them down …” Honesty lost in the face of expedience.
2. Children are taught that school supplies they bring (that their their families paid for) go into the community box. They are “owned” by all. Communal ownership of pens and pencils, notebook paper and Kleenex?
Why not communal ownership of writings of others? Of ideas? Of music on the internet?
12-year-old settles music swap lawsuit. LOS ANGELES, California (CNN, Wednesday, February 18, 2004) –A day after being sued for illegally sharing music files through the Internet, a 12-year-old girl has settled with the Recording Industry Association of America. … She’s the first of 261 defendants to settle their lawsuits with the association. …Brianna LaHara agreed Tuesday to pay $2,000, or about $2 per song she allegedly shared. …”I am sorry for what I have done,” LaHara said. “I love music and don’t want to hurt the artists I love.”]
3. Is Forced Sharing Communism? http://officiallyscrewed.com/blog/?p=511 Oct.09, 2006
Yesterday at the dinner table, my wife was talking to Cookie about pencils. Cookie, my 10 year old daughter, commented that they don’t have their own pencils at school.
This made me perk my ears up a bit to listen closer.
She then proceeded to explain that in her class they have a box where they all put their pencils at the beginning of the year and when you need a pencil, you can just go up and get one from the box.
3a. Are Shared Back to School Supplies Fair to Kids?
August 3, 2010, 3:36 pmPublished July 24, 2007 by Melanie L. Marten http://www.associatedcontent.com
There is a trend in many schools to have the students provide shared, or community, back to school supplies. Some parents complain that they are expected to purchase forty or fifty pencils to send with their child on the first day of school. Others tell stories of back to school needs that include five boxes or tissues, or even toilet tissue if there is an in-class bathroom.
velville in atlanta says:
Consider the following:
1. Plagiarism not governed by professional boundaries, says former Rocky Editor Temple http://bigmedia.org/ Jason Salzman
July 15th, 2010 Temple emailed me:
“’I don’t think plagiarism is governed by professional boundaries. We saw what happened when Joe Biden plagiarized Neil Kinnock. Nobody should take somebody else’s words and use them without crediting the original source.”
“I don’t know who would disagree with this. It’s clear that plagiarism is wrong, regardless of who commits it.
“But how big a deal should be made of it?”
[How about, A big deal because it is dishonest?]
2. Consider: “Is Forced Sharing Communism? http://officiallyscrewed.com/blog/?p=511 Oct.09, 2006. Yesterday at the dinner table, my wife was talking to Cookie about pencils. Cookie, my 10 year old daughter, commented that they don’t have their own pencils at school.
This made me perk my ears up a bit to listen closer.
She then proceeded to explain that in her class they have a box where they all put their pencils at the beginning of the year and when you need a pencil, you can just go up and get one from the box.”
Consider: Children are taught that school supplies they bring (that their their families paid for) go into the community box. They are “owned” by all. Communal ownership of pens and pencils, notebook paper and Kleenex?
[Why not communal ownership of writings of others? Of ideas? Of music on the internet? Or "music sampling?" Or bank robbery?]
3. Consider: 12-year-old settles music swap lawsuit. LOS ANGELES, California (CNN, Wednesday, February 18, 2004) –A day after being sued for illegally sharing music files through the Internet, a 12-year-old girl has settled with the Recording Industry Association of America. … She’s the first of 261 defendants to settle their lawsuits with the association. …Brianna LaHara agreed Tuesday to pay $2,000, or about $2 per song she allegedly shared. …”I am sorry for what I have done,” LaHara said. “I love music and don’t want to hurt the artists I love.”]
Is it that the student cannot write or will not write because he or she never learned to write but did learn that “sharing” was better?
August 3, 2010, 4:01 pmproduct of a public education says:
When I was in middle school, we spent a few days in my English class talking about plagiarism. Our teacher told us that plagiarism is directly quoting someone else’s words. So, if you want to avoid plagiarizing, you need to find synonyms to substitute for the original words (at least one in every five). If you do that, you don’t need to cite to the original source, since you’re no longer directly quoting that source.
Our homework assignment was to practice “not plagiarizing” by rewriting a page of text with substituted synonyms. Fortunately, my mom asked me about my homework and was able to tell me what plagiarism was actually about. But there are an awful lot of kids who had this English teacher and might still believe that you’re not committing plagiarism if you don’t directly copy all of the words in an original source.
August 3, 2010, 4:17 pmMark Horning says:
Oh it’s much easier to do the research now. But I still think that citing the original source is much harder since so much stuff on the “intarwebz” has been repaginated and divorced from it’s original source. Most of the better journal articles you an get as full-pdfs though, which make citing straightforward.
I agree that APA = yech. I always use AIP (American Institute of Physics) style and it drives my APA trained coworkers nuts.
August 3, 2010, 6:08 pmGuest14 says:
Well, there in fact is no God. So if what you say is correct, why do we bother trying to encourage academic honesty at all?
August 3, 2010, 7:05 pmElliot says:
I wonder if an increase in plagiarism in school reflects a diminished ability to write. It’s really not that hard to rewrite a passage from the internet so the scanners can’t detect it.
August 3, 2010, 7:22 pmbbbeard says:
Heh. That’s nothing compared to being forced to sit still for a recitation of Rainbow Fish.
BBB
August 3, 2010, 9:16 pmDesiderius says:
“The problem is not that academic standards are too strict for the Internet Age. Rather, it’s that students are not taught that such standards really matter.”
Well, they are taught that, but it’s interspersed with so much PC bullshit that it is difficult for them to tell the difference between what the teachers really do care about as opposed to those things they’re forced to pretend to.
That, and it is to the perceived advantage of certain groups of students to play dumb on such matters.
Ultimately, the fact that the (K-12) school environment is forced to rely on coercion to maintain the attendance of the students (in such contrast to the free society surrounding students and school) erodes its effectiveness as an authority on anything.
August 4, 2010, 12:16 amCareless says:
You’ve written this twice, and there’s no way it’s correct. The lowest spending state now spends 50% more per student today than the average state 30 years ago. Without accounting for inflation, the lowest spending state spends more than twice as much as the highest spending state 30 years ago
August 4, 2010, 12:37 amCareless says:
And I’m fairly certain Tennessee wasn’t blowing every other state out of the water in per-student spending 30 years ago.
August 4, 2010, 12:43 amElliot says:
I’d suggest students know exactly what they are doing, and they have no problem with confusion. The problem is with adults who can’t bring themselevs to acknowledge the kids are dishonest cheats. Like so many other groups, it must be somebody else’s fault.
Lots of these same folks look at a gang banger shooting people in the street and twist themsevles into pretzels trying to blame everyone besides the shooter. Anyone think they are going to say a kid in school is respopnsible for his own cheating?
August 4, 2010, 12:51 pmBarb says:
The teacher knew that kids don’t know anything –so they are doing good if they can paraphrase what they read. Are you objecting to the paraphrasing? or that they did not cite the source of their information –which that teacher probably ALSO taught them to do –I hope. It’s likely that a middle school termpaper comes entirely from sources to cite –no original thoughts.
When I taught English and the first termpapers, I told them to write about something they already knew –say, how to take care of a horse –and then find some quotations or new info and footnote those.
The value of the term paper, besides the exposure to a topic about which they know nothing, is to learn how to make note cards (on computer now, I suppose), do a bibliography, record sources, cite them in the body of the paper, etc.
I also told them to write questions they wanted to find answers to on their topic. Then find the answers and teach the reader what you learned, citing the sources.
August 5, 2010, 12:47 amBarb says:
That’s what the cheaters are saying –why bother, since you say there is no God to whom they’ll ever be held accountable. Why should they care as long as they get their degree?
In fact, Guest 14, I’m sure there is a God. The evidence of intelligence behind the universe and life, our existence, the beauties of earth, our marvelous eyes and spirits which enjoy the beauty of the earth and of life –it’s all mysterious, marvelous, awesome. In spite of all the bad things that happen, there is so much good –I’m sure we are loved –and that we are supposed to love each other.
C.S. Lewis suggested that our ‘sense of oughtness’ –like that we ought to have good standards in academia and not cheat, e.g. –is evidence of a moral law in the universe –something out there.
August 5, 2010, 12:57 amRob Berra says:
Surely you mean “doing well…
That’s a great approach, Barb. I must remember that one. I’m not a teacher, but I have known one or two in my time, and I know plenty of people with children.
August 6, 2010, 4:45 pm