why plagiarism is bad

[truepenny]

Long ago, when I was teaching, one of the things that frustrated me the most was my students' inability to understand why plagiarism was bad. (And, yes, I came across that frequently. I never had to initiate formal proceedings, although I came close a couple times, but it was something I had to be vigilant for, and had to deal with on several separate occasions.) Some of them didn't understand what plagiarism was, and I said many bad and probably libelous things about the educational system of the state in which I live (not just for that reason, but that's another post). But even those who understood what it was and understood they weren't supposed to do it, didn't seem to have a grasp on why.

I'm thinking about this today because a friend is dealing with a non-academic case of plagiarism (and because even though I'm not a teacher anymore and don't want to be, part of my brain really latched onto the conditioning that makes you look for examples to use in teaching everywhere you go--as, for example, my realization about the grammatical uses of Bon Jovi); it's a good (where by "good," of course, I mean "morally bad"), clear example, thanks to the PayPal Donate button: asking people to pay you for words you didn't write is Not Okay. It's theft.

But, of course, in academia, the students aren't getting paid. They are, in fact, the ones doing the paying, and it occurs to me that that may be, in part, where the problem is coming from. Because they--or, more accurately, their parents--were the ones shelling out the money, some of my students seemed to feel that they were therefore entitled to get good grades with the minimum of work. (And notice the way in which the confluence of those two influences, money and grades, completely eradicates the whole notion of learning from the situation. And there's another post, about why grades are a terrible idea and a call for sweeping, Utopianist education reform. But I think I'll restrain myself from making that post today.) And it's not a very long step from that idea to the idea that, really, they shouldn't have to do any work at all to get a good grade, and that's where plagiarism starts to look all too tempting.

(I should add that I did not encounter this attitude among what my university calls "non-traditional" students, by which it means students who did something else for a while (one year, five years, twenty years . . .) after high school. Those students, each and every one of whom I treasured, knew what they (or possibly their parents or spouses) were paying for and why they wanted it, and they exhibited no sense of entitlement at all, except in the sense that they felt they were entitled to get the most out of their education that they could, and about that they were 100% correct.

(I should also add that I did not encounter this attitude in all of my "traditional" students, but it afflicted a minority large enough to be noticeable. And problematic.)

And here's the other way in which plagiarism is wrong: it assumes, and in fact enforces, an antagonistic relationship between student and teacher. It assumes the teacher is a blocking figure, standing between the student and what they want. (And notice again that what the student wants is not knowledge but good grades.) And it assumes that the student is justified in whatever bullshit, lies, and treachery they choose to employ to get what they want. Plagiarism isn't just about being lazy--although it's that, too--it's about cheating the system. And you only do that if you think the system is cheating you.

And, you know, I understand why some of my students thought that. I principally taught English courses for non-English-majors, so my students were fulfilling requirements that had nothing to do (at least on the surface) with their goals. Business majors; pre-med majors; engineering majors; student athletes, who need good grades so they can keep playing their sport (another post I won't write today is the one about the fucked up nature of the relationship between college education and college sports, particularly, though not exclusively, football and basketball): I understand why it might seem to them that an English class was a waste of their time, and therefore, if you extrapolate a little, a cheat--particularly if you're not doing well and you need that point on your GPA in order to achieve whatever it is you're actually interested in--and therefore fair game for cheating. I would, by the way, argue vehemently against the idea that English classes are a waste of time for any major, and not because I think everyone should be well-rounded or because I think literature makes you a better person. But because nobody, and I mean nobody getting a college degree in America is aiming for a job that will actually enable them to avoid the use of the English language entirely (even if a lot of engineering majors want to believe that job is out there). In today's grant-writing climate, being able to write a coherent paragraph might even arguably be a survival skill. If I could go back and have those classes to teach over again, I'd spend some time talking to them about why they were being forced to take this class and what concrete skills and advantages they were going to get out of it. I actually did that with the last class I taught (ironically, that was the class for English majors), where we talked about what an English essay is supposed to do and why I was trying to teach them to do it. Nobody ever explained that to me (I figured it out by osmosis, somewhere around my junior year of college, I think), and my students told me that nobody had ever explained it to them, either, and I have to say, pedagogically, that's just dumb. But it's also very common.

Plagiarism is morally bad because it's an attempt to get something for nothing, like any other kind of theft. Academic plagiarism is bad for that reason, and also because in their efforts to cheat the system, plagiarizers are, yes, cheating themselves. (Cue the After-School Special, yes, I know.) But the problem is that they've been mis-educated and misled into a worldview where they can't see that. Hence the whole subculture of buying papers online and fraternities keeping files on assignments in O-Chem and other weeder courses that are taught the same way year after year. (And, hello, shall we consider everything that's wrong, pedagogically, with the whole idea of the "weeder course"?) Because education has been turned into warfare between students and teachers, the spoils being the student's GPA. That's the thing that needs to change: this culture of antagonism. Stern punitive measures--The War On Plagiarism--don't ensure that students won't plagiarize; all they do is ensure that students will lie about it when caught. And be even MORE resentful of the system. Teaching students why they are required to take certain classes, why they are asked to write papers--teaching them the value of their education rather than expecting them to accept it based on a flat, and implicitly antagonistic, Because I told you so--that will start to unmake the cultural atmosphere which encourages academic plagiarism in the first place. Abolishing GPA would (I think) do even more, but even my Utopianist vision doesn't think that's going to happen any time soon.

It won't reach everyone--because nothing ever does--but it would at least make discussion possible, and it might give students something they can grasp instead of the flat and slippery, "Because it's wrong." Or possibly that's Utopianist thinking right there.

Education should be a cooperative venture between student and teacher. It should be empowering. Students should be baffled by why plagiarism seems like a good idea, not by the reasons why they shouldn't do it.

And while I'm wishing, I'd like a million dollars and a pony.

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

There were a couple of classes in which I got the distinct feeling that the teacher really was trying to stand between me and knowledge. Most of my Japanese Lit class was like that. But it is a separate problem from what you're talking about here.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Yes. That's bad teaching, which I would also like to eradicate.

[kateelliott.livejournal.com]

Excellent post. Thanks.

[wl551.livejournal.com]

I hope you don't mind a question from an uneducated person who stalks your LJ. We were taught in high school that plagiarism is bad; and for the most part, I believe most of my classmates followed that rule.

Now, I've got a daughter getting ready to go to college this fall. She is a good student and fairly smart, (6th in her class). She's always been a hard worker and a good reader, which of course, makes for a good writer, imo. In her freshman or sophomore year, I forget, she was accused of plagiarism on one of her papers. I know for a fact that she did not. The teacher said something along the lines of her writing being too good for her age, so therefore she must've plagiarized. She had to rewrite and dumb down her work. -_-

Also, teachers are now using the internet to check for plagiarism. They'll type in a phrase and if it matches, the student has plagiarized. There are only so many ways a thought can be contorted into a sentence. How on earth can one not be accused of plagiarism in these days even if they didn't really do it, but it was an instance of two people thinking the same thing and expressing it in a similar matter? I'm keenly interested in what your thoughts are on these situations. I'm truly concerned for my daughter being accused of something that is so against her nature to even contemplate, especially when she's got so much riding on her college education. Thanks so much for your time.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I certainly use the internet to check for plagiarism. The difference is, I don't consider a single phrase matching as constituting plagiarism.

Papers are much harder, I'm sure, to decide where to draw the boundaries on. My experience was with the content of a web site project. In any case, when multiple pages of text are 90% identical, it seems like a clear case to me. I like clear cases; I can be fairly confident I'm right about them.

Saying that she "must have" plagiarized because the writing is too good is completely and totally unacceptable. That teacher should find another profession; possibly prison guard. (I speak as somebody who, at 3 years old, was evaluated by the researchers at the Purdue experimental nursery school as having the vocabulary and sentence structure of a college freshman).

[nemosed.livejournal.com]

Great post, and I agree totally (especially with the non-traditional students part. Yay for non-traditional students!)

I think, though, that the problem is even worse than you are suggesting - that is, I think that a lot of higher education really *is* trying to cheat students. You're lucky in that everyone *should* learn to communication in English. But I'm in science, and therefore spend most of my time teaching those same pre-meds and engineers. But I'm not teaching them anything actually *useful* to them. You can argue (and I would argue) that everyone benefits from some basic understanding of chemistry and physics and statistics, particularly. But that's not what we're teaching them, at all. What we are teaching them is a bunch of information that will never be any use to them at all, so they can pass the MCAT and go to med school. (The engineers, in my experience, are mostly overloaded and therefore not interested anyway.) If they realize this, I'm not surprised they feel cheated. It is an arbitrary hoop they have to jump, and I am the nearest representative of that hoop.

(I try to gear things as much as possible to their interest and relevance, but I don't have that much scope. So far it also hasn't been wildly successful, but that's probably me.)

And clearly this is a ranty subject for me too :)

[nemosed.livejournal.com]

I also forgot to mention that plagiarism becomes a difficult issue in science as well. Obviously I'd hope that everyone can recognize when someone copies something with an intent to pass it off as their own, but if you are writing, for example, a mathematical proof, it's not considered wrong to reproduce someone else's argument. You can't actually produce a *new* one, usually. And this is something that usually falls under definitions of plagiarism that we give to students. I'm, again, not surprised that there is sometimes confusion.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I'm currently teaching my second college-level course (Linux for Web Development, at North Hennepin Community College), so these questions are somewhat in my head currently. (This is a side job for me, and given that the two courses I've taught are both "original", i.e. I've had to do all the work of inventing the course from scratch, they're a bad proposition financially. But fascinating to be involved in, which is why I'm doing it.)

Basically everything you say strikes something of a chord. Education is certainly about learning to do things, and students should learn why they need to know these things (preferably before they go to college, but I've always been a bit of a utopian).

I have not encountered a severe problem with entitlement among my actual students yet. I hear about it as a broader social problem rather a lot however.

I'm not sure I have a coherent post to make; I know I have a bunch of little responses to things.

Where I went to college, there were no fraternities. So the Math department kept a file of their past "comprehensive exams" (required to get a math major; a 3-hour test covering the required courses in the major, normally taken senior year). I like this; having some idea what the test is like is useful, and the department seemed to have the idea that they shouldn't actually be the same each year. It helped me figure out what to make sure I knew (sometimes that meant studying it intensively, if I'd forgotten; sometimes it meant stopping worrying about it since it was solidly in my head).

I know people who don't seem to really know how well they're doing in a class. Grades apparently help these people. This seems completely and totally weird to me, however; I wonder if there's some deeper dysfunction at work, either in the people or perhaps in the courses they're taking?

A lot of the arguments for why grades and GPA are useful are welling up, but I'm not sure how useful they are. Colleges differ so much (especially today, when Harvard and North Hennepin Community College are placed in the same bin by some people), and students differ so much, that I'm not really sure knowing a GPA really helps much. I'm not sure I'd exclude people from job interviews based on a GPA, and I'm *totally* sure I wouldn't hire them without interviews because of a GPA. So maybe I don't care about the GPA. Does there have to be a difference between graduating and not graduating, though? A total and sweeping overhaul of education could no doubt invent some vaguely meaningful way to make that distinction.

Many students are in college because they've been told they need a college degree. That's kind of the root of the problem -- they've been told that, rather than observing it themselves, or observing some need for knowledge that is best obtained in college. And given some of the jobs I've heard they insist on a degree for, being skeptical about it is a rational response, too.

Law is even weirder, in that first you have to pass law school, and *then* you have to take a special cramming course and pass the bar exam. (Yeah, the cramming isn't officially required, but I hear a really tiny percentage of people who pass the bar didn't take it).

My modest experience with plagiarism suggests to me that my students were NOT very good with Google, or just didn't think about anybody trying to catch them. I did what I thought was a rather pro-forma check to see if web sit projects had been stolen -- and got two hits, just by looking for somewhat distinctive text and googling for it.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

The fraternities aren't keeping files of the tests. They're keeping files of the answers.

[cow.livejournal.com]

> And there's another post, about why grades are a terrible idea and a call for sweeping, Utopianist education reform. But I think I'll restrain myself from making that post today.

I, for one, would quite like to read this post, should you ever find the time and interest to make it. :)

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Word. Word on all of it. Word on the grades, not the learning, being the focus in too many cases; word on the non-traditional students understanding the value of what they were after; word on the "do this thing because we say you should" approach being too common and too flawed.

My last semester teaching was my second occasion teaching a course of my own design, which I had to pitch to the board of the honors dorm (through which the course was offered). It was on sf/f creative writing, and one of the things I had to do in my course proposal was talk about why this subject mattered, what value my students could expect to get out of it. I decided, after the proposal was accepted, that there was absolutely no good reason I shouldn't present that same argument to the students themselves. So on the first day I said, "Look. Most of you probably won't go on to write sf/f professionally. Or any kind of fiction. But all of you are going to need the English language in your lives, no matter what your job is. So the one thing I want everybody to take away from this class, no matter what, is the ability to write better. To use the English language to communicate effectively. Because that will be useful every time you write an application, or a grant proposal, or a project report, or an e-mail to your boss -- every time you open your mouth." And then I would give them the example of how I thought about my verb moods when pitching the course to the board, how I decided to speak say "I will do X in this class" rather than "I would," because I wanted to sound confident rather than tentative.

And it was, hands-down, the most rewarding semester of teaching I had in five years. Some of that was probably because I had sixteen students who were geeks to one degree or another, thrilled at the chance to take a course that valued their geekery, but I'd like to think some of it was because we all knew what we were trying to accomplish together.

It isn't perfectly transferrable, unfortunately. When I taught sections for a course on human evolution for non-anthro majors, and it was required for students of physical therapy and geriatrics, it's a bit harder to make a rousing argument for the universal value of the class. (Especially when some percentage of those students are majoring in those subjects because it sounds like a good idea, not because they actually intend to stay in the field profesionally.) I could make separate rants, as dd_b has, about the way we're now requiring college degrees for jobs that used to only require a college degree and could still be done with one just fine; or about how college is more of a delaying tactic for some people than it is a desired end in itself. But saying up front, here's what I want you to get out of this -- that isn't a grade -- and why it matters, can help a hell of a lot.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

The metaphor of "theft" with respect to plagiarism is unfortunate, though I admit it seems ineradicable now.

But the person who puts up a Paypal button soliciting money for words she didn't write is not taking thing from the true author. The author is not deprived any tangible object she had before. The author is not prevented from selling her work elsewhere, or deprived of the use of it. This is completely different from what happens when someone steals a car or a camera or a wallet. If someone steals my camera, the pictures on it are gone, and I can not take any more until my camera is restored or replaced. The effects of plagiarism are far less tangible, and more often hypothetical. As long as we call plagiarism "theft" we are not properly describing what is wrong with it.

A better analogy, as I see it, is to liken plagiarism to fraud. The plagiarist falsely purports to be the author of the plagiarized work, and hopes to benefit thereby, whether by money or grades or academic acclaim. The plagiarist is defrauding her audience by putting forth the work as her own.

As for students feeling cheated by their English classes, I'm not sure they're always wrong to feel that way. As a discipline, much of English literature seems to have wandered rather far from the cogent, the rigorous, and the germane. It is perfectly possible to learn to read carefully and write well without taking a single college English class, and it's frighteningly possible to be intellectually handicapped by taking them. Certainly, even at institutions that teach remedial composition, a year of college English will not rectify a lifetime of bad instruction.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I think of fraud as a kind of theft. So it depends on your definitions.

[jenett]

You're right on about the explaining why we're doing this. I was thinking about this with the end of our quarter-long 9th grade research projects. Our current division head still doesn't get why these are so important, and why the entire 9th grade English and Social Studies team are so committed to making them happen - but it gives them (and the library and media staff, mostly me but also my office colleagues) a deliberate chance to say all this stuff. Multiple times. And then to have major wins where we find cool stuff they're interested in that they couldn't find. (Which usually makes them sit up and start paying attention to research tools, which is a bonus.)

What happens is that students are allowed to pick any topic within a very broad range (World history, not including the Americas, basically, with some nod at the year's History Day competition theme.) They then have to do a research project on it, and end up with a small dramatic presentation. Many of them work in small groups, but working on your own is possible too.

But during that quarter, we all get a chance to talk to every student, multiple times, and say "Here's some different ways to look at taking notes" or "Here's why you really want to keep good track of your sources" (and oh, boy, do I have a story about that one from my own high school days that horrifies them). And we talk about how picking a topic for a long project is different than your teacher picking something for you, or even picking a topic that you're only going to be spending a couple of weeks with. And then we work through "Do you have enough resources to do this topic? How are you going to figure that out?"

We get some truly amazing things out of it - really nuanced understanding of a subject we'd *never* have thought to assign. (For example, we had two separate groups of boys doing projects on the legalisation of abortion in the UK: I read one of their scripts and was blown away by how nuanced they managed to be about both emotional and scienticfic issues.) And they get a chance to walk through each step, with really clear "This is why this is important, and why we're teaching you" flagging all over the place, before they're expected to do it on their own in later years. There's also lots of space for them to try stuff and have it fail miserably without completely messing up their final grade, which I also think is really important.

(It also has the advantage that any other teacher in the school can expect them to have gone through this process, and therefore can focus on either subject-specific things like different citation methods, research tools, etc. or just let them get on with it outside of class and do other things with their class time, mostly.)

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

That sounds really amazing! I'm generally really happy with the way my HS education went, but something like that might have saved me from a certain amount of difficulty in college. May I ask where you teach?

-Nameseeker

[talkswithwind]

This reminds me of one of the major-requirements for Computer Science at my college. All CompSci majors were required to take a class on ethics. This makes some sense, as CompSci majors end up in jobs that make the world's data go 'round and 'round and having a solid sense of ethics is a good thing in that kind of job. Really, it is. I didn't get it from that class, though.

This provided eternal bemusement to that particular Professor when his classes were half full of students who had never taken a PHIL class in their lives, and were somewhat resentful of being there. I found it a quite interesting class, but then I'm an armchair sociologist so the evolution and framework of ethical development is interesting to me. What this class wasn't, was "this is why you don't want to be a hacker."

Good idea, poor execution. A class with a more direct ethical-behavior bent rather than an ethical-systems bent is what the Major really wanted. I managed to get this Prof and some of CompSci Professors pointed at each other to see if this could be fixed, but I graduated that year so I have no idea if it got fixed.

Ethics can be tricky to train, especially in domains where there is no historical precedent for such education. We do need more of it

[friendlydog.livejournal.com]

Tufts?

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

If you ever again run into engineering students who think they don't know how to speak or write well ... send 'em to me. I've got real-world experience.

(Management memos. Memos *to* management. Requirements documents. Design documents. Test plans. Technical documentation. White papers. User guides. Or if they have someone else to do that, explaining how the thing works to the person who writes the user guides. Presentations. Emails that go to a lot of people including some who might decide your future career. Etc., etc., so forth.)

[heresluck]

I may have to send you a copy of Clueless in Academe. Because you need something else to read! (What? Don't look at me like that!)

[finnyb.livejournal.com]

I don't currently have the brain to reply to any of this, though I want to (I've got a BFA in creative writing, and stuff like this was brought up all the time), but I do agree with all of it. And disagree with most, if not all, of the current educational system, both in the States and here in Canada, but that's another rant entirely.

[yukis-kirausagi.livejournal.com]

I'm continually baffled about why my fellow student peers think plagiarism is a good idea. Among your reasons, I find plagiarism to be bad because I find it insulting on the part of those who spend so much time and effort on their respective work. I don't like when others insult me and I don't tolerate it for other people either. The author's work I'm crediting doesn't have to be available for my academic use and I'm appreciative it is. It takes far less effort to properly cite that piece as opposed to flat out plagiarizing.

Then again, I'm not the typical student and have never broken academic rules. I've worked hard to get into college and am grateful I can even go. I'm baffled by those that are fortunate enough to have parents paying for their college education as to why they'd expect good grades for little work and even to go so far as a passing grade for work that's not even their own.

[britmandelo.livejournal.com]

That antagonistic attitude is why I hate more or less every waking moment of my university career, which I am still embroiled in. It's made me sure I don't want to teach. Absolutely sure. If college was actually about education instead of money and sports, I suspect I might have learned something insofar. I'm two semester of electives away from my degree, with all programmatic requirements finished, and I have learned literally nothing new in my field. (Now, I've learned a lot of weird and cool things from electives, like how black holes die--but notice that these things have nothing to do with my career path or my life, and I probably could have learned them on my own eventually.) The fact that most students don't see plagiarism as wrong (though I do, definitively) seems to reflect that feeling of betrayal. If you know it's about buying your way through to a degree so the university can have your money, it seems a lot less important.

(I know that seems kind of, er, angry, but attending university has stomped on my dreams of academia repeatedly and without mercy.)

[melusinehr.livejournal.com]

From a different perspective: I'm currently back in school after being out of it for a good while (new career yay!). Unlike my previous career (theatre) the new one (law) requires quite a lot of writing, so you'd think plagiarism would be an issue. It isn't.

I mean, of course it is, in that we get extremely stern warnings about not doing it, and specific discussions of why someone in a career that specifically deals with ethics really shouldn't do it (yes, yes, I know the lawyer stereotypes, which is why the profession is working extremely hard at policing itself). But the reason it's not an issue in the same way is because the school I'm at has an honor code to which all the students swear at the beginning of the year. Not only are we not allowed to break it, but if we suspect someone else of breaking it and don't tell, we're just as liable. I am sure there are people who break it anyway, of course--human nature--but for the rest of us, it means a much freer atmosphere. We're allowed to do things like listen to our iPods during exams, because we're assumed to not be listening to answers (and I honestly can't imagine how you could do that on a law exam in a useful way anyway). For one of my exams, I actually brought in an answer that had been written by the professor to previous exam question--not because I expected the information to be useful in any way, but just as a reminder of how to approach the questions I'd be getting (though in the event, I didn't look at it; it was more for comfort than anything else. Also, it was an open-book exam--I'd never have done that for a closed-book one). But there is a feeling that, because the school assumes we're following the rules, we assume that what they're teaching us is useful information.

Of course, this doesn't solve the entitlement problem you saw, but I do think it helps. Then again, as a very non-traditional student, I might be reading my own perspective into the rest of my classmates. Still, I don't think I'm too far off.

[mamculuna.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, that kiind of teaching comes too late in college. I've done all kinds of things to try to m ake the reasons for writing clear to students,to make them see what the connection is between writing and thinking and their lives after college, and the whole idea of writing as someone else's hard work...but if they've spent 12 or more years in schools that more or less teach them that research meanings cutting and pasting, when they get to college, they have not interest. The worst students I've taught have been the ones from the best schools,which seem to have taught them the cynical attitude that college courses are indeed contests between them and the teacher. Their goal isn't learning but getting away with not learning. Fortunately, I mostly teach non-traditional students in a community college setting, so one or two a term is the worst I encounter, and usually just the direct confrontation ("you copied this from this website") is enough to end it. I completely agree with what you say, but it has to start in elementary school and be reinforced in high school. College is too late.

[eagle]

There's a chapter in Dark Ages Ahead by Jane Jacobs (the author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities) about how education has turned into credentialing. Your post reminded me a lot of that. The book is a jeremiad, so a bit focused on the negative, but one of the things that Jacobs is concerned with is the increased use of degrees as required credentials for jobs and the corresponding and correlated changes in the educational process.

Students treat degrees as obstacles on their way to careers in part because their careers require the piece of paper but often don't require the information. It's commonly known in IT fields, for instance, that you need a degree to get a job, but it need not be in anything related to computer science. It's more a measure of one's ability to fit within a system and finish something (and partly just a requirement that exists because everyone in the field had to meet the same requirement when they got into it). Like professional credentials or certification, the degree becomes a certificate saying that one can get a job, or a better-paying job, and the job is the end goal. Jacobs points out that sets up the adversarial situation that you describe; the teacher who gives low grades is standing directly in the way of the economic success of the student, because not getting a college degree is a fast track to massive decreases in life-long earning potential.

What to do about this, of course, is much harder.

[(Anonymous)]

I've signed out and am remaining anonymous because I don't want names to be associated with this post. I hope you don't mind.

It's sadly not just in academia (which I'm sure you already know). I was plagiarized by someone with something like twenty years' experience WORKING FOR MAJOR COMMERCIAL PUBLISHERS. They left publishing to do freelance writing, particularly ghostwriting. (I'm intentionally using the plural pronoun to stand as the gender-neutral singular.)

Upon getting a contract to ghostwrite a memoir, the subject, per the contract, gave the GW a 60K word manuscript (written by yours truly) and told them 'this was written by my friend'. Did the GW ask who owned the IP rights? No. They just used the manuscript and bolted another 20K or so words to it.

Because, yanno, why do all that work yourself when you can get paid HANDSOMELY for just using someone else's?

This was discovered before the MS was turned in to the publisher, and the GW was told to remove my material. They simply rearranged a few sentences and swapped the occasional synonym, and then bolted on a few more bits. The published book was more than 50% my work.

The case was settled out of court.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

No, I don't mind. And I fully understand your reasons.

I try pretty hard to believe that most human beings, most of the time, are doing their best to be good people. And then there are the assholes who just have to prove me wrong.

I'm sorry you had to deal with that.

[nathreee.livejournal.com]

I must honestly say, the only thing I've questioned during my education is not why people who would rather be doing sport should learn about grammar and literature, but why a smart and not very athletic person like me was required to perform in sports. Pet peeve, had to say it.

I think you may be right; making them understand why they could benefit from learning things like this, could turn them off plagiarism alltogether. It did for me anyway. But then, I spent my entire time from junior high to the last year of college keeping track of why I was doing this and what I was learning. I may be a little strange...

[cabell.livejournal.com]

I appreciate your view here, and I share a great deal of it--but not your optimism about what might unmake the culture of plagiarism, unfortunately. I've been TA'ing a course for three years now that has pass/fail reading reflection assignments where, if they screw it up so badly we cannot in good conscience pass it, they get a lot of feedback and a "rewrite," and still get full credit for redoing it. And every year, I catch 2-3 people plagiarizing those pass/fail reading reflections. A couple more on the graded take-home essay exams, of course, but at least those are graded for points and I can sort of understand their GOAL.

I also feel like you might be skirting close to the argument that it is the responsibility of the individual instructor to prevent plagiarism, which I find problematic. A friend of mine recently caught a kid who had taken her paper from several internet sources--barely anything original at all, just welded together at the paragraph breaks, basically. She reported it to the head of her CC department, who sent her back an EXTREMELY patronizing email about how, if she didn't let students select their own topic, they would be less likely to plagiarize because they would "have more structure." Fun surprise ending: she then realized that the paper had originally been turned in for one of the chair's classes, for one of his super-structured plagiarism-proof assignments, and of course, it was copied off the internet then, too.

I agree that the present culture of "I paid for my grade, now give it to me" is a major root of the problem, but within that culture, no individual instructor will be able to stop every student who would have otherwise plagiarized, or even very many of them. They are so determined not to learn ANYTHING that they won't even write a READING REFLECTION for pass/fail credit--what pedagogical strategy can be employed here by a single teacher? I tell them every year that the rewrites are an opportunity for them to clarify concepts and learn how to discuss these topics BEFORE we have a take-home exam that is graded on a percentage scale, and still they cheat.

And I always initiate formal proceedings. Formal proceedings don't have to go anywhere, but if we really believe that plagiarism is wrong and also note that students seem to have a very hard time grasping that concept, they are necessary to ensure that a continued pattern of academic dishonesty within a large institution will not go undetected. If I catch a student plagiarizing on a reflection and don't put a letter in her file with the Dean, maybe she really didn't understand paraphrasing or maybe she did, but now she can just tell the next professor that she didn't understand it, and so on.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Okay, wow. Your students are much worse about this than mine ever were.

Also, thank you for forcing me to clarify: no, I most emphatically DO NOT think that preventing plagiarism is the responsibility of the individual instructor. They're just the poor bastards caught on the front line, the ones who are stuck doing the police work and playing the heavy. It's the student's responsibility to not fucking plagiarize. Students are autonomous individuals who make their own choices, even if those choices are badly informed, and I agree that in the face of the ingrained and appalling unethicality you describe, no single teacher can do very much beyond, insofar as is possible, not letting them get away with it.

(The chair of your friend's department? Is being a craptastic role model. Way to go, dude.)

It's also very easy for me to hold forth about this, because I'm not teaching any longer. (The ivory tower, I has it.) So when I say, as I'm about to, that the dystopian state of the current culture is no reason not to try to teach students a different worldview, I know full well that I'm saying that partly because I don't have to deal with the assholes who don't want to learn. I'm also not saying it to criticize you, or your friend with the lousy department chair, or anyone else who's out there teaching and doing the best they can. I hated teaching a lot of the time, and I know how painfully misanthropic it made me. So, you know, I'm talking at a level of abstraction that actual teachers don't have the luxury of contemplating. I know that.

The culture of cheating, with its support from free market capitalism and the completely ass-backwards priorities of many educational institutions (who matter to us? our football players matter to us!), is something so endemic, global, and ingrained in American education* (not to mention supported by the culture at large: we glorify physical achievement and distrust intellectual achievement, and that makes it even harder to make students understand why intellectual achievement is important and valuable) that waiting for reform is something one had best not do underwater. And no individual person, student or teacher, can hope to change the cultural ethos on his or her own.

Ultimately, individual teachers can't control anything except the pedagogical choices they make in their classrooms. They can't make the students change, anymore than they can make the culture of cheating change. But I do think that teachers are responsible for making the best pedagogical choices they can. This doesn't mean that I think it's the teacher's fault if the student makes bad choices, but I think introducing the idea that how a student approaches a class is a choice--that's a pedagogical choice a teacher can make.

---
*although it's also important to note that not ALL colleges and universities are afflicted to the degree that schools like UW-Madison are. Not ALL students are unethical assholes.

[prettyarbitrary.livejournal.com]

Oh god yes, yes, a thousand times yes! I wish someone had sat me down in some of my classes and explained to me what I was supposed to be getting out of it, what I should be paying attention to, and then not only would I have cared more, I would've known how I could be proactive in enhancing my experience.

I'd be prepared to debate the GPA point, however. I see what you mean about the trouble it can cause, but in good circumstances, GPA is actually a pretty useful method for students to keep track of their performance. Well, I suppose we could handle that tracking in a different way, but some form of measurement of progress is a handy tool.

[deliasherman.livejournal.com]

This has been going on for a long time. I was dealing with it in my Freshman Comp teaching days in the 70's, when I had to go to the actual library to look up articles. If I had a dollar for the number of times I heard, "My parents aren't paying $17,000 a year (which was a lot in 1976) for me to get a C- in this class!" I would have been better compensated for the work I was putting into teaching it. Sometimes I wondered, in those pre-internet days, what would happen if those students had put half the effort into writing the actual paper that they put into looking up the pertinent articles and cobbling them together.

[alex51324.livejournal.com]

I always want to reply to those, "I'm not paying/my parents aren't paying X dollars for me to get X grade," with, "Yes, you should be working harder to make sure you get your money's worth."

But that's the kind of thing that gets "does not care about her students success" written on your evaluation forms, and then gets you fired by an asshole who hasn't set foot inside a classroom since the Carter administration and has no effing idea what kind of students his institution is currently attracting.

[smills47.livejournal.com]

This is the best story I know about academic plagiarism. And it's true. ;)

As a grad student, at one point I was my Teacher's TA for a big Classics-in-translation course. When the term papers were handed in, he generously took half of them to grade and I had the other half. One of mine was blatantly cribbed from a standard textbook. I went to him in high dudgeon. Mr. Webster smiled and said, "I was subjected to five pages of me."

Moral: Plagiarism is stupid, and sometimes it's *really* stupid.

[girlpunksamurai.livejournal.com]

I'm glad someone posted about this

I mean, it's not a good idea to get me started on education in general and public education, or, in other words, anything not private school or college, in particular. Because I can go on and on and before we knew it, it'd be a year and a day and I still wouldn't have reached the bottom of my talking points.

But suffice it to say, as someone who's in her third semester and starting to feel the pressure, I can still find myself disturbed at how some of my fellow students seem to take a 'why not?' approach to plagiarism. I can't stand the thought of doing it myself; not just because it's wrong, but because I'm a writer and if I can't come up with my own original paper then I'm so sad a case even clowns should frown at me.

Still, there are some things I don't like about the academic setup: for instance, I chose a major in line with writing and being an editor, wanting both sides of the experience. And these people somehow tried to stick me in 3 semesters of math, and stuck me in college level Biology this semester, which I'm trading hard just to stay above the C grade. I plan on finding a way to test out of the math, because seriously? I don't see myself doing algebra as either a writer or an editor. I can suppose a dubious possibility of being an editor in the position of reading and editing science textbooks and papers, but that's the only reason I can come up with for them to stick me in there.

None of which would irritate me...if it weren't dragging down my oh so important GPA.

[girlpunksamurai.livejournal.com]

*treading* Spell error adjusted *ahem* >.>