{"id":1013,"date":"2010-08-12T10:58:40","date_gmt":"2010-08-12T16:58:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/minkhollow.ca\/beckerblog\/?p=1013"},"modified":"2014-09-12T12:02:03","modified_gmt":"2014-09-12T18:02:03","slug":"plagiarism-in-the-21st-century-why-dont-college-students-seem-to-know-what-it-is","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/minkhollow.ca\/beckerblog\/2010\/08\/12\/plagiarism-in-the-21st-century-why-dont-college-students-seem-to-know-what-it-is\/","title":{"rendered":"Plagiarism in the 21st Century: Why Don’t College Students Seem to Know What it Is?"},"content":{"rendered":"Approximate Reading Time: <\/span> 2<\/span> minutes<\/span><\/span>

There’s been a lot of buzz about plagiarism lately; here are two recent articles:<\/p>\n

Are You Part of \u2018Generation Plagiarism\u2019? – The Learning Network Blog – NYTimes.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cPlagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age,\u201d<\/a> Trip Gabriel<\/p>\n

SO, why aren’t they learning this in school BEFORE college? I think a big part of it is that their teachers in H.S. and before did not make a point of crediting the sources THEY use. Lack of time (to learn it and to teach it) is a frequent excuse – but another one is that the teachers themselves <\/em>practice plagiarism.\u00a0 How often does a kid get a photo-copied worksheet with no identification of the source? What about clipart? Notes? How often does the teacher talk about where the materials they use come from? MOST teachers do not produce most of their own teaching materials – they buy or ‘inherit’ them.
\nAcademic integrity is really such an easy thing to learn, but it needs to be made explicit and modeled by their teachers.
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\nRule number ONE: If you didn’t make it up yourself, say where it came from.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

RULE 2: Always keep notes on where you got things from as you gather them.<\/span><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Understanding plagiarism is not intuitive – it needs to be taught. It hasn’t been.<\/p>\n

Before kids had access to their own resource materials (aside from the local library and home encyclopedias) it was less of an issue – it was easier to identify sources. This is no longer true – and kids are not taught how to do research, OR how to assess their sources. Often this is because the elementary teachers don’t really know how to do this themselves (even many of the recently trained teachers do not know – probably because most of their professors didn’t know either).<\/p>\n

Education about respecting other people’s ideas and attribution has to start right when the kids FIRST start grabbing things off the net for their presentations: usually that’s GRADE 1. Many elementary teachers don’t really understand this themselves, and routinely “borrow” stuff without identifying the source.<\/p>\n

The other part of the problem lies with the professors themselves. According to a colleague of mine (whom I will not name as he’s gotten into trouble for raising this issue before – he wrote a lovely article about it with references and all, but it’s been taken down from his website),\u00a0 as many as 20% of all faculty got where they are through some form of plagiarism.<\/p>\n

Too many people try to take credit for things they didn’t do. The pressure to do this is high in the Academy. How many faculty add their own names to every paper their grad students write? And of those, how many actually contributed in some significant way? Paying your grad students doesn’t (or shouldn’t) count as a contribution.<\/p>\n

I know one ‘academic’ who boasts 20-30 papers a year. I seriously doubt he even understands what’s in those papers, let alone is able to contribute in some meaningful way (other than financially).
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\nTeaching what plagiarism means is easy. Making students accept the value of academic integrity when they see people all around them (including some of their professors) getting ahead by cheating is much harder.<\/strong><\/p>\n