There’s been a lot of buzz about plagiarism lately; here are two recent articles:
Are You Part of ‘Generation Plagiarism’? – The Learning Network Blog – NYTimes.com.
“Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age,” Trip Gabriel
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 practice plagiarism. 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.
Academic integrity is really such an easy thing to learn, but it needs to be made explicit and modeled by their teachers.
Rule number ONE: If you didn’t make it up yourself, say where it came from.
RULE 2: Always keep notes on where you got things from as you gather them.
Understanding plagiarism is not intuitive – it needs to be taught. It hasn’t been.
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).
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.
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), as many as 20% of all faculty got where they are through some form of plagiarism.
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.
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).
Teaching 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.
I know that many teachers do this.
After teaching computer science and trying to deal with cheating and plagiarism at university for over 30 years, I have come to some conclusions.
1. Some students will try to cheat no matter what you do. They amount to a very small percentage of the whole.
2. It is easy to end up spending a disproportionate amount of time trying to catch that small percent of recalcitrant cheaters. They are not worth your time. You end up using a lot of time that you could be using to help students who actually DO want to learn.
3. As a general rule, people will live UP or DOWN to your expectations. The more I trusted my students, the more trust-WORTHY most of them became. I even started to see students ‘policing’ each other. On the other hand, if you don’t trust them, why should they even try?
4. Students will tend to mirror the ethics of their teachers. As teachers, we need to take a very hard look at what kind of models we are providing: do we tell our students where we get OUR information from? When we buy or ‘inherit’ a packet of teaching materials (notes, activities, etc.) do we cite OUR sources? Or do we just photocopy them and hand them out without comment? How often do WE get something off the net and forget to take note of the source and date?
5. This is something that needs to be addressed by EVERY teacher in EVERY subject in EVERY year, not just English.
At the start of every semester, I tell my students that I think it is important to collaborate and to share knowledge. I also tell them it is important to give credit to the people who shared their knowledge with you. I tell them I will generally trust them to acknowledge their sources. I admit that I will not likely catch all the cheaters, that most cheaters are eventually exposed for the frauds they are (whether it be at school or out in the real world), and that if I ever catch anyone passing off someone else’s work as their own, I will show no mercy and come down on them with everything at my disposal.
Our English teachers actively pursue plagiarism issues. I am amazed at the amount of time they spend trying to check each paper. It is the time issue that really limits what they can do however. One of the English teachers wants all papers turned in digitally this year (I have created a one-way folder for the kids to do turn-ins) so she can have software scan the papers. It will still require a lot of time out of her day.
Actually, scanning papers for plagiarism has gotten fairly easy with the advent of commercial services like turnitin.com