[The Montana Professor 17.2, Spring 2007 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]
Nancy Mattina
Director, The Writing Center
UM-Missoula
Nancy.mattina@umontana.edu
Plagiarism, once a pen-and-paper prank, has taken on the dimensions of a social ill. Academic journals and the mass media continue to report that plagiarism, along with other kinds of academic cheating, is on the rise among college students. Donald McCabe, founding president of The Center for Academic Integrity, recently conducted a survey of nearly 50,000 students at 60 college campuses in which forty percent of respondents said they had committed Internet plagiarism, while seventy-seven percent held that such cheating was no big deal./1/ Despite the fact that faculty are aware of student cheating, McCabe also found that fifty-five percent of the 10,000 faculty he surveyed were not willing to spend time documenting student cheating./2/ For many in higher education, hard evidence of a plagiarism epidemic is beside the point. Web-based paper mills and dubious reference sites like Wikipedia get thousands of hits per day; the copy-and-paste file-sharing habits of today's students seem generally to lend themselves to a lax view of intellectual property and, by extension, the academic conventions and ethics that scholars hold dear. It is all too easy, given the usual tensions between the young and the older, for some in higher education to view Internet-assisted plagiarism as just another effect of a moral malaise among the young, part of "a societal shift toward glib and facile understandings", otherwise known as intellectual laziness./3/
This dim view of today's student body seems in part a reaction to the scandalous behavior of those professional scholars and educators whose intellectual malfeasance has ignited media spectacles time and again since the early 1990s. When academics and the reading public think of plagiarism they think of Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin; fabrication of data brings to mind Michael Bellesiles and Rigoberta Menchú; impersonation, Joseph Ellis; and résumé fraud, Quincy Troupe or Eugene Tobin, to name a few. Such high-profile deviance from academic norms has contributed to the passion with which college faculty and administrators exhort students to conduct themselves properly, as if only the students could rehabilitate the reputation of the academy. Googling "how to avoid plagiarism" yields a list of more than 800,000 links to sites, most of whose addresses end in .edu. These sites are obviously addressed to students, imploring them not to yield to the temptation to steal text from others. Websites and articles directed at faculty urge them to stop, bust, detect, and report students in order to thwart the plagiarism plague.
Set aside for a moment the facts that plagiarism is selfish and disrespectful; that college students have ample means to commit it with impunity, with or without the World Wide Web; that faculty who tell students to avoid plagiarism have good intentions. When faculty, administrators, or the general public make plagiarism into a symptom and symbol of moral or intellectual decline, they are committing a convenient but potentially paralyzing intellectual error--overgeneralization--with serious consequences for how the problem of plagiarim is addressed. If plagiarism is merely an expression of moral lassitude, then the job of educators is to proscribe and punish it, with little hope of suceeding in the face of such a broad challenge. As it turns out, who does the plagiarizing and why are crucial factors when calculating the costs of plagiarism to society. Appropriate preventive and punitive measures should differ depending on whether the perpetrator is a professional writer-scholar or a college student. When we begin to distinguish between the pros and the amateurs, recognizing their different contexts, we can reduce plagiarism by students without becoming adversarial or hypocritical.
Given the pressure to publish or perish, faculty in the humanities and sciences may be said to write for a living, and some of them write their way into lucrative book contracts, prizes, or prestigous academic posts. The public assumes that successful academics do not write primarily for economic gain, but to tell the truth about the world viewed through the lens of their discipline. Yet, since the advent of the Web in particular, one famous truth-teller after another has had his or her reputation immolated in the press for copying the sentences and ideas of others, without proper attribution, into their best-selling volumes./4/ True, plagiarists are often lumped together with other kinds of professional scoundrels, making the incidence of plagiarism seem higher than it is, but by now no one doubts that charges of plagiarism directed at celebrated scholars, journalists, and others who live by their writing is sensationally newsworthy.
With or without media hype, the professional writer stands to gain financially or increase his reputation by his writing, making it unethical to copy the phrases and ideas of others without proper attribution. This is not a victimless trespass. Offering someone else's writing as your own mocks the readers' trust. It infuriates the original authors and may put them at an economic or competitive disadvantage and lead to protracted copyright lawsuits. When perpetrated by a famous writer against a no-name graduate student whose thesis has otherwise shrunk to the size of a microfiche slide it is particularly shabby. Given the money to be made from best-selling books, literary stars who plagiarize earn their fortunes dishonestly, something that still offends the public's sense of fair play. One apologist for Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose who, in separate cases, blamed their research assistants for the plagiarism evident in their popular books, begs the public's indulgence on the grounds that "the public wants a good read, a good show, and the fact that a book or a play may be the work of many hands...is of no consequence to it."/5/ But if this special pleading finds favor with some of the reading public, few academics would argue (as a sociologist was said to have done for vandalism) that plagiarism is a legitimate form of self-expression.
It is also the case that acts of plagiarism are not as easy to discern as simple property theft. Because it refers to the failure properly to acknowledge copying someone else's ideas or sentences, plagiarism offers more than enough gray area to leave readers and pundits arguing for and against an author for years at a time. What is "proper" acknowledgement? What constitutes copying someone's ideas? Did the accused plagiarizer intend to fool his audience? Or, asks an historian in defense of a beleaguered Lincoln biographer, "How many ways can you say that Abe Lincoln was born in a log cabin in Kentucky?"/6/ As with charges of misconduct in any other domain, the motives and claims of the accuser need to be examined as well those of the accused, to avoid the possibility of a personal or professional vendetta stemming from philosophical differences within the field.
Although plagiarism is not a legal concept, plagiarism by professional writers does have its punishments. On the authority of professional conduct codes or university personnel policies, plagiarists have seen their tenure revoked, salaries reduced, and resignations accepted. Some academics would prefer that the general reading public show less tolerance for popular authors who plagiarize by refusing to buy their books. But the public has made its values known in other ways, as Ron Robin argues in his study of the causes and consequences of the academic scandals over the last several decades. The massive media attention focused on the missteps of Ambrose, Goodwin, and others may have started with angry scholars but it ended up in the living rooms and blogs of non-experts eager to pass judgment on an elite class caught cheating on each other. Despite the possibility that the hunt for celebrity plagiarists in the mass media may stem from "the almost pornographic satisfaction derived from exposing the guilty" that afflicts American mass culture, the effect on working scholars is the same./7/ All publishing faculty should be aware that with a popular readership comes a band of readers all too eager to troll the digitized literature looking for suspicious word matches. Robin finds that the policing of academic misconduct by anyone who follows the national news has resulted not in a less stringent standard for professional writers but a strict one that thousands of readers are ready and willing to enforce. "In a somewhat counterintuitive manner," Robin writes, "the modern-day version of the vox populi is decidedly averse to revisionism and intolerant of deviancy." Public reaction to academic misconduct reveals a "widespread rejection of those who seek to...transgress conventional rules and regulations."/8/ In the court of public opinion, professional writers who profit by stealing text from others may continue to sell books, but they are not role models for anyone's children.
Even as books sell (and most do not), academic journals heap reproaches on the heads of plagiarists with articles that describe plagiarism as a crime, theft, piracy, fraud, original sin, or a plague. Those accused of plagiarism earn the title of reprobate, when not compared to cockroaches, cheats, or "loafers, incompetents, drunkards, lunatics."/9/ In days gone by, scholars appeared to be constrained by the conduct codes they adopted when they joined their professional societies; but, they were also protected by those societies, who usually handled misconduct behind closed doors or in the confines of a relatively tiny academic journal. Now that large professional societies, such as the American Anthropological Association and the American Historical Association, have formally surrendered their former jurisdiction in matters of professional conduct, the newly alert public expects universities to render tough verdicts against plagiarists in their midst. According to a special report on plagiarism that appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education in 2004, however, there is evidence that universities continue to be reluctant to back up their tough talk on plagiarism by handing out convincing punishments to faculty who have plagiarized others./10/ In a recent review of Past Imperfect, Peter Hoffer's 2004 analysis of misconduct by historians, University of Montana President George Dennison warns his fellow historians that if the erosion of professional integrity were not enough incentive to "self-regulate," the threat of government regulation should shame "practitioners" to police and prosecute their own./11/ Considering that many practitioners are employed as university faculty, it seems equally important that higher education use the personnel policies at its disposal to prevent plagiarism and definitively punish faculty who plagiarize, especially at a time when it is promulgating tough new standards against plagiarism by students. Because plagiarism by professionals is first and foremost a breach of professional ethics, it cannot be tolerated or downplayed within a college or university any more than it should be left to non-experts to decide how scholars should conduct themselves in print. All that is needed to reduce plagiarism by professionals is the institutional will to do so.
Well-intentioned faculty have always accepted a duty to teach students that plagiarism is wrong. Even in the face of the so-called "new plagiarism" involving electronic resources, no doubt most faculty feel some obligation to stop little plagiarizers from turning into big ones. Some faculty become determined to unmask cheaters, spending hours on the Web checking the originality of the papers they are grading. Others place their faith in newly revised student conduct codes to keep plagiarism in check; they dutifully paste terse injunctions against plagiarism into their course syllabi, replete with the list of dire consequences that often attends them. Library faculty have been amongst the most pro-active in teaching students how to use electronic sources for good and not for evil, as if their daily proximity to new research tools and bibilographic materials make them potentially accountable for any misbehavior by the students they assist. The fact that a large number of faculty report that they are reluctant to address or report plagiarism in their classes suggests that many faculty do not have a coherent strategy for dealing with the new plagiarism./12/ As scholars and writers they welcome advances in electronic resources as much as their students do and they might well question whether as teachers they have to become electronic "print police" or ban the use of the Web in their classes. That stern student conduct codes promise hearings, the glare of publicity, and threats of lawsuits only adds another layer of unwelcome drama to an already confusing situation. The "just say no" approach to plagiarism may be no more effective than its familiar analogs, but what is a busy professor to do?
The first thing that faculty and others in higher education need to do is to recognize that students have different motives and opportunities, if not means, to commit plagiarism than do professional scholars and writers. The "just say no" approach presumes that student plagiarism is chiefly an ethical problem, as it is for professional writers. Yet there is little to suggest a moral or rhetorical equivalence between best-selling authors who plagiarize and students who plagiarize a term paper now and then. Evidence that higher education is confused on this point comes from the fact that a major thrust of the battle against plagiarism has been the development of student conduct codes that urge students to "avoid plagiarism" as a matter of personal integrity, echoing the interdictions against plagiarism once found in professional conduct codes. In professional societies, like-minded individuals create codes of conduct to define the ethics of their profession in order to maintain credibility (and the privileges that go with it) with those outside their profession. But students do not collect in colleges for the chief purpose of furthering the credibility of higher education. They come to improve their individual lives, meet new people, prepare for a career. School is not their livelihood or vocation. They are not principally committed to keeping up the reputation of the academic enterprise by doing their moral duty by it, unless, perhaps, their athletic scholarships depend on it. In fact, students may have little say in the campus conduct codes that apply to them. However much students are invited to sit on policy-making committees, they are not the institutional equals of faculty or those directly responsible for the reputation of the institution.
Students differ from professional scholar-writers in many other ways. Students who plagiarize papers, whether in part or in whole, do not deceive a paying readership; they are disobeying an authority figure. Unlike a writer with a following, the plagiarizing student has an audience of one--the professor or teaching assistant, unnatural consumers of rhetorically rootless texts--whose response to a paper is both coerced and totalitarian. And the financial incentive for a student plagiarist is usually minimal. Perhaps buying or copying a paper saves the student a few hours he can spend working at a low-wage job, but this is hardly the fame and fortune of a literary prize. Nor is plagiarism unfair competition in the grade game when graduate programs and employers consider an array of factors besides grades when deciding whom to attract. Moreover, the ambition of most students who plagiarize is to escape notice in a stack of hastily read papers, not to draw attention to their literary gifts.
Certainly there exist the serial student plagiarizers who delight in fooling others into praising pilfered papers or speeches, students who climb from a fraudulent academic career into lucrative post-graduate positions they do not earn. Such students are simply con-artists, so skilled at a variety of means of deception as to escape detection as frauds by all manner of educational testing. These have to be reported and punished with haste when they are discovered. At the other end of the spectrum, there are desperate repeat offenders who know they write too poorly to make the grade on their own. They adaptively cut and paste without attribution rather than reveal their illiteracy and face another round of shocked comments. Many of these students will leave school for other reasons, or change schools until they have collected enough credits to qualify for a degree, before fading into other pursuits.
The garden-variety undergraduate plagiarists are both less desperate and more common than the occasional sociopath or misplaced student. Unlike the professional writers whose passion for making written texts propels them into positions that make their fall so mesmerizing, the typical student plagiarist is an inexpert writer who does not see himself as a writer at all. He does not know or care to know enough about writing conventions to distinguish plagiarism from onomatopoeia. Laziness may play a role in this but the effect is the same as ignorance, and strikingly different from the wages of professional plagiarism: a student plagiarist intends to perpetuate his own ignorance, not that of his audience. Maurice Isserman, historian and faculty coordinator of the writing center at Hamilton College, recasts the problem with student plagiarism neatly:
Plagiarism substitutes someone else's prowess at explanation for your own efforts...; plagiarism isn't a bad thing simply because it's an act of intellectual theft--although it is that. It's a bad thing because it takes the place of and prevents learning./13/
When students plagiarize instead of doing the necessary work themselves they are momentarily denying their existence as writers and thinkers. They are avoiding both the challenge and the intellectual development that would make their college degree more than a trophy for time served. In the pursuit of a better life that college often represents to so many, students who plagiarize become their own worst enemies.
The mistake of equating the motives of student plagiarists and professional ones can lead to other misapprehensions. By focusing on the fragility of student ethics, university officials can fail to recognize the curricular implications of the new plagiarism. It is possible to miss the fact, as an example, that student plagiarism arises as often as not from poor instruction and inexperience as it does from deviousness. Anyone who works in a university writing center can testify to the following: there are average to superior students who do not know when and where to use quotation marks, commas, parentheses, or capital letters, let alone citation formats, under any style guide. They do not know the difference between summarizing, paraphrasing, and direct quoting. They do not know that quotations need frames that present the opportunity for attribution. They do not know the evidentiary and sociolinguistic functions of direct quotations and why using them in an essay impresses faculty more than unleavened summaries. They do not know what "read the literature and put it into your own words" means because they have not been held to that standard before. All student plagiarists fail to allow enough time to write an original paper; take poor, if any, reading notes; often fail adequately to read and understand the assignment. They are unaware that writing is a complex, yet analyzable activity that requires practice, time, and detailed feedback. Their notion of writing is so strongly associated with filling a prescribed number of pages by a specific date that copying is just a no-brainer way to achieve a set word count. If they do not understand the forms and functions of written expression by the time they enter college, and methods for teaching these matters exist, then blaming students for misusing sources involves self-deception at various levels in the educational hierarchy.
When the intent is to deceive, most students are signaling something more than moral lassitude. "It's easy, and it's quick, and it's better than spending six hours writing a paper for some general requirement class that I didn't care about to begin with," says one college senior at the University of Pennsylvania./14/ But for its inclusion in student conduct codes, plagiarism is seen by students as just another one of those things they do when they do not like a course, like skipping class or not reading the textbook. Many, perhaps a majority, are skeptical about the rewards of academic work. When they are handed back graded work with nary a comment in the margins many will wonder, with reason, if the professor even read their work. Research papers that are worth more than half of the grade for a course and are due whole on the last day of class will tempt fretful or indolent students past the breaking point. Other commitments such as paid employment, family, and recreational pursuits compete favorably when learning for its own sake feels more like learn-because-I-say-so.
In light of changing circumstances, the critical question for faculty and campus officials to ask about student plagiarism is not how to get students to stop using the Internet to cheat, but why students would prefer the intellectual self-erasure that buying or cobbling a paper together from Web sources offers. Unless today's academics are content to write off all younger generations as immoral and hopelessly incurious, the answer to that question should lead to an examination of the way students are taught and evaluated. Says one would-be reformer, "it is reckless and irresponsible to continue requiring topical 'go find out about' research projects in this new electronic context."/15/ McKenzie continues:
When we require fresh thinking, we stand the least risk of suborning plagiarism. If students cannot find the answers but must make the answers, they are less apt to pass off others' ideas as their own. The secret is to pose or ask students to pose questions or problems and decisions which have never been adequately answered./16/
While this advice is short on specifics, there is no shortage of practical suggestions, readily available on the Web and elsewhere, for making academic assignments that disincentivize plagiarism. One option is to revive the art of the timed, in-class essay. While it is fashionable to consider the timed-essay an antediluvian, even cruel, exercise, some well-informed proponents of teaching students to think as they write recommend it, with sophisticated caveats. John Bean, professor of English at Seattle University, advises faculty in all disciplines to teach students how to write essay exams, allowing students to discuss the grading criteria and practice for the exam ahead of time./17/ Essay questions should be clear and focused, cueing students to begin with a cogent thesis statement that helps them organize their response efficiently. Properly prepared, students can be held accountable not just for mentioning the right course concepts in their essays but for making sense of them in response to a worthy question.
For assignments completed outside the classroom, the most common recommendation is that good assignments should not be once-and-done scavenger hunts, given that scavenging has become ridiculously undemanding. Rather, they should be assigned in stages, with revisions, so that there is little incentive for a student to take a whole paper written by someone else and rewrite it in pieces to fit the recursive nature of the assignment. Nor should assignments be recycled semester after semester, for the "convenience" of the grader. Instead, paper topics should focus on time- or place- or theme-sensitive issues to make them relevant to the practice of the discipline. University of Montana associate professor Valerie Hedquist asks her lower division art history students to apply course concepts in critical reviews of the art exhibits that come and go at campus galleries each semester. She requires all students to revise their reviews after peer- and tutor-assisted conferences. Despite the large size of her class and the substantial amount of writing students do in it, Hedquist does not have to worry that plagiarism will rear its head in her class; she can concentrate on evaluating how well her students are engaging with the material. In other disciplines, asking students to respond to a specific, contextualized assignment--and holding them to it--makes plagiarism a waste of time for students. Instead of asking students to pick a country, species, or event to write about, good assignments ask "How might the [choose your non-endangered species] be protected if it were to become endangered?" Or "Which of these cities is the best candidate for the 2014 Olympics?" Or "How do we restore peace to____?"/18/ An alternate approach is to ask students to answer a question and solve a problem. As an example, Bean offers this prompt used in an introductory psychology course:
Is a skilled trout fisherman on a variable interval or a variable ratio schedule of reinforcement? Imagine you are writing to a classmate who has missed the last week of lectures and finds the textbook explanations of "variable interval" and "variable ratio" confusing./19/
Closely related to problem-solving prompts are those that require students to take and defend a position on a clearly stated issue as in "Mine tailings behind the Milltown Dam do/do not pose a threat to the lower Clark Fork River ecosystem." Such assignments do not preclude research or critical analysis. In fact, they make research serve the same function for students that it does for scholars and other professional writers: to provide context, data, and discussion as background for a newly articulated claim. Nor do they "cramp" a student's imagination; think instead that they focus the student's thinking and offer students the kind of finite tasks that they will be expected to initiate and complete in their professional lives.
Making plagiarism beside the point in academic assignments addresses the new plagiarism with open eyes, but, as Russell Hunt points out in "Four Reasons to be Happy about Internet Plagiarism," how higher education deals with the new plagiarism should go beyond interdictions or end-runs. Hunt argues that students ought to be taught more than what not to do in a piece of writing. They need to experience what it means to think, debate, and write as a way of being in the world. They should be taught how citations, quotes, and other forms of intertextuality positively affect intellectual and civic discourse. Hunt observes:
Scholars--writers generally--use citations for many things: they establish their own bona fides and currency, they advertise their alliances, they bring work to the attention of their reader, they assert ties of collegiality, they exemplify contending positions or define nuances of difference among competing theories or ideas. They do not use them to defend themselves against potential allegations of plagiarism./20/
Not only do professional writers have codes of ethics to constrain their practices, but they have intellectual and artistic incentives to acknowledge other texts and authors. The conclusion to be drawn is that when faculty "just say no" to student plagiarism they are missing the opportunity to invite students into the intellectual discussions of the day that occur through written texts. According to Hunt, too much focus in the classroom on how to avoid plagiarism is tantamount to teaching "the infield fly rule to people who have no clear idea what baseball is."/21/
If student plagiarism has been misperceived by some as a sign of cultural decline, others have set to work understanding and addressing the issue as a matter of shared responsibilities. The Council of Writing Program Administrators has issued a statement on plagiarism that recognizes the students' responsibility honestly to seek understanding; the faculty's responsibility to educate themselves about plagiarism and genuinely to challenge and engage students; and the institutional responsibility to support students and faculty through resources and policies that foster mutual respect./22/ Most of the WPA's statement on best practices asks faculty to rethink and redesign how they challenge students in the classroom, echoing Lawrence Hinman's conclusion that "our first and most important line of defense against academic dishonesty is simply good teaching."/23/ But class size, faculty compensation and development, clear guidelines on student rights and responsibilities, academic support for a diverse student population--these are largely in the hands of campus administrators. The student conduct codes and plagiarism detection programs that can be put in place with relative ease are no substitute for a thorough institutional analysis of where, when, and why students plagiarize. Continually updating the campus climate for meaningful learning, and setting consistent examples for students to follow are the long-term solutions to the problem of plagiarism that require leadership and vision from campus administrators and faculty alike.
The invention of the World Wide Web and the Internet has been a mixed blessing for scholars and writers, bringing unprecedented access to source material while and eroding the boundaries between the experts and the lay audience. Given the popular interest in academic conduct, there is something salutary about the fact that higher education now has a wider audience watching how it responds to mistakes made within its classrooms. By responding appropriately to the new plagiarism by students, the academy can distinguish itself in the eyes of the public by doing something more than complaining about the problem. It cannot be satisfied with merely demanding that students act ethically, as if that were an antidote to misconduct by professional academics. Rather, higher education must employ some of its best-loved tools--honest inquiry, logic, insight, and judgment--to formulate a variety of ways to encourage and reward ethical behavior by all its members. Perhaps higher education should not be expected to save society from a general moral decline, but neither should it become a symbol of that decline by refusing to act wisely and decisively in the face of new challenges to its oldest and best traditions.
Notes
[The Montana Professor 17.2, Spring 2007 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]