AMDG

THE WAR ON PLAGIARISM

What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing, he knew nobody

had said it before.

Mark Twain

Lawrence Tribe, Alan Dershowitz, Dolores Kearns Goodwin, Stephen Ambrose, Senator Joseph Biden---What do these names have in common? You’ve guessed it: they have all been accused of plagiarism. Poor Alan Dershowitz was accused of failing to cite his secondary sources. I can’t even guess at how many times I have penalized students for citing secondary sources instead of primary sources.

The word plagiarism is taken from the Latin noun, plagiarius, meaning “pirate or kidnapper” It simply means taking another author’s language or original ideas and passing them off as one's own. In the world of academe, it has become a capital crime comparable to stealing goods from someone’s locker or trashing a dormitory corridor in a drunken fury. In the decades-old “cat and mouse” game that undergraduate students and faculty play on this issue, the ratio of punishment to crimes has always been a small one. I have spent a good percentage of my time in the past 45 years of college teaching searching for the original sources for an “A+” research paper written by a student who normally demonstrates ninth grade writing skills. Now, with technological advances and the advent of Internet, this task has become even more difficult and, quite frankly, very frustrating. The students have too many weapons in this “catch me if you can” scenario.

We have tried to battle this new insurgency with weapons of our own: software like plagiarism.com; highly original assignments; academic honesty contracts and outright threats of severe punishment. Some concerned institutions make special efforts in Freshman English classes to advise students to avoid the practice of plagiarism. They forewarn students about Mosaic Plagiarism, a term that has been introduced to cover those students who pirate brief phrases and terms from the source and integrate them into their own prose. They also inform them that Accidental Plagiarism will no longer be tolerated. This is the term used to identify students who are ignorant of the rules or forms for citation and have unintentionally kept the original source hidden from the reader. Intentionality has always been a problem for faculty whose students plead innocence and ignorance of the rules when confronted. It is impossible, of course, to prove intentionality unless a student confesses outright. Most college student manuals publicly profess little tolerance for these unintentional offenses and group them along with premeditated acts of plagiarism.

All of these strategies and caveats have apparently failed to significantly reduce the incidence of academic dishonesty on college campuses. In a 1999 survey of 21,000 students at 21 campuses throughout the country, Donald McCabe at the Rutgers University Center for Academic Integrity (CAI) found that half of the students surveyed admitted to cheating on written assignments at least once. Internet plagiarism, in very recent years, has run rampant on college campuses. In another CAI study, the incidence of plagiarizing from the Internet has been reported to have increased from 10% in 1999 to 41% in 2001. There are websites that will write a student’s paper for as little as ten dollars a page.

Most recently, a few colleges and universities have now decided to resort to a sort of Patriot Act of their own to what appears to be an attempt to increase the numbers of offenders publicly punished for plagiarism. They seem to want to send a message to the larger numbers of students who escape punishment by borrowing old papers from classmates or purchasing original papers from a variety of websites. They have arbitrarily “stretched” the definition of plagiarism to include any citation errors that a student may commit on a research paper. This would include incorrect pagination, omission of a page number in the text or citing an incorrect source. As a result, hey have added one more label to the rubric of plagiarism---- Misrepresentation. No piracy is involved here – just carelessness.

Once penalized by reducing the grade for the paper, this sort of negligence is now justification for university sanction on grounds of “academic dishonesty” or a violation of “academic integrity”. The problem with this is that placing the adjective “academic’ in front of “honesty” and “integrity” doesn’t alter the definition or connotation of these words. Accusations of ”dishonesty” and “lack of integrity” have moral implications and cast public aspersions on a student’s character. To publicly sanction students for unintentionally and/or carelessly misrepresenting their sources on an undergraduate research paper doesn’t simply evaluate their performance, it impugns their character. If a cashier carelessly returns the incorrect change to a customer, it reflects on his or her job performance not his or her character. A pirate is a thief not an inept boatman. It is our role as academic mentors to inspire, motivate, inform and yes, to evaluate those students who enroll for our classes. Moral judgments and punishment are the business of those offices in any institution that exist to deal with student misbehavior, including cheating and intentionally plagiarizing on papers from undisclosed sources.

In a recent survey of 160 university websites, two undergraduate researchers, Salhany and Roig, reported in the Psy Chi Journal that only 66% of the institutions sampled publish an academic dishonesty policy and that a little more than half bother to include any statements at all about plagiarism. To their credit, a few institutions are responsible enough to publish this expanded definition of plagiarism so that at the very least their students are forewarned. Some, however, have decided to publish only the traditional definition in student handbooks but add the phrase “not limited to”, which subsequently leaves the newer, broader definition to the discretion of individual professors. Needless to say, uninformed students sanctioned under these mysterious new guidelines always have access to the College’s internal appeals process, which usually involves members of the professor’s own department reviewing their colleague’s decision and judgment. This is hardly a good example of the kind of unbiased due process that faculty demand for their own appeals. Ombudsmen, especially in private colleges, are pretty much non-existent these days. Students and their parents who have the funds can try to take legal action, but the courts are very reluctant to intervene in the academic process. Accountability appears to end at the gates of the institution.

So, in the final analysis, we find ourselves in a situation where those students who do make a sincere attempt to cite their sources (however carelessly) become more open to scrutiny and university sanctions than those students who cleverly mask their sources in a premeditated attempt to plagiarize. The obsessive need to publicly sanction a student for misrepresentation instead of simply lowering the student’s grade for these errors is an abuse of power. Furthermore, those university administrators who feel they must support their colleagues at all costs and uphold their action perpetuate the injustice to these students and demonstrate a callous disregard for their rights.

If the courts continue to be reluctant to intervene in academic matters, it is the responsibility of the universities and colleges in this country to come to an agreement on a detailed operational definition of academic dishonesty and plagiarism and publish this definition in its entirety in catalogs, student handbooks and websites. To continue to do otherwise would truly be a breach of academic integrity.