All Posts Tagged With: "plagiarism"
The 10 biggest stories in Canadian higher education
The (surprisingly) most-read stories of 2011
Photo by Kelly Finnamore on Flickr
Each year, we offer Maclean’s On Campus readers a look back at the Top 10 most-read higher education news stories of the year. There were two big themes in 2011. First, the many scandals over universities’ reputations, from Alberta to Queen’s to St. FX. Second, uncertainty about the job market for grads.
1. Time for this year’s edition of X-ring Idol
Our blogging English professor, Todd Pettigrew, dared to compare the obsession of St. Francis Xavier students with their beloved X-ring to Gollum’s unhealthy quest for the precious. We knew St. FX students would defend their tradition vociferously—and they did, with more than 250 comments over three days. Most were from alumni and students who thought Pettigrew missed the point. They argued that the ring symbolizes their hard work and the family-like bond they instantly glean whenever a fellow X-grad catches a glimpse of their band. Then again, dozens of readers agreed with Pettigrew—some even suggested the flood of emotional reactions reinforced his point.
Continue reading The 10 biggest stories in Canadian higher education
I was a plagiarist
The academy comes down too hard on honest mistakes
Maclean's writer Emma Teitel
From the Maclean’s University Rankings—on sale now.
It’s fall, and over 800,000 undergraduate students have just begun classes at universities across Canada. In the next 12 months, 32 per cent are likely to binge drink and smoke marijuana, 14 per cent will probably drop out, and—to introduce a new scholastic rite of passage—more than 1,000 will be accused of plagiarism. Scores will be convicted, but there’s a good chance only a few will be guilty of anything more than oversight. I know this because I am a plagiarist.
I was accused in my third year at Dalhousie University (a mature plagiarist, they would say) by a creative-writing professor a few days before reading week: I had failed to attribute a philosophical term, “category mistake,” to the philosopher who first used it, an omission that put me in direct violation of Dalhousie’s academic dishonesty policy. In addition, I gave an example of the term that was nearly identical to the example used by its originator, Gilbert Ryle, in his 1949 book, The Concept of Mind. Here’s what I wrote: “Such a question is the stuff of a philosophical category mistake. For example, if a small child touring Halifax were to ask his mother and father ‘show me a university,’ the parents might take him on a tour of Dalhousie, showing him all the different faculty and athletic buildings, and confused, he would still ask, ‘show me a university,’ so the same concept applies to the question of film editing.”
When professors plagiarize
Star academics get light punishments for lifting ideas
Photo by John Ulan Epic Photography Inc.
From the 21st Maclean’s University Rankings—on newsstands now. Story by Charlie Gillis.
Every university has them—prize-winning researchers, or profs who routinely get their faces on the late-night news. “Celebrity academics” are typically figures for a school to extol, but the reigning newsmaker at the University of Alberta won’t be gracing this year’s alumni brochures. Formerly the dean of U of A’s medical school, Philip Baker is now best known as the guy who plagiarized tracts of an address to graduates from an article he’d read in The New Yorker magazine. Baker lost his administrative position following an internal investigation. But he kept his job as a professor, and was expected back on campus in October.
Dalhousie abandons anti-plagiarism software
Victory for student groups
A majority of university presidents in the U.S. (55 per cent of them) say that plagiarism has increased in the past 10 years. Of those, 89 per cent blame the Internet, says a new study by Pew.
Many universities have fought back by using software like Turnitin, which forces students to upload their papers to be scanned against a database of published works, before their professors grade them. If passages appear to have been copied, the professor is informed and may investigate.
But profs at Dalhousie University learned this week that they no longer have access to the software, in part because papers were being stored on U.S. servers against the school’s wishes, Dwight Fischer, the school’s Chief Information Officer told the Toronto Star.
“We’re moving quickly to replace that system with something else,” said Fischer. “We’re not bailing on our academic integrity strategy. Students should not think that this is a retreat on what we hold dear and valuable here.”
Dalhousie University’s Student Union has long opposed Turnitin, partly because it presumes students are guilty before proven innocent. Some students were concerned that their intellectual property was being stored in the U.S. or copied and stored against their will.
McGill University student Jesse Rosenfeld won the right to submit his paper in person, instead of through Turnitin, after the university punished him for refusing to use the software in 2003.
Ryerson University uses Turnitin, but students can opt out if they make alternate arrangements.
Seven students at the University of King’s College were found guilty of plagiarism in December after fifteen papers had been flagged by Turnitin.
McGill sets bad example on integrity
Barbara Sherwin got off easy
The news that Barbara Sherwin has received only a reprimand from McGill University is distressing to me. In 2009, the story broke that Sherwin had published a paper written at least in part by a ghost writer who had in turn been hired by a pharmaceutical company. The paper appeared only under Sherwin’s name, and when the truth came out it was something of a scandal.
At the time, I pointed out that students who took credit for other people’s work are rightly penalized for such plagiarism and universities set a bad example if they don’t take academic integrity seriously among their own professors. In this case, where health research is being done, it seems especially clear that if a study is written at the request of a pharmaceutical company and payed for by that company, at the very least, that process should be made absolutely clear upon publication. Big companies should not be able to pretend that the research is not theirs by getting a professor to front for them. And professors shouldn’t play along. Two University of Toronto law professors have said recently that the practice amounts to fraud. We already have good reason to believe that when drug companies fund research, the results are more likely to say good things about the drugs. Are we really to believe that having drug companies secretly ghost write journal articles is not going to make the bias problem worse?
To be fair, McGill could have done less than it did. A formal reprimand is taken seriously in university circles, particularly because such things usually become part of a professor’s personal record. Even so, a reprimand is still only a reprimand. Imagine if a student found guilty of plagiarism was sent a letter saying “your plagiarism was wrong and you should not to do it again, but you still get an ‘A’ on your paper.”
The lack of more serious consequences for Sherwin is particularly troubling in light of the ongoing struggles of Gabor Lukacs, who was suspended for an entire term without pay because he fought for academic integrity (not to mention the rights of airline passengers). Sherwin violates academic integrity and gets slapped with a ruler? Canadian universities, it seems, can barely tell right from wrong these days.
Students can now buy and sell notes
Is sharing notes cheating?
Photo courtesy of Tulane Publications on Flickr
It was two o’clock in the morning on the night before her physiology mid-term when Jennifer Hidy turned on her laptop and saw what she calls “the blue screen of death.” A virus had killed her hard drive, erasing all of the carefully curated lecture notes that she was planning to read in the wee hours of the morning before her nine o’clock exam. She had visions of failure. She considered calling a friend. Then she remembered hearing about a new website called Notesolution.
Hidy headed to the school library, entered her University of Toronto email address into the site and—much to her relief—found that someone else had uploaded notes for her physiology classes. She printed them off and studied. A mere seven hours after recoiling from the blue screen, she sat down and aced her exam.
Don’t compromise on cheating
Professors must fight plagiarism, even when it’s hard
Photo courtesy of Mr_Stein on Flickr
The decision of Panagiotis Ipeirotis to no longer pursue plagiarism might seem notable in that a professor would give up on catching cheaters. But to those inside the academy, his announcement merely gives a public face to an alarmingly common sentiment.
Students cheat, and any professor with more than a few years experience can tell you stories that would make you laugh. Then weep. Every case of plagiarism makes you feel sick. You are not only not getting through to your students, but it’s as though they don’t care enough to even want you to get through.
So the feelings of Professor Ipeirotis are entirely understandable, and shared, I’m sure, by thousands. They must, nevertheless, be resisted.
The NYU prof has complained publicly that his efforts to catch cheaters made his job harder: “There was a very different dynamic in class, which I did not particularly enjoy.” Oh well, then, by all means, professor, please only stick to what you particularly enjoy. Any bets on how long a university could function with all of its staff doing only what they particularly enjoy?
Simply put, a certain level of diligence is necessary to assure the academic integrity of the assignment, the course for which it is required, the degree to which that course is applied, and the university which grants the degree. If Ipeirotis thinks he was denied part of his raise for being tough, then his problem is with his administration. If he compromises on cheating, he’s part of the problem.
But what about the professor’s idea of winning the cold war by structuring courses and assignments so that cheating is impossible? Isn’t that a better solution?
Not really. As Ipeirotis concedes, some students will cheat if at all possible, and it’s almost always possible. One year I had students submit an essay proposal, then an outline, and then the actual paper so I could follow them through the process and make sure they were not just getting a paper from the internet. Except that some students started with a paper from the internet and then reverse engineered a proposal and outline. You can give students very specific assignments, but suppose a student hands in a paper way off topic? That’s a big red flag and you have to check it out. And even if it’s spot on, there’s no guarantee that he didn’t pay someone to do it for him. And what if two students hand in identical work?
The only real way to ensure students are not cheating is to watch them every minute they are working on their assignments, but that introduces a new and even bigger problem. In-class assignments and presentations take up valuable time that could be given to instruction and discussion. In any case, there are assignments that can’t be done properly in class time. In many disciplines students have to spend time outside of class doing their work or they are not doing the discipline they are supposed to be doing. Chemistry without lab reports is not chemistry and English without essays is not English.
This is not to say we should do nothing. We should explain plagiarism properly, and we should punish it judiciously, and, yes, we should look for innovative ways to structure assignments.
But we can’t compromise where it really matters.
Prof says he will never pursue cheating again
Did outing cheaters lead to poor evaluations, lower raise?
On advice from the school, a young computer scientist at New York University has taken down a controversial blog post entitled Why I will never pursue cheating again.
After Panagiotis Ipeirotis accused 20 per cent of students in one of his classes of plagiarism, he ended up with much lower student-teacher evaluation scores than ever before, he wrote in the now removed blog post. He had discovered the cheating using software and many of the students confessed when confronted. He was proud to have done the right thing.
Then the low scores from students were cited in a performance review as justification for his smallest-ever pay raise.
“Was it worth it? Absolutely not,” he wrote, referring to the confrontation with students. “Not only [have] I paid a significant financial penalty for ‘doing the right thing’… teaching became annoying and tiring.”
He told Inside Higher Ed in an e-mail that the point he was trying to make was that “as educators, we should be focusing on making cheating impossible. Not through enforcement but by designing evaluation schemes that are much less amenable to cheating.” He suggested that replacing assignments with in-class competitions could eliminate the need to police students.
Regarding the low pay increse, Ingo Walter, a business school dean, wrote the following. “Faculty evaluation is based on a detailed annual review of research, teaching and service to the department, the university and the profession. This includes possible class-feedback consequences in plagiarism or cheating cases in course evaluations. Moreover, the course evaluation input of any student who has an honor code infraction is removed from consideration when evaluating teaching performance.”
Dean Baker resigns but remains a professor
University of Alberta dean accused of plagiarizing speech
The University of Alberta’s President, Indira Samarasekera, has announced that the Dean of Medicine and Dentistry has resigned after an investigation was launched into the fact that he copied parts of another man’s speech in an address he delivered to students last Friday. Dr. Philip Baker will remain at the university as a professor during the ongoing investigation, reports CTV News. Earlier in the week, the dean apologized to Atul Gawande, the man whose speech to Stanford University’s graduating class had “inspired” his own.
To read more Maclean’s On Campus coverage of the Dean Baker controversy, click here.
Leader has PhD yanked for plagiarism
German politician missed 120 footnotes
The University of Heidelberg has withdrawn the PhD of a notable German politician after a committee found plagiarism throughout her thesis, reports Deutsche Welle. The German school’s investigation found 120 passages without footnotes that should have been credited to other sources. Sivana Koch-Mehrin was vice president of the European Parliament and head of the German Free Democratic Party until she resigned last month over these now-proven allegations. The story comes as the University of Alberta investigates Dean Philip Baker’s speech to graduating medical students, in which he said he was “inspired” by another academic’s address.
Opinion: Four reasons Dean Baker should resign
Would you trust your cancer diagnosis to someone who had cheated on an exam?
This morning, the news broke that on Friday, Philip Baker, Dean of The Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry* at the University of Alberta, delivered a speech that was largely plagiarized from a speech given by Atwul Gawande last year at Stanford. Baker has issued an apology, but an apology is not good enough. He should resign immediately, and here’s why.
1. On principle. As Dean, Baker is responsible for the academic integrity of the programs he oversees. Deans are called upon every day to make decisions that impact students and faculty in the most basic ways: hirings, promotions, sabbaticals, grade appeals — it’s hard to think of an important university function that does not involve deans. Baker made a mistake, and he may feel bad about it, but he cannot now be trusted with the grades of students and the careers of faculty.
2. It sets an impossibly bad example. How can the university enforce its rules about plagiarism (for which students can be expelled according to U of A policies) when one of its own deans has admitted to plagiarism himself? What could a faculty member say to an offending student who points out that what he has done is no different from what his own dean has done? Is a professor of obstetrics supposed to look a student in the eye and say that students have to be held to higher standards than university officials?
3. The scandal may hurt students, the integrity of whose degree might be called into question.
4. “What I stole was really good” is no excuse. According to the Edmonton Journal, Baker’s apology suggested that while he did lift the content of the Gawande speech, it was only because the original oration “inspired me and resonated with my experiences[...] The personal medical traumas which I detailed were wholly genuine and did indeed engender the sense of inadequacy I highlighted.”
Such an excuse, though, is no excuse at all. For one thing, there are well-established ways of using the words of another in an ethical way: paraphrasing and quoting with attribution. If the Gawande speech was so inspiring, all Dean Baker had to do was say, “In thinking about my address today, I recalled a wonderful speech delivered at Stanford last year, in which Dr. Atwul Gawande said…” and so on. Why didn’t Baker do that? Because according to witnesses who read compared the two addresses, Baker lifted almost the whole thing, and to admit to that would be to look like you hadn’t written your own speech. Which, of course, he hadn’t. So he passed off a counterfeit.
But to do so at a university event, in his capacity as Dean, is to show a shocking disregard for a basic principle of academic integrity: you don’t knowingly take credit for someone else’s work.
Baker’s programs are in obstetrics and gynecology. Would you want your baby delivered by a doctor who hadn’t written her own papers? Ask yourself: would you want your cervical cancer diagnosed by someone who cheated on their oncology exam?
*This post originally referred to Dean Baker with an incorrect title. It has been corrected.
Gadhafi’s son accused of plagiarism
London School of Economics investigating claims parts of PhD thesis were copied
Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi’s son is facing allegations he plagiarized portions of his dissertation when attending the London School of Economics where he received his PhD.
The prestigious institution has released a statement acknowledging complaints that Saif Gadhafi used a ghost writer and copied parts of his thesis. “LSE is aware that there are allegations of plagiarism concerning the PhD thesis of Saif [Gadhafi.] The School takes all allegations of plagiarism very seriously, and is looking into the matter in accordance with standard LSE procedure,” the statement read. The allegations surfaced in the wake of the violence in Libya when activists began fact checking the thesis and posting the results online.
LSE has also declined to accept any further payments from the Gadhafi International Charity and Development Foundation, which donated £ 1.5 million to the school in 2009. Following a student occupation of director Sir Howard Davies’ office last week, LSE has set aside £300,000, equivalent to the amount already received from the foundation, to establish a scholarship fund for Libyan students.
Photo: By TonZ
German defence minister loses ‘Dr.’ title
Guttenberg admits to ‘serious errors’ in his PhD thesis
The university where German defence minister, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, received his PhD, has withdrawn his right to use the title “Dr.” over plagiarism allegations. Ruediger Bormann, president of Bayreuth University, said he removed the titled because the popular politician had “seriously violated” academic norms because large portions of his dissertation appeared to have been taken from other sources without being properly cited. Guttenberg, who completed his doctorate after being elected to Germany’s parliament, says he “did not deliberately cheat, but made serious errors.”
German minister alleged to have plagiarised PhD thesis
Law prof claims similarities between dissertation and several news articles
Germany defence minister, the popular Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, is being accused of plagiarizing parts of his doctoral dissertation. University of Bayreuth, where he earned his degree after completing his thesis in 2006, is investigating the claims made by Bremen University law professor Andreas Fischer-Lescano. Fischer-Lescano alleges that the defence minister lifted passages from several newspaper articles and failed to use proper notation. “The duplication appears throughout the work and in all its substantive parts,” he told the Guardian. Zu Guttenberg denies the accusation. “I did the work in good faith with my own knowledge,” he said. Elsewhere he has called the charge “absurd.” A Swiss newspaper has created a website comparing the thesis to the articles the minister allegedly copied.
Top medical prof faces plagiarism allegations
Study retracted in 2007, prof continues to receive federal research grants
A top University of Calgary medical professor is facing allegations he plagiarized portions of a celebrated 2003 paper on medical ethics. Although the 88 page study was officially retracted by journal Current Problems in Surgery, in 2007, it is only now being discussed publicly after Postmedia had learned of the incident. The retraction noted that former U of C head of surgery Rene Lafreniere had taken “multiple passages . . . from other sources without appropriate attribution given the original authors.” Although the original study had three other coauthors, Lafreniere was specifically identified in the journal’s published retraction notice. Also in 2007 Lafreniere was named president of the Canadian Association of General Surgeons. In 2009, he, and another academic, had received a research grant worth nearly $70,000 from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. The U of C is not commenting directly on the case.
Should plagiarism be illegal?
Why we shouldn’t be tolerating down essay mills
It was sad but not surprising to see that in Nova Scotia, Canada’s university province , yet another essay mill has sprung up to help students cheat in return for digital cash on the virtual barrel head.
So this week I’ve been feeling like if we ever could rely on a broad sense of personal integrity or honour to help uphold standards of intellectual integrity, we can’t anymore. Fortunately, our society has a way of curtailing bad behaviour when social norms are not enough. We call them laws. So consider this modest proposal:
Plagiarism at universities should be illegal.
After all, plagiarism, when successful, allows students who have not earned credits to be granted them nevertheless and thus to earn degrees to which the students have no right. And yet, those students can, for the rest of their lives reap the benefits of those degrees without any real fear of discovery or punishment (once you’ve graduated, nobody double-checks your papers). But taking money for a job as a teacher or a lawyer or a doctor based on a degree you did not earn seems tantamount to fraud as far as I can tell. And fraud is illegal.
I, of course, am not a lawyer, so I can’t speak to all the legislative and litigational hurdles that would have to be overcome to get this done, but I would welcome input from clever lawyers who agree with me. And, to be sure, making plagiarism a violation of the law would not stop it altogether, but it would have an effect. For one, it would clarify the seriousness of the offence, and make would-be plagiarizers think twice before stealing a paper. Second, the law could standardize procedures across institutions. Third, the legal ramifications would force all professors to give a full account of the proper use of sources. Finally, it would give authorities the power to shut down the essay mills designed for no other purpose but to defraud public institutions.
Look at it this way: if you payed your tuition with money you printed in your parents’ basement, you would be guilty of a crime, not just an academic offense. Why is getting credit for someone else’s work a lesser offence?
(Editor’s note: This post has been updated.)
Student expelled for plagiarism takes Concordia to court
Quebec Superior Court asked to order new disciplinary hearing
A Concordia University student who was expelled in 2004 for plagiarism is taking the school to court. Ashraf Azar, who failed to win a previous $15 million lawsuit against Concordia in 2007, wants Quebec Superior Court “to order the university to grant him a new disciplinary hearing on the plagiarism charges that got him kicked out in the first place,” Canadian University Press reported. Azar alleges that he was expelled “due to what can only be seen as discriminatory motivated ‘errors’ [emphasis in the original] committed by his professors with respect to his grades,” his statement of claim reads. He also says that he was “coerced” into confessing to the plagiarism charges in exchange for lenient punishment. A hearing is set for Jan 20. Azar will be representing himself.
What punishment for plagiarism?
Enforcement of the rules should be strict but not so harsh as many fear.
A little while ago, I expressed interest in the position of President of King’s College in Halifax. Sadly–perhaps they were reading this blog– they expressed no interest in me. But if I had become President there, one of the first things I would have done is have a good look at the plagiarism policy.
Recently King’s came under fire for its handling of widespread plagiarism in its Foundation Year Programme, whereby some students were punished only with reduced grades on their papers. Obviously, King’s doesn’t want my advice, but it raises a question that is often overlooked in discussions of plagiarism at universities. What should the punishments be?
In the popular imagination, plagiarism carries exceedingly heavy penalties, often expulsion and perhaps some kind of public shaming ritual. In reality, punishments are usually much lighter. Indeed, in over 20 years studying and working at universities, I have never known a single student who was expelled for plagiarism. It might happen, but not often.
In fact, many professors are reluctant to pursue charges of plagiarism at all, either because they fear the student will be punished too harshly, or they think the charge will lead to a long bureaucratic and legal rigamarole that just isn’t worth it. Having a clear and reasonable punishment policy would help in this regard.
So where is the right balance? Somewhere between nothing and expulsion. Let’s consider this in a little more detail.
It seems clear to me that simply having a student rewrite the paper is grossly insufficient. There’s an old joke to the effect that a man who steals a horse cannot be found “not guilty provided he returns the horse.” Why not? Because whether he makes amends or not, a crime has still been committed. With plagiarism, the violation of the rules itself must be addressed, not just the result of the violation.
Similarly, only deducting marks is not strong enough, either, because it fails to recognize the seriousness of the offense. For reasons that I have addressed elsewhere, plagiarism is not simply a matter of misunderstanding an arbitrary convention. It runs contrary to the whole process of higher education. Consequently, plagiarism cannot be treated in the same way as one treats margins that are too wide or a font that is the wrong size or a sentence that runs on.
Minimally then, a plagiarized assignment should receive a grade of zero, recognizing that the student has violated a basic principle of academic discourse. Such a punishment seems fair for a first offense. It sends a clear message, but it does not unreasonably hobble a student who has learned the lesson. But if we are counting offenses, cases of plagiarism must be reported to the administration which must, in turn, keep track of how many offenses a student has committed.
For a second offense, a student should get a zero in the course in question. This punishment is in line with simple justice: a second offense is worthy of a harsher punishment than the first because the offender should have known better and should have reformed after the first time. The university should also consider including a notation on the student’s transcript to the effect that the grade of zero was given for academic dishonesty. Such a notation would serve as fair warning to any potential graduate or professional program that the student has refused to play by the rules on more than one occasion.
A third offense should result in some kind of suspension or expulsion from the university. The penalty would serve as a deterrent to students who might adopt cheating as a general strategy, would assure that wider community that the university values academic integrity, and would remove chronic offenders (who take up valuable time from teachers and staff) from the system. The suspension or expulsion for academic dishonesty should be noted on the transcript as well.
I have a feeling that most students would see such a regime as fair and reasonable. As I mentioned above, I suspect that most students think the policies are already harsher than this. My own august institution has something like this now (partly because I helped draft the policy).
As for faculty, they are responsible for ensuring that plagiarism has been fully explained to their students. A boilerplate reference to the academic calendar is not enough. Similarly, faculty must agree to take their university’s policies seriously, particularly when it comes to reporting infractions. Failure to report plagiarism means that a student can offend multiple times without facing serious consequences. Professors may feel they are being generous to the student, but such favours to individuals come at the cost of the integrity of the entire institution and thus to the whole student body. I have heard more than one faculty member say, “I didn’t become a professor to be the plagiarism police.” Well, actually, you did.
Administrations bear some responsibility, too. To be fair, they must have a clear and accessible route for students to appeal if they feel the charge of plagiarism was unwarranted. At the same time, administrators must ensure that all faculty understand the policy and remind them that following academic policy is a responsibility of their employment. Faculty who overlook plagiarism should be disciplined just as surely as if they never showed up to class. At the same time, universities should assure faculty members that they will have the full support of the administration when they do report academic dishonesty in the unlikely event of a lawsuit. Anything less, and faculty members may worry that they will be on the hook for legal costs should the case end up in court.
No university can be credible without a commitment to academic integrity, and dealing with plagiarism is central to that commitment. It begins with a fair policy conscientiously enforced.
Photo: Getty Images
This is The Hour Hand’s 100th post! You gotta like that!
Why cheating is cheating
Plagiarism matters more in the academy, and for good reason.
In the wake of the latest plagiarism scandal, there has been more talk to the effect that plagiarism is perhaps not such a big deal after all. People in other fields besides academia are not so uptight about using the work of others, after all, so isn’t plagiarism just another ivory tower formality? Yet another nothing about which academics make so much ado? Is it, in Stanley Fish’s memorable phrase, merely “an insider’s obsession”?
Well, yes and no. Is plagiarism particularly a problem in academics? Yes. Does that make it less important? No. The reason that plagiarism has been and should be taken seriously in universities is not that it is an outrageous impurity or a vicious betrayal of trust, but rather that it undermines the purpose of higher education at a basic level. In this sense, we may call it an ethical, if not a moral violation.
A contrast might make things clearer. When a politician goes in front of a crowd and delivers a speech, she delivers it as her own, using the first person, referring to personal experiences and so on. Indeed, every surface indication is that the politician’s words are her own. Except, of course, that usually they are not. They are probably the words of a team of speech writers who, remain, for the most part, anonymous. So why is it okay for a Premier or Prime Minister or President to take credit for someone else’s work when ordinary students have to sweat it out to credit every single source?
The answer is that the political speech and the student essay have different purposes. In the case of the political oration, the aim is to set out ideas or positions that the candidate or leader is prepared to stand by. It really doesn’t matter exactly who wrote what because what is said is a characterization of positions already assented to by the speechmaker and given as a matter of public record. Even if Governor Firebrand didn’t write her speech to the Twolumps Club, she is still responsible for its content; she can’t turn around and say, well yes, I said that, but someone else wrote it.
A student essay has a different function. The purpose of the essay is to test the student’s mastery of particular skills in a particular discipline. The essay serves as evidence that the student in question is capable of conducting certain kinds of research, synthesizing important information, making a persuasive case, and so on. In a political speech, it is what is actually said that counts; the process is irrelevant. But in a student paper, it is almost the reverse: the particular arguments and conclusions matter little. What counts is whether the student is capable of formulating those arguments in the first place. If the paper is lifted from someone else, it doesn’t demonstrate what it’s supposed to be demonstrating. The armed forces have an annual fitness test; do you think they would allow you to let someone else come in to do your pushups for you? Would they be swayed by the argument that many jobs in life are delegated? No, because the purpose is to test something about you. Students plagiarize largely because they, in fact, can’t do the work genuinely, and so professors must be careful to catch plagiarists if they can. To do otherwise is to certify that graduates are capable of doing things they may well not be. So your doctor misdiagnoses you, your lawyer lands you in jail, and your kids don’t understand grammar because their English teacher is a moron who cheated his way through his degree.
The ethics of taking credit in any field, to be sure, depend heavily on circumstances. A recording artist who pretends to have written a song he didn’t write may be denying a fellow songwriter of well-deserved royalties and may be in serious legal trouble. An executive who takes credit for the collective contributions of her team may be only ungenerous.
A student who copies and pastes his essay from Wikipedia, is trying to get away with something. That’s why we call it cheating.
Plagiarism is wrong because ‘I’ say so
Of course students should be punished but it isn’t uniquely offensive
My first reaction to the minor plagiarism scandal at King’s was to denounce the university for being soft, flabby, and altogether unconcerned with academic standards. How could the harshest punishment be a mere fail of a single assignment? Surely the university can no longer defend not subscribing to plagiarism detection software because it has a “bond of trust” with its students.
Don’t they realize that cheaters are narcissistic and quite possibly psychopathic? Have they not read that more than half of university students already admit to plagiarizing? Why would a respectable institution like King’s not want to draw a line instead of administering a series of wrist taps? Can’t they see their degrees are now worthless and no one will ever hire their graduates?
Then I had a cup of tea.
Turns out my instincts had less to do with any objective understanding of the case than with the fact that I only recently left university where I had spent the better part of a decade. Those were years where I had no choice but to abide by the rules of the academy, from meeting deadlines to learning obscure citation styles, to leaving any soapbox I might be standing on at the door.
And rules against plagiarism are just that, rules. They might be particularly important rules, and no doubt rules that should be enforced, but when isolated, it is hard to see what exactly it is about plagiarism that makes it uniquely offensive.
The typical explanation is that plagiarism involves “intellectual theft” but when applied to students, as opposed to, say, artists, the analogy falls apart. Professors who copy another’s work when submitting a paper to a journal, may be depriving another of prestige, respect, or research funding. There is a real identifiable harm to another individual.
Students who plagiarize in most cases aren’t depriving anyone of anything, except maybe the self-respect of an embarrassed professor who might have been fooled into giving a student an undeserved grade.
Todd’s counterfeiting analogy is sharper. The value of money is only reliable so long as it is real money. The same goes for grades. Grades are based on the assessment of a student’s performance, and if students don’t do the work they cannot be properly assessed. But the same might be said for enforcing deadlines, using accepted research methods, being a stickler for spelling and grammar, and other demands aimed at instilling in students the importance of academic rigour.
We are still left with the question of what makes plagiarism particularly wrong. If students cannot be said to be stealing, and if ensuring students are properly assessed applies to a range of academic criteria, is there anything that makes plagiarism special?
I think Stanley Fish had the right idea when he wrote “Plagiarism Is Not a Big Moral Deal.” Whether or not a work is authentic matters to those initiated in a particular setting. It is a guild concept intended to regulate and enforce how scholars, or journalists for that matter, should conduct themselves and how their accomplishments are to be measured. Handing in original work matters because professors say it should.
In other contexts, passing off someone else’s work as your own does not matter, and might actually be encouraged. When preparing reports for their ministers, government bureaucrats typically help themselves freely to the work of their colleagues without giving credit. No one talks about plagiarism scandals in the federal bureaucracy, unless the prime minister is implicated.
With that in mind, it is unsurprising that students, particularly first-year students as in the King’s case, plagiarize. Some of them might have been motivated by laziness or self-entitlement and there is something to that explanation. More likely many are still just learning the rules.
