Gillian Silverman's "It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's a Plagiarism Buster!"

It's a bird, it'a a plane, it's plagiarism buster!
Gillian Silverman.
Newsweek. New York: Jul 15, 2002. Vol. 140, Iss. 3; pg. 12, 1 pgs

Full Text (825 words)
Copyright Newsweek, Incorporated Jul 15, 2002
[Headnote]:
Brandishing a red pen in place of a red cape, I fight to rescue words from literary bandits

AT AROUND THIS TIME EACH year, I transform from mild mannered English professor to take-no-prisoners literary sleuth. The beginnings are fairly undramatic. They usually involve myself, a Starbucks and a large stack of mediocre college-student papers. My mind numbs in response to the parade of hackneyed phrases ("And in conclusion, these books are both very similar and very different... ") when suddenly something catches my eye--a turn of phrase or an extra literary locution. "Paradoxically... ; writes one, "In lieu of an example ... , writes another. My breathing quickens, my heart skips, I reach for the red pen. And behold Plagiarism Buster, armed with a righteous sense of justice that would rival that of any superhero.

Plagiarism is the purloining of ideas or language from another source. It is literary theft, deriving from the Latin plagiarius, meaning kidnapper. Perhaps the dramatic derivation of the word is what attracts the academic set. We spend our days in libraries, classrooms and archives. Given the scant opportunities for stimulation, a kidnapping, literary or otherwise, offers perhaps the only taste of salacious activity we may experience all year.

Maybe this is why the disappointment I feel upon discovering a suspected case of plagiarism is always mixed with a bit of excitement. A plagiarized paper presents itself as an act of aggression, a taunt behind a title page. To ignore the challenge would be worse than irresponsible; it would be cowardly. And so, I begin the chase.
The Web is always a productive place to start. With thousands of sites dedicated to armchair literary criticism, nothing has done more to accommodate paper pilfering. The thing my students don't seem to realize, however, is that as easily as they can steal language from the Web, I can bust them for it. All it takes is an advanced search on Google.com. Plug in any piece of questionable student writing and up pops the very paper from which the phrase originates. I've discovered papers plagiarized from collaborative high-school projects and from essay services like screwschool.com. My personal favorite involved a paper cribbed from an Amazon.com reader's report for the Cliffs Notes of Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener." Really, why take the trouble to cheat directly off the Cliffs Notes when you can simply crib from reviews?
It's not that my students are bad performers. Many of them do outstanding and original work. But on the whole, they are terrible cheaters. They will mooch just as readily from an adolescent chat room as they will from an online academic journal. And they can be sloppy in their deceptions: referencing page numbers to editions other than those we used in class or printing out essays without deleting underlined links. With gaffes like these, the job of Plagiarism Buster is often less than taxing.

This past semester, I discovered eight cases of plagiarism from the Internet, a new record. The confrontations that followed often verged on the comical. One student swore up and down that she had not cheated, and when I pointed to the proof on the computer screen, she looked genuinely perplexed and asked how her essay got there. "That's what I want to know," I told her. "Yeah," she said as if empathizing with my plight, "me too: Another student spent 10 minutes insisting that her brother wrote her paper for her and therefore it was he who was guilty of plagiarism.

Despite their efforts at defense, however, these students generally end up miserable. I fare little better. While I anticipate these confrontations will leave me victorious, they usually just make me depressed. The answer that I most frequently receive to my repeated inquiries of "why?" makes me think that plagiarism comes out of a misplaced effort to please. "You didn't like my last paper," one student told me. "I thought you'd be happier with this one." As if this weren't enough, I know that in the public university where I teach, it is largely my students' overtaxed lives that leave them so vulnerable to the temptations of cheating. They're not off rowing crew instead of writing their literature paper. They're working 12-hour night shifts and caring for elderly parents. In the end, I'm forced to realize that my students are not bad guys; they're just guys trying to get by.

And yet, while empathy for my students is important, in cases of plagiarism it has little educational value. And so I fail them. With compassion, sure, but I fail them nonetheless. And then, feeling more villain than superhero, I head to the movies for some moral clarity.

[Author Affiliation]
SILVERMAN is an assistant professor of English.