The Charleston Shuffle (or 'Sidestepping the Plagiarist')

The semester officially started again yesterday, so I have seen all of my students over the last two days.  One change I'm making this semester is the inclusion of a "Contract" on my syllabi detailing 6 reminders and expectations for my students.  This is partly an effort to minimize incidents of plagiarism throughout the semester and partly a reminder to my students that I expect them to take my courses seriously.

I'm teaching one section of Composition, two of Research & Writing, and one of World Lit. I, and all four groups of students received syllabi with the Contract front and center.  The nuts and bolts are essentially: 'I understand that by enrolling in this course, I'm agreeing to buy my text, read assignments, abide by University Academic Integrity Standards, be subject to the University's penalties if I violate those guidelines, and that I will strive to avoid any dishonest behavior in the class.'

I asked all of my students if they thought the "terms" of the agreement fair, and they all agreed.  They signed their copies (in their syllabi) and signed a copy for me to keep.  This may seem like overkill, but it frustrates and saddens me when, every semester, students try to take a shortcut and plagiarize.  Not only do I catch the students who do plagiarize, but I am not lenient on the penalties.  I never cheated or plagiarized in school and I want each student who graduates from the University where I teach to have a degree that is worth something.  If it's common knowledge that students from any institute get away with cheating and plagiarizing, everyone's degree is devalued.  This is a concept I try to explain to my students repeatedly.

The idea of a student "contract" is certainly not original and certainly not mine.  Research, in fact, has demonstrated that the more frequently students are asked to commit to a statement of honesty (or the inverse: a statement of not being dishonest), the less likely they are to cheat (or plagiarize).  Frighteningly, the more easily students can access information, it seems the higher the levels of academic dishonesty go.  From the German Education Minister who quit over the scandal of her plagiarism on in her PhD work (the second such scandal to hit during Merkel's term), to Taiwan's Chief of General Staff who resigned amid a similar revelation: plagiarism is not unique to the U.S., for certain.

The popularity of software like Blackboard's "Safe Assign" and websites like www.turnitin.com has risen dramatically as more and more professors and educators (even at the secondary level) grow concerned with the number of students turning to plagiarism, instead of their own, original work.  The question, still, is how do we best deter students from plagiarizing?  Some research would seem to indicate that simply educating students on what plagiarism is (via online tutorials, etc.) is more effective than the threat of detection, but clearly this does not stop all would-be plagiarists.  Type "plagiarism" into Google and you'll quickly realize that there are millions of websites, pages, tutorials, and videos on plagiarism.  Some of these are tutorials for educators on how to catch and deal with plagiarism, and some are "How to plagiarize and get away with it" pages for the less-than-ethical student. 

In my experience teaching, students are most likely to plagiarize (or cheat in other ways) when they feel overwhelmed, out-of-time, or under-prepared.  Some students spontaneously forget years of training in MLA format and hand in assignments that attempt to cite sources, but can only be deciphered over multiple painstaking readings.  I don't see these as equivalent to the blatant and intentional plagiarism of copying and pasting or "copy-summarizing" (wherein students essentially copy material from a source, then change words or rearrange parts so that the end result is not identical to the source), but they are still a problem.  Once upon a time, dishonesty in essay-writing meant buying an essay from another student, reusing someone else's old work, or copying material from a book off of a dusty library shelf.  Now, it's so easy to plagiarize that I fear some students may simply be overwhelmed by the temptation that dances around in front of their face every time they turn on their smart phones, tablets, or computers.

How do we help them not plagiarize so that they do learn?  This question will be a large part of my focus this semester, in addition to the usual.  All of my classes have their syllabi now, and I have promised not to talk so much in a single class again!  Best of luck to all this semester...I shall, as always, endeavor to be more faithful to my readers this semester!

Dirty Little Plagiarists

We haven't even hit Spring Break yet (which starts March 5th, by the way, so you'll know why I'm not blogging!) and I've just given my first 0 for a plagiarized paper. I'm printing out the material from the website this little plagiarist used as I type, so I'm not sure yet just how much he copied and pasted.

Fun fact? I hadn't even run the essay through Safe Assign--didn't have to: he used the word "droll." None of my students know what droll means, I guarantee you. I mean, I finally had to look it up when I was in high school because I had been thinking it meant dreary or boring for years.

Now, to be fair, it was also obvious because the kid started his first body paragraph with the phrase, "To summarize," but still. And this is the type of plagiarism that requires a complete re-write of the paper, not for me to off-his-head: He did actually include the sources in his Works Cited, but not in his paper (in-text citations). This all adds up to plagiarism, but this is the type I use to teach, not to fail. Does that make sense?

I'll let you know if he cries when I tell him I noticed. Some of them do, you know.

More on the "P" Word

During the discussions I had with my last two classes about plagiarism, I asked the small groups of students to discuss whether or not they thought plagiarism ought to be penalized. Most students said yes, but some in each section said no.

The reasoning behind the 'no's' was shoddy, at best, but I made sure each student explained his position clearly before poking holes in the logic. I then gave my classes my side of the plagiarism story:

I worked my rear end off in both my undergraduate and graduate programs, writing every single one of my essays and papers myself, never once "borrowing" or copying someone else's work. I earned my B.A. and M.A. and it pisses me off that there are other people who have that same alphabet soup following their names who achieved their degrees by copying and pasting or buying their work from other students or essay mills. Frankly, I don't think it fair that those imposters made it through their years of "higher education" to "earn" the same diploma I did.

I told my students that I feel the same way about them: students who work hard and honestly earn their grades (even if those grades are C's) should not be bested or even considered equal to students who cheat, plagiarize and fake their way to grades. If I can level the playing field, I will.

This seemed to resonate with my students, including the ones who initially claimed they did not think that plagiarism should be penalized--perhaps because I truly believe it. What are your views on plagiarism?

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.

Week 1

Monday, January 9th: 85% of my registered students attended the first day of class. We went through the usual motions of going over the syllabus and I went through my usual speech about having ZERO tolerance for plagiarism and the necessity of attending class (and owning the textbooks).

Wednesday, January 11th: All ENG 120 students are writing their "Diagnostic Essay" in class today. Two sections of the course meet on MWF, so the classes only meet for 50 minute sessions. This means I will receive a batch of largely unfinished essays; I'm okay with this as I'll be grading them and handing them back for revision anyway.

Friday, January 13th: At the moment, the plan is to field any questions about our Blackboard page (I am piloting the new version of Blackboard Learn for all my classes this semester), their blogs (instead of handing in typed, printed journals each week, my students are keeping a blog this semester), or any other housekeeping issues. Once that is taken care of, I'm going to split the class into groups for a series of short "Getting to Know You" activities built around language and vocabulary. I have a few I'm considering right now, but I haven't decided yet which ones I'll really use (Stand by!).

On a slightly different note, I receive an email every day with a quote by an author from Goodreads.com. Today's quote:

After all, reading is arguably a far more creative and imaginative process than writing; when the reader creates emotion in their head, or the colors of the sky during the setting sun, or the smell of a warm summer's breeze on their face, they should reserve as much praise for themselves as they do for the writer - perhaps more.

- Jasper Fforde (author of The Eyre Affair)

I found this rankled me a bit--but only just a bit. I do believe that reading is a creative process, and as I read, I follow a sort of mental cinema, complete with color, voices, accents, fashion, etc. I truly feel sorry for those who do not experience this vivacity when reading. However, as an English Composition professor, I must insist that this same creative, sensory process is necessary for writing (I doubt anyone would debate that). The problem with many students (and adults) today, I would posit, is that they never learned how to read with this level of engagement and commitment, hence, they also cannot write in vivid, real language. This can't be allowed to continue!