Academic Plagiarism

Does it really matter?

It seems so banal, ordinary, every-day, everywhere.

It seems like a tide of infinite information and omnipresent technology is submerging we academics under a large and increasing possibility (probability) that an increasing proportion of our students are giving us assignments which are totally or significantly NOT their own work, albeit that they have actually signed and presented such work to us as their own.

In ‘our day’, we fifty-something teachers, plagiarism was barely present at all:

1. it had been drummed into us that copying each other or source material would be met with the heaviest punishment. We believed it, and on the occasions it was in evidence it was summarily and visibly punished.  There was a general respect for teachers and the academic system which I think has dissipated of late.
2. Our problem was not almost infinite information to sort through to find the gems that might be lurking there, but rather a paucity of  critical sources: often the entire cohort was ‘after’ just three of four journal sources that our lecturers knew backwards and sideways.  We were expected to find them and cite AND attribute them properly in both the main body of the text and in the references or bibliography.  Not attributing such work and claiming it as one’s own would have been niaive to the point of crass stupidity: we would have been caught!
3. In the UK we were taught how to cite and attribute as a critical academic skill: often as part of a week-long ‘Course Director’s Programme’ which took place at the induction to the academic programme.  This was usually delivered by the Learning Resources Centre (Library) staff.  As new sources came online (micro-fiche, databases, the web etc…. new courses were run every year both compulsorarily and also on demand).  The training was not limited to one tutor on one course, it was standardised for all students in all subjects at all levels.  there was neither escape nor excuse!

Nowadays things are different, and culturally I find them different again here in France.  These things, taken together, seem to make plagiarism more likely. Why?

• The movement to pressure staff to ‘assess everything’ has increased the workload of students upon certain courses (curiously not upon others it seems).  This puts time-pressure upon students and can easlily lead to wholesale copying and pasting.
• Staff workload increase. We are teaching many more hours than before with many more elements of assessed work to read and mark.  This doesn’t always make it easy for staff to spot likely plagiarism or to do the time-consuming research to prove it.  Neither does it help that one would have to give time to a disciplinary procedure.
• Some cultures and individuals seem to think that it is somehow ‘neat’ to find academic ‘cheats’ the way one finds ‘cheats’ to move between levels on todays digital games.  Further, some cultures appear to take the view that ‘pulling the wool over the eyes’ of western teachers, academic institutions and systems is to be admired and to be well worth the risk. [A colleague of mine once found a student submitting a Masters Thesis as his own which he had bought on the online market for 500$.  How did the teacher know?  He had been the supervisor of the student who had originally authored the work!.  The student said that in his society the quickest route was always the best and that cheating was respected.]
• Internet search engines and copy & paste technologies render plagiarism all to simple and quick. The temptation for some is simply too great.  Faced with search results in the millions some seem to think that as one can’t review them all, take one, hopefully well-hidden source and reproduce it is a low-risk solution. [I once had FIVE students in a group of just 24 using 100% of the same article and each claiming it as their own. One disguised it by translating from French into poor English. One changed the structure of the article. Three simply copied and pasted 100% verbatim. pretty obvious, huh?  The moreso as they had copied a Minister’s speech with all the political bias and jargon.  Took me less than 0,5 of a second to find it!]
• The propensity for copying from colleagues seems to have dropped off, however…. largely because,( I suspect), it is easier and quicker to copy from the www.

My thoughts on the matter and solutions.

1. There MUST be across-the-board teaching from Day One / Year One on plagiarism and how to avoid it...AND the consequences of being caught. This should be standard on all courses and in all faculties.  It should be reinforced by the Library.  This should not just be a two-minute exhortation, but  as part of a taught unit on writing skills: give it weight and credibility. The basics should also be in the course handbooks and on the website such that students cannot claim they did not know.
2. We MUST have a common disciplinary approach across the university. Perhaps some ‘sins’ are greater than others.  A first year student omitting accidentally to list a source in a bibliography is evidently NOT the same as a student submitting 100% of someone else’s work as his own.  We clearly need a tariff from a metaphorical slap on the wrist to a full disciplinary hearing and the immediate ejection of a student from the programme, without certificate and award, no right of re-sit and possibly even black-listing.  The latter perhaps for the student who buys a thesis and submits it under his own name.  Unless we are consistent, we are likely to get played off one case against another.
3. Have all students place the above statement on all submitted work on the front page and sign it.  Produce this as a Master Page Template on the programme website so all students can easily comply.  « I…. NAME…. hereby certify that this assignment is all my own work and that, where I have relied upon materials / sources which are not of my own authorship, they are duly cited and attributed both in the text and with a full bibliographical reference enabling such materials to be found and checked.   I have received a copy of the University policy and disciplinary procedures regarding plagiarism and understand the consequences should I not comply with these requirements. »
4. Plagiarism digital-copy checkers like Ephorous should be used for theses and significant projects, particularly in the final years of programmes. Students should be required to upload their work to such systems.  This should not be a tutor’s job.
5. Academics and academic systems should consider, in the light of the prevalence of  plagiarism, whether less weight should be put upon formative individual written coursework and more upon summative examination assessment where the opportunity for cheating is all but impossible.

The message is that plagiarism is not a ‘clever’ shortcut: it is simply cheating:

• cheating on colleagues/peers who have worked to learn
• cheating on the teacher and destroying the relationship of trust the teacher extends to all students
• cheating on the academic system which seeks to reward and certify learning not cheating
• Cheating on future employers by furnishing a certificate of a measure of learning that has not been achieved.
• cheating on the self: zero learning, zero advancement, zero development, zero preparation for life and the working world.

For these reasons, I believe that we need to get our ‘act’ together and urgently ‘weed out’ serial, wholesale plagiarists.

A final thought. Although I hope that the extreme cases will be few and far between, I believe that we will find that plagiarism in the ordinary course of work is far more common than we think.  Some 12 years or more ago a high-ranking British university ran a massive sample of ordinary coursework through a digital referencing system and found that, to its horror, more than 1/4 of coursework examined showed evidence of significant plagiarism.  This, of course, pre-dates easy web-access and the Google search engine….. we can expect significantly higher results I fear……  I hope I’m wrong…. but I fear not.