Plagiarism: The Challenges of Teaching Rhetorically in Basic Writing
Susanmarie Harrington, Indiana University Purdue University
Indianapolis
Linda Adler-Kassner, Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti,
Michigan
The New York Times recently featured an article on students' inappropriate use of World Wide Web resources which argued:
At a time when Internet literacy seems in inverse proportion to age, a new generation of students is faced with an old temptation made easier than ever: taking the work of others and passing it off as one's own. In this era of cut and paste, hundreds of sites offer essays and research papers on topics as abstruse and challenging as Shakespeare's "Troilus and Cressida" and Sartre's "Being and Nothingness," some at no charge. And e-mail has made it simpler for students to borrow from one another's work. (Hafner)
The article was inspired in part by a Rutgers professor's survey on cheating and plagiarism in high school and college. The Rutgers survey also claimed attention in USA Today, with a headline "Cheating as Easy As ABC; Teachers Clueless, Survey Reports."
Research by Donald McCabe and his colleagues at Rutgers' Center for Academic Integrity suggests that patterns of student cheating--while widespread--have not changed much in the past 30 years, and that instances of plagiarism are actually on the decline: "none of the…cheating behaviors associated with written work has changed dramatically, and plagiarism and turning in work done by another have actually declined" (McCabe and Trevino). This is not to say that student cheating, generally, is not a problem. McCabe and Trevino report that about 70% of students surveyed have engaged in cheating behavior, and close to 40% cheat regularly. In addition, they report that under half of students surveyed view making up a bibliography as "serious cheating" (42%) and even fewer (26%) classify using source material without footnoting to be serious cheating. McCabe and Drinan report that institutions that make serious attempts to change the culture on their campuses can reduce cheating; the use of honor codes that involve students in monitoring and adjudicating misconduct issues significantly reduces cheating rates (see McCabe and Pavela). While these numbers are indeed cause for concern, they do not support the oft-heard argument that plagiarism is on the rise. Ironically, although fears about the growth of plagiarism may be misplaced, many faculty actually underestimate the extent of student cheating, broadly defined. Over 80% of students, in past and current surveys, reported cheating at least once on a writing assignment. This is clearly an issue to take seriously. .
The challenge for us as basic writing teachers is to determine what our own responsibilities are (questions that writing programs and English departments more generally can consider as well). Shortly after reports of McCabe et al.'s research were reported in the press, Susanmarie's department had a brief online discussion about internet plagiarism, with some of her colleagues urging attention to new software (like that at http://www.turnitin.com, which calls itself "the world's leading resource for educators and students concerned with the deterioration of academic integrity in our schools") Such software allows professors to submit work to large databases in order to detect plagiarism. It is common for faculty to allege that plagiarizing is easier now, since students can easily cut and paste web sources, or download whole papers to submit as their own. New websites have emerged, more widely accessible than fraternity paper files, providing ranges of papers on different topics (http://www.schoolsucks.com is one example).1 Some of our colleagues warn students that they will use Web search engines to verify that students have done their own work. Others regularly use Google or some other search engine to vet student work, but don't tell students about this to avoid inadvertently encouraging plagiarism. The prominence of these discussions, both on campus and in national newspapers, reveals growing tension about plagiarism and the Internet. Issues of academic integrity, source use, and citation cut across all levels of education, and for this month, we invite you to explore how these issues play out in basic writing classes and programs. What responsibility do we have, as basic writing teachers, to include these themes as part of our courses? What special issues do we face as basic writing teachers as we explore these themes with our students?And what outcomes do we expect of our students?
Prompt One: At the start of the semester, what are your initial expectations about students' abilities to understand sources, understand your school's working definition of plagiarism, and use outside sources in their writing? What are your expectations about cheating in writing classes? What prior knowledge do you expect students to bring to class?
Prompt Two: What do you teach about reading and responsible source use in your class? How much time do you spend on these issues? What kinds of activities, exercises, and assignments do you use?
Prompt Three: What complications arise in the work that you do? What is hard to teach? What problems do you encounter--and how do you know what problems your students encounter?
Prompt Four: Based on this reflection, what would you teach differently?
Related Resources
Plagiarism.org (http://www.plagiarism.org), a site presented by the makers of turnitin.com, a commercial plagiarism-prevention program. The resource links on this site are largely based on data from turnitin.com, but there are some references to articles on the web and in print.
Plagiarism and the Web, by Bruce Leland (Western Illinois State University, http://www.wiu.edu/users/mfbhl/wiu/plagiarism.htm). Has links to various paper mills and sensible advice for teachers.
Search Engine Watch. (http://searchenginewatch.com/) Useful guide to various search engines and search strategies.
On Ethics, Collaboration, and Citing Sources, by Susanmarie Harrington. 15 August 2000. (http://www.iupui.edu/~wp/ethics.htm)
Cut-and-Paste Plagiarism: Preventing, Detecting and Tracking Online Plagiarism, by Lisa Hinchliffe (University of Illinois at Chicago, http://alexia.lis.uiuc.edu/~janicke/plagiary.htm)
Plagiarism and Anti-Plagiarism, by Heyward Erhlich, Rutgers University (http://newark.rutgers.edu/~ehrlich/plagiarism598.html)
Print Sources
Clayton, Mark. "Term Papers at the Click of a Mouse." Christian Science Monitor 27 October 1997, 1. Available Lexis/Nexis Academic Universe.
Hafner, Katie. "Lessons in the School of Cut and Paste." The New York Times 28 June 2001. G1. Available Lexis Nexis Academic.
Howard, Rebecca Moore. "Plagiarisms, Authorships, and the Academic Death Penalty." College English 57.7 (1995): 788-806.
-----. "A Plagiarism Pentimento." Journal of Teaching Writing 11.2 (1992): 233-45.
-----. Standing in the Shadow of Giants: Plagiarists, Authors, Collaborators. Stamford CT: Ablex, 1999.
McCabe, Donald and Gary Pavela. "Some Good News about Academic Integrity." Change Sep/Oct2000, Vol. 33 Issue 5, p32+. Academic Search Elite. Accessed 20 August 2001.
McCabe, Donald L. and Linda Klebe Trevino. "What we know about cheating in college." Change, Jan/Feb96, Vol. 28 Issue 1,p28+. EBSCOHost Academic Search Elite. Accessed 15 August 2001.
McCabe, Donald L. and Patrick Drinan. "Toward a Culture of Academic Integrity." Chronicle of Higher Education 15 October 1999, B7. Academic Search Elite. Accessed 20 August 2001.
Thomas, Karen. "Net makes cheating as easy as ABC Teachers 'clueless,' students report." USA Today 20 March 2001. 3D. Lexis/Nexis Academic Universe. Accessed 20 August 2001.
Paper Mills
1 The proprietors of such websites uniformly deny that they are in the business of encouraging plagiarism. The Mission Statement of schoolsucks.com, for example, ends: School Sucks is the largest collection of free, but awful homework. School Sucks is 100% against plagiarism. If we wanted to encourage plagiarism, we would a) charge even 1$ per paper and thereby deny educators the right to see them and b) rate or grade the papers. Thank you for all your support!!! A 1997 Christian Science Monitor report on online term paper services quotes Paul Roberts of cheat.com (a site which has since gone out of business, and whose domain name is now used by a sex site): "The site wasn't at all to promote plagiarism, but to sort of put the library online….I thought if I put term papers online then kids wouldn't have to spend time looking in all the encyclopedias and books and stuff like that. Kind of like Cliff Notes" (Clayton).