May 27, 2012
This semester’s batch of plagiarism stories

This semester has been another eventful one, and now that I have a chance to breathe, I can post about my plagiarists! This one will just round them up—I’ll tell the individual stories in future posts.

This semester, I taught 4 classes of Intro English Comp, had a total of 86 students, and had plagiarism issues with 6 of them.  Only 3 of these were major—the other 3 were fairly minor.  By major, I mean significant chunks of text that cannot be anything but willful plagiarism, and the minor ones were various forms of patchwriting, aka partially rewriting a passage of text without attribution.  I’m not counting the occasional missed citation, or a minor summary issue, or I’d have ten times that number.   

So, 6/86= about 7% of my students had issues with plagiarism, …and

3/86= at least 3.5% were willful plagiarists.

It’s hard to tell where my numbers fall.  Am I catching all the students who plagiarize?  Are my assignments (particularly my open argument assignment) a plagiarism-attractor?  Am I just not teaching plagiarism-avoidance effectively?

Some numbers from other sources: According to a study in  Education Week, 54% of students have admitted to plagiarism.

Various studies involving students self-reporting cheating vary wildly, from about 30-80%, sometime in their academic careers. 

Of course, I cannot easily compare these numbers to my own.  These are students self-reporting on their whole academic careers, in all their classes, and perhaps they’ve only plagiarized once or twice; perhaps never in English class.

So far, I haven’t been able to locate a good study on the typical percentage of students who plagiarize in English comp classes.  And it seems very strange to me that there is not—if at least 30% of students are doing it (unless they are lying, that is) then wouldn’t there be a huge hullabaloo about it in English classes, where the goal is to teach (original?) writing, and the method is to write (original?) papers?  But I have a theory on this.

According to a thoroughly nonsensical but appropriately collaboratively-written recommendation for the non-adoption of plagiarism-detection software, by the Miami University Department of English Composition Committee,  “On average the Composition Program hears about 7 academic dishonesty cases per semester. Considering that over 3000 students enroll in composition courses each semester, this number represents less than one-fourth of 1% of students.”  

0.25%!  Man, if I taught there, I could do some real damage to their stats.  So what’s happening at University of Miami that makes their students so much more ethical than mine?

My theory: nothing.  The difference is not so much, I suspect, in the quality of student (though the University I teach at does have a selectivity about 20% lower than University of Miami), or that I’m a terrible teacher (I think if I express one concept most clearly, it is this), but in the lack of reporting.

I’ve written earlier about how infrequently instructors report plagiarism to the University.  Instead, they seem to treat it as an in-house problem, making the student re-do the assignment, fail them just for the assignment, take off points, (or maybe they even ignore it).

And here’s the thing: this lack of reporting is not lost of the students.  According to the same Education Week article linked above, 47% of students believe that educators ignore students’ cheating.

My theory: they’re right.

And maybe there’s a relationship between the willingness to plagiarize, and the fact that plagiarists aren’t often reported.

But, I’m doing my darnedest to even the score.  One student even wrote in a letter of tips to the next class (an exercise I have them all do on the last day) “Don’t plagiarize in Prof. X’s class—she’ll catch you!!!”  Since I hadn’t caught this student for plagiarism,  I suppose word got around about my other cases.  Hopefully, it’s a deterrent; we seem to think so in the case of criminal justice, that police presence deters crime, or referees keep a game fair.  The analogy isn’t perfect, but I wish more instructors saw it that way, instead of the threatening evil accusations, that we were really more like friendly traffic cops or referees who keep the game fair for the rest of us by benching players.    

So, next post I’ll tell you guys about one of the more funny the players I benched this semester…perhaps for good.

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Filed under: plagiarism plagiarize education 
January 22, 2012
Sponge-wit

slangterms:

  • Sponge-wit - a plagiarist

source:

Farmer, John S. and Henley, W.E.. A Dictionary of Slang and Colloquial English, an abridged collection from Slang and its Analogues. Princeton University. 1901

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(Notes: 16)
  
January 21, 2012
Caught at the Finish Line: The Saga of the Retroactively Caught Plagiarist

I’m finally getting around to recounting my biggest plagiarism case of last semester—because it finally resolved this week, a few days before the beginning of the new semester!  Peggy, whose last name was a derivation of a word that ironically means corruption, turned in a somewhat suspicious essay two weeks before the end of Freshman Comp class at State University.

Read More

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(Notes: 6)
  
Filed under: plagiarism saga crazy quilts 
January 19, 2012
Using Plagiarism to Detect Fraud

I’ve been apartment hunting and using Craigslist to do so.  Sure, Craigslist doesn’t have the best reputation for all its stuff, since its listings are only as good as the people doing the listing - caveat emptor, and all that.  But, I’ve sold and bought used cars using Craigslist, so I know it can be great, and cheap, if you’re careful.  While I expected the usual scams to be in the apartment listings, I thought I was pretty good about picking them out before emailing the ad.  Unfortunately, this proved not to be true.

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(Notes: 12)
  
Filed under: plagiarism fraud scam apartment scam craigslist 
January 17, 2012
Reading Lawrence Lessig’s Code 2.0

On my long battle uphill to the comps exam, I’m reading some books on digital culture and thinking about how changes in the way we communicate affects plagiarism and intellectual property issues. I’ve started with Lawrence Lessig’s Code 2.0 and the thesis of the book so far (I’m only halfway through, but it’s very clearly laid out) is that the Internet is in danger of over-regulation by commerce and the government and we better watch out or else the freedoms that most count on from the Internet are in jeopardy.

I totally didn’t plan this, but the book is becoming an excellent (if paranoid) companion to the SOPA debates.

In one of Lessig’s first chapters he brought up what was, for me, a really interesting point: the architecture of the web manipulates actions people do on the web. (You’re thinking “well, duh”).  I’ll let Lessig explain:

“We can build, or architect, or code cyberspace to protect values that we believe are fundamental. Or we can build, or architect, or code cyberspace to allow those values to disappear.  There is no middle ground.  There is no choice that does not include some kind of building.  Code is never found; it is only ever made…” (6).

I’m going to sound dumb, but I never really thought of that in those terms before; I suppose I assumed the ideal was to make the web as reflective of real human experience as possible, or as efficient as possible…but those things are not really true.  And I’m flashing back to playing Hero’s Quest when I was a kid on my family computer, trying to figure out the parameters of the world - what I could do and not do, and how that shaped my choices, making me avoid somethings and try others, ultimately forcing a win condition only after heroic deeds were accomplished. 

Because Hero’s Quest was a fictional world, I was constantly aware that it was designed, and I wasn’t bothered by that: I just wanted to figure out what the game was trying to make me do, and do it.  But though I can be very aware of the designs affecting my daily life, and how they either interfere with my tasks or make them easier, I don’t think of them reflecting some grand scheme that reflects certain fundamental values…that’s always seemed very conspiracy theory.  But, when we are talking about encouraging or discouraging a specific behavior, I can buy that design affects the likelihood of the behavior occurring, or even being able to occur.  And this made me think about how the structure of the web could encourage/discourage plagiarism and how it could be coded differently.

For instance, Tumblr itself is a case in point.  There have been many many many back and forth squabbling (and rightly so) about people plagiarizing fan fiction by simply reblogging someone’s work and leaving off the source.  Tumblr gives us the option of leaving off the source because you can delete the data in the source box which even says in tiny gray slanty letters (optional).  Both the code and the words on the page give the option of easily plagiarizing.

If Tumblr wished the code could easily be changed, which would stop all the silly nonsense of people immaturely or unknowingly taking credit from artists who in turn get all worked up about it.  How could it change?  They could make filling in a source mandatory, or even automatic when reblogging, OR they could stop reblogging altogether and plagiarists would have to go back to “old fashioned” cut-and-paste if they wanted to steal.

Taking this a few steps further, if we wanted to seriously crack down on plagiarism what could be done?  I gave it some thought and came up with a few ideas for an anti-plagiarism u/distopia, but I’m not a programmer so there could be practical problems with some of these ideas, or maybe some are already in practice or more could be done - feel free to let me know.

1. There could be no cut-and-paste.  Websites like Wikipedia could make it impossible to highlight and select text (like some pesky .jpeg files), making it just not as easy to plagiarize.  Or, the whole function of cut-and-paste could not exist: when you Ctrl+C….nothing happens.  Scary world.

2. Word and other word processing software could either not allow pasted text, or have an app/plug-in that flagged the author every time a chunk of text was pasted into a document and quotations were not used.  Maybe a little paperclip guy could pop up in the corner: “It looks like you’re about to commit academic dishonesty…”

3. The structure of the web could have a built-in copied text check.  Maybe every time text is posted to the web, it checks against everything else out there and then highlights and links it automatically to other websites with the same text.

4. That red underliney thing that now automatically happens under every misspelled word even in writing on websites could happen with plagiarized text.  Maybe a purple underline, for plagiarism.

hmm…I’m sure there’s more, but I’m out of ideas.

Anyway, I’m not suggesting these things happen, or that they are good ideas.  How many times is cut-and-paste used for good and not evil?  The point is that these are (mostly) restrictions, that would probably influence behavior, but do we want all the baggage that comes with restricting rather than being permissive? 

I tend to buy into the idea that we should err on the side of too much freedom, and make personal responsibility that much more important, but that doesn’t mean we should be blind to the encouragement some options give, or forget to put up warning signs.  

This seems to me to be very like the SOPA issue, with the key difference that it affects not only ethical norms (if you think that piracy is an ethical issue), but money.  And money is a big deal.  But like discontinuing copy-paste, giving the code-building keys to someone else can make expression harder.

I think I’ll get somebody to program me that paperclip guy for my students.

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Filed under: theory list plagiarism SOPA 
January 16, 2012
Thinking about Plagiarism

For grad school, I’m reading through my comps exam list, so there will be many book review and academic rumination posts coming up.  I also plan on doing a series of “plagiarism profiles” where I highlight a particular literary figure and talk about the plagiarism controversy surrounding that figure (I’m thinking on Wednesdays).  I’m doing it as both notes to myself and because very little information about literary plagiarists is actually readable and detailed in any way, at least on the web.  (I believe I’ve mentioned and recommended Thomas Mallon’s book.) 

There are some websites on “famous plagiarists” out there, but after doing just a little research on Oscar Wilde, who will probably feature first on my list, I found out that much of what’s on those lists is hearsay: grossly incomplete, and mostly inaccurate. Even Wikipedia doesn’t have it right; oh the shame!

But in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, I thought I should put up some mention of this famous plagiarist.  I’ve doubted before whether the plagiarism can be wholly divorced from morality—is it just a set of academic rules, an oddity of Western culture, or a principle that upholds academic standards and protects artists; can it be both?  I didn’t put this story up here to attack the obviously great achievements of this man and the civil rights movement.  I bring it up because, while I’m studying plagiarism so closely, I’ve got to wonder: why does it matter? 

I’ve got a couple answers, but they only serve to complicate this particular case.  I think plagiarism matters because originality matters.  New ideas (and yes, I think there is such a thing), provide not only increasing advances in science, medicine, and technology, but beauty and power in the humanities (which are, of course, old ideas). 

But originality is a tricky thing.  Sometimes seeing the same thing from a slightly angle is original, or a mirror/distorted image becomes more valuable than the thing it reflected.  Perhaps sometimes time is sufficient as a distortion and can cause the reawakening of an idea to become new, or seem new, or act new.  Determining what is plagiarism can be very difficult, because plagiarism is so tied to the tricky concept of originality.

Perhaps the case of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. isn’t so odd; he used plagiarized words of love and peace, to speak about something both very original to the people of the age, and very repeated in the course of human history.  When have people not struggled for freedoms?  And, IF Dr. King’s work during school had been caught would he have become as powerful a civil rights leader, or even as effective an orator?

Perhaps if the plagiarism had been caught during his lifetime, he would have been expelled or disgraced, and we would never have heard of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 

So, what am I doing here?

Arguing against myself, I guess.  People can get pretty worked up about plagiarism, and I’m one of those people, but there is a danger in over-certainty, in claiming truth without testing it. What makes plagiarism interesting to me is that I haven’t figured it out.  Sure, I have ideas and beliefs about plagiarism, but there always seems to be cases that remind me that plagiarism isn’t simply breaking a universal truth (nor is it simply breaking a pesky academic guideline).

If nothing else, the Dr. King case, demonstrates how very complex the issue of plagiarism is.

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Filed under: theory list broad list narrow list 
January 16, 2012

threatpost:

A Graphical Look at Digital Piracy:

Read the companion piece at Threatpost.

Images from the American Assembly’s Copy Culture Survey

(via smuwritingcentre)

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(Notes: 388)
  
January 13, 2012
Salon debate: What is plagiarism?

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January 12, 2012
Plagiarizing for Extra Credit

At the end of Fall semester I gave my usual extra credit assignment to my overachieving State University Students - to write an Op-Ed for the school newspaper, which they would actually have to submit in order to get the extra credit.  Now, because 1. This is for a measly 10 points of extra credit which can affect their grades by maybe 1%, and 2. They were asked to base the Op-Ed off of their own final argument paper. and 3. They actually have to share this work with the editors of the school newspaper and possibly risk publication, you’d think this was exactly the sort of assignment a student just couldn’t plagiarize.

Well, you’d be wrong.

Exhausted after grading stacks and stacks of final papers and presentations for 64 students, I finally got around to glancing over the extra credit to give those last-minute desperation points before I submitted the final grades.  Since I wasn’t handing them back, I just skimmed them to see that they actually did something like what I asked them to do.  Even in my half-conscious, glazed-eye state, I had to do a double-take at Oscar’s paper, so named because his plagiarism and subsequent denial should win an Oscar.

It smacked of Wikipedia-isms, with very specific dates, names, and facts with no attribution, so I ran it through Turnitin.com.  I was thinking the whole time - nah, this has got to be just bad paraphrase - the student was solid A- material, not super-engaged, but he did all the work, and showed some critical thinking skills. 

The Turnitin report came back with 70% plagiarism, and, even better, he had plagiarized the UNIVERSITY’S OWN WEBSITE.

The Op-Ed basically consisted of a 2-sentence introduction that was his own, something like…”Did you know it’s the 50th anniversary of my yadda yadda team?  Let me tell you a bit about how awesome State University sports team is.”  Then 5 paragraphs of cut-and-paste from the University sports team website, about the history of the team, and a closing that was also straight from the website, something like, “If you want to support the team, come on out to this and such event.”

So, it being late, and me being tired, I just sent the student a short email:

Oscar,

I can’t believe you plagiarized an extra credit assignment.

Send me electronic copies of all of your other work for this class so I can see how extensive this problem is.

-Professor ____

The student wrote back immediately with all of his previous work attached and a funny excuse: ‘I just forgot to attach my Work Cited sheet - here it is.’

I explained in the next email that a Works Cited entry wouldn’t cover the fact that basically his whole paper was completely unchanged, without quotation marks from the online source.

He pleaded ignorance in the next email, saying that, well, this was just a BLOCK QUOTE and he didn’t know how to indent the right way.

Ha!

Again, I explained why this was inappropriate, and improbable, to have more than half of a paper as a quotation from a single source, and that there was no take-backs.  In fact, this student had already submitted this to the school newspaper for publication!  Additionally, as I explained, this was not an appropriate assignment to have any quotations in, as it was an Editorial, a piece of pure personal opinion. 

Just to see how extensive this was, I tested the rest of his old papers, but found no other instances of plagiarism, not even a little bit, which was unusual. This case then, hinged on this weird extra credit assignment.

The student’s next excuse was that his coach had given him “permission” to use the website for his paper, and he could prove it by having the coach write to me.

I said, sure, have the coach write to me.

Surprisingly, he did.  The coach wrote me a little note about how good of a kid Oscar was and how hard he works, and how Oscar had approached him and he suggested getting information from the website.

I emailed the coach a copy of Oscar’s paper with the plagiarized 70% highlighted, and explanation of the assignment.

The coach’s tone changed in the next email and he said he would have “a talk” with Oscar.

Oscar wrote me back finally saying that he understood what he did was wrong and that he was sorry.  Oddly, he kept referring to plagiarism as illegal, which was probably something his coach told him.

So, I was on the edge about what to do for this case.  On one hand it’s “just” an extra credit assignment, on the other hand, it’s plagiarism, he submitted it FOR PUBLICATION, which could have had dire consequences for the school newspaper at least in terms of reputation, and he tried his darnedest to sneak out of it. 

It being an extra credit assignment also posed a particular problem.  If I wanted to just give him the slap of the wrist option, a zero for the assignment, there was no real punishment.  Oh wow, a zero for my extra credit, I’m sooooo sorry I tried to get away with academic dishonesty.  The slap on the wrist becomes sort of non-consequential.

I’ve been chumming up to the Office of Student Conduct so I sent them an email asking what other instructors have done in this circumstance.  They gave me some good options - just give a zero, dock all the extra credit for the semester, subtract the amount the extra credit was worth from the total amount of points for the semester, or dock participation points or some combination of these.  I could also, of course, file a report with the Office of Student Conduct, either an informal “watch this guy” report, or a more official all-the bells-and-whistles judicial hearing report. 

I just went with the “watch this guy” report, docked all the extra credit for the semester, and told him that he had to write an apology and essay withdrawal to the school newspaper editors as well as a new Op-Ed without any plagiarism. 

He wined in the next email, but I threatened him with the other options I had on the table, and he emailed me his new Op-Ed the next day.

All in all, it went ok, but I can’t help feeling I was way too lenient.  I hope his coach gave him extra laps or something.

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(Notes: 2)
  
Filed under: plagiarism 
December 26, 2011
Expecto Status? Expect away.: An update!

calleo:

So, my wife e-mailed the student who copied his final paper, verbatim, from a free term paper site.

She asked him if he’d written it himself or if he’d copied it from a website.

He wrote back, all incredulous, how DARE she suggest he’d cheated, what would make her think that, why was she…

This isn’t one of my stories, but I couldn’t help reblogging it because it is pretty funny.  So far, none of my plagiarists have fought back all that much when it’s so blatant, but perhaps that’s because I show my hand too early.

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(Notes: 11)
  
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