Plagued by Plagiarism
It is the rare writing teacher who hasn’t, in some way or other, had to deal with the issue of plagiarism. From primary school classes through graduate level work, the question of whether students’ writing is completely their own or the beneficiary of illicit borrowing haunts the minds of teachers and graders. Universities have established strict plagiarism policies while teachers and professors have become plagiarism police. Stories about plagiarism in academia and “the real world” hit the news regularly, as the following recent headlines illustrate:
Two Students Kicked off Semester at Sea for Plagiarism 1
Herald sports columnist John Sleeper resigns over plagiarism 2
Cartoonist Loses Freelance Job After Plagiarism Allegation 3
McCain faces accusations of Wikipedia plagiarism 4
The forms of plagiarism are legion and range from using another’s phrases without attribution to the wholesale copying of text. It can take the form of using one’s own words to state the ideas of others as well as presenting as one’s own an essay written by someone else. It can be as subtle as omitting a citation or quotation marks or as blatant as the copying of an entire article. With so many different ways available for substituting the work of others for one’s own, it is no wonder that teachers and institutions feel plagued by plagiarism and devote so much attention to trying to stamp it out. To come to the aid of teachers desperate to know which student essays were copied, entrepreneurs have produced websites and software applications to catch plagiarizing miscreants. Institutions of higher learning have rushed to draft (and have sometimes plagiarized) policies to penalize plagiarizers, policies at times so draconian and rigid that students’ lives are permanently impacted by minor and even innocent mistakes. (Incidentally, one of the students alluded to in the first headline above, a senior at Ohio University, stated, “Had I had any idea I had done something wrong, I would have absolutely come forward.” 1)
No doubt about it, plagiarism is a real problem, but maybe a bigger problem is the reaction to it. A remedy can be more harmful than the illness it is meant to cure and we ought to consider how actions aimed at combating plagiarism affect education and the teacher’s real goal of making better writers of the students in the class. When a teacher becomes a cop dedicated to detecting cheaters, what happens to the relationship between students and teacher and how is the learning process impacted? When a teacher is intent on sniffing out any hint of plagiarism, how good a reader will that teacher be and how effectively can s/he react to what the writing is attempting to express? Obsession with grammatical correctness, incidentally, or any other specific aspect of writing, can produce the same result of making the teacher a poor reader, because reading to detect cheating or errors is not true reading.
A writing teacher who keeps in mind the genuine purpose of the class – to produce better writers – is less likely to focus on detecting and punishing plagiarism than on exploring why plagiarism occurs and devising strategies to avoid it. Just as those sincerely desiring to combat a problem like drug abuse would do better to devote their energies to understanding the root causes of why people take drugs in the first place instead of squandering resources on the capture and incarceration of addicts, the teacher sincerely interested in producing good writers will look for the root causes of students copying other people’s writing.
If we delve into the causes of why students plagiarize instead of writing for themselves, we might have to say, in the immortal words of Walt Kelly’s Pogo, “We have met the enemy… and he is us.” Maybe we, the writing teachers, are in large part responsible for students’ propensity to express themselves in the words of others. How, you may ask in astonishment, is it possible that we foster plagiarism when we warn, caution and advise our students daily not to plagiarize? Let’s start by considering how writing is typically taught.
Many writing texts and classes begin with model sentences, paragraphs and compositions and ask students to write their own sentences, paragraphs and compositions following the models that have been presented. Instructions may be provided as to how to write a topic sentence and where to place it in the paragraph and then how to follow it up with appropriate supporting sentences. Students are taught to follow a format or formula and their writing is expected to conform to the external rules imposed. Such writing instruction focuses on the product rather than on the process that creates the product – and by focusing on product, we impress on students that it is what is on the paper and not how the writing evolves that is important. By placing so much emphasis on the product, we put pressure on students to focus on the paper they submit instead of on their writing. The product-over-process approach leads students to resort to plagiarism and other ploys to give teachers what they seem to want.
Students may plagiarize because they just don’t know how to produce the kind of writing their teachers expect them to produce without relying on outside help. Especially in the ESL context in which students have to gather information and then relay it in a foreign language, the need to use the wording encountered in external texts may seem all but unavoidable. To understand the causes of plagiarism is not to condone it, but allows us to devise ways to make it less likely that students will resort to it.
Perhaps a different approach to the teaching of writing, one that focuses on what the student wants to say and the language s/he has available to say it, will decrease reliance on borrowed language. Starting with the students’ own ideas and words rather than external texts and models encourages them to recognize writing as self-expression rather than adherence to some external form they may not fully comprehend. When the focus is on improving students’ ability to effectively express ideas that come from within and to do it in a unique and individual way, it is much less likely that they will depend on the words or ideas of others for the content of their essays.
So the plague of plagiarism is one we inadvertently bring on ourselves when we emphasize product rather than process. Furthermore, once plagiarism becomes an issue, we spend our time and efforts trying to catch cheaters instead of on the important work of helping students use the written word to express themselves effectively.
2(http://www.heraldnet.com/article/20080808/NEWS01/654916415)
3(https://www.dailycartoonist.com/index.php/2008/07/29/freelancer-loses-gig-after-plagiarism-claim/)
4(https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews_investigates_claim_McCain_plagiarized_speech_from_Wikipedia)
Originally published in Global Study Magazine 5.2:p.14-5; March 2009. © Mark Feder