Vol. 4, No. 2: Fall/Winter 2008
Reckoning with Plagiarism
by Elizabeth Rosdeitcher
Staff, faculty, and students reflect on how to promote honesty in academic writing and establish a campus culture that values integrity
“I walk a line between sympathy and indignation,” says Laura Plummer, director of the Campus Writing Program at Indiana University Bloomington.
She is talking about the breach in ethics known to have ruined the careers of prominent public figures or at least cast a shadow on their reputation, delicately referred to as “the ‘P’ word,” less delicately as plagiarism. And it soon becomes clear how appropriate both responses are.
Sympathy, because learning to write is often a matter of figuring out how to position yourself comfortably among a range of voices. For beginning writers especially it is a challenge both intellectually and in terms of the sheer mechanics of writing.
“What keeps me from being a rampaging cynic when it comes to plagiarism,” Plummer explains, “is seeing the difficulty beginning students have using and representing their sources and putting others’ ideas in their own words. Their development as writers has a lot to do with their sophistication at using sources.”
As Kathy Smith, associate chair of the Department of English, puts it, “As teachers of writing we recognize that the effort to represent what other people are thinking and to synthesize that into your own thinking is a complex process.” For this reason one of the goals of English W131 Elementary Composition, the class required for most freshmen and the introduction to academic writing for most IU students, is “to learn how to handle others’ ideas and words legitimately, how to integrate others’ ideas into your own thinking and writing.”
Yet, there is a distinction—and usually, says Smith, a very clear one—between “a deliberate intent to deceive and a misrepresentation of sources.” And this is where the indignation arises, especially when it comes to sophomores, juniors, and seniors who have confronted the issue in their freshmen writing courses and have been taught how to cite their sources accurately.
Senior English major Rachelle Wilson confirms that “Every single course I’ve taken from my freshman year till now has made clear what it was and what would happen. As a result I go out of my way to cite everything like crazy. I also think it’s wrong to blatantly use someone else’s ideas, to cut and paste them into your work. It defeats the purpose of what you’re trying to do—to form your own opinions and strengthen your critical thinking skills.”
“Students who simply have difficulty representing others’ ideas,” Smith explains, “usually indicate in their text that they are trying to attribute them to someone else. This is different from trying to obscure your use of others’ writing in your own work. Intentional deception is usually easy to detect.” She gives the example of the student whose bibliography leaves off the one book from which most of his paper was taken or the word-for-word lifting of passages from sources on the Web without any indication that they are not the students’ own.
“It is something,” says Smith, “for which we all agree, there’s just no mercy, given the premium we place on what we do—on our writing, the respect we have for it, and the respect we have for other students who are doing their own work.”
Still, as Pam Freeman, associate dean of students, suggests, not all cases of plagiarism are “premeditated attempts at deception. Very often, the students just don’t think it through. They haven’t considered why it is wrong. They think they’re just hurting themselves.”
Or as Bryan Stuart, director of the Student Rights Department of the IU Student Association, says, “We see a lot of otherwise good kids who were stressed out with work, sports, and other activities. In every case they realize it was a mistake.” Students accused of plagiarism often seek out the support provided by his office.
“I had one student,” Freeman relates, “who was so mortified at what she let herself do that she had me come to her entire sorority to talk about academic integrity. She stood up and said, ‘I always considered myself an ethical, honorable person. But it was easy when I got under pressure to do this. So I want all of you to be warned and to learn from my mistake.’”
Such cases, according to Freeman, provide a valuable lesson in ethics. They help students “think about the bigger picture, to see how academic misconduct hurts the whole institution and has a negative effect on the value of the degree, to see that we’re responsible for the well-being of the community and the world we live in, not to mention the fact that no one wants the surgeon who’s operating on them to have cheated in biology at medical school.”
Freeman also underscores the importance of reporting instances of plagiarism. “All the literature shows that the more students get away with plagiarism, the more it gets perpetuated.”
The best approach, of course, is to prevent students from plagiarizing in the first place. The Campus Writing Program suggests several ways for faculty to approach plagiarism in their courses. First is to define plagiarism and the penalties that go with it in their syllabi as well as to discuss examples of it in class and strategies for avoiding it. Instructors can also design assignments in ways that discourage plagiarism, by changing assignments from semester to semester or building each paper in stages from short drafts to longer final revisions.
Certain assignments, too, lend themselves less readily to plagiarism—a focus, for example, on close comparisons between course materials rather than a broad question on a single, widely read text. It is also helpful for instructors to announce that one of the criteria by which they will grade papers is how well students address the specific questions of the assignment.
Instructors can also do more to help students with the process of choosing a topic and focus for a research project. “Sometimes,” suggests Carrie Donovan, instructional services librarian for IU Libraries, “low confidence gets students into the danger of using others’ work as a surrogate for their own. They think they do not know anything. But instructors can provide a mental framework that enables students to identify what they know and what they want to learn about the topic. As an instructor, you can pose questions about what led them to choose a particular source.” This helps them to recognize what they think and to see how that relates to their sources.
New technologies assist teachers both in clarifying what constitutes plagiarism and in finding plagiarized sources. IU Bloomington subscribes to the Web-based software Turnitin.com, through which teachers can compare student papers to a large database of student writing, online journals, and other material on the Web. Students or instructors submit electronic versions of essays to Turnitin.com, which in turn produces an “originality report.” If a student submits a paper, the teacher can allow the student to view the report; if the instructor makes the submission, the report is not available to the student.
Director of the Teaching and Learning Technologies Centers David Goodrum, who worked to establish an agreement between IU and the software company, believes Turnitin.com is a small, but useful piece of a broader approach that is necessary in creating a culture in which academic integrity is important. It may be “most useful,” he suggests, “in providing a catalyst for dialogue about using and citing other works, what constitutes common knowledge, and what it means to do original work. It’s more about engaging students in a conversation about campus culture than about the technology.”
Gender studies professor Jennifer Maher is “a big fan of Turnitin” and uses it in her large lecture course, G225 Gender, Sexuality, and Pop Culture. All students must agree to its use in order to take the course.
Some reject what Maher admits is “a vaguely big brother-ish” technology on the grounds that it presupposes guilt and undermines the trust on which student-teacher relationships depend. But for Maher it has been an indispensible tool, which relieves the professor of some of the burden of uncovering the sources of plagiarism.
She also elaborates on the why it is so important to do so. “What I’m doing as an educator is getting them to wrestle with difficult issues and when someone decides to opt out of that, they do not deserve credit for this work. I also want to defend the students who are doing this difficult work against students who buy a paper for 25 dollars.
“But I’m also idealistic,” she adds. “I believe that you gain something as a human being from this work. Students in the class often come in with bumper sticker ideas about the topic and sometimes do not want to read the articles closely. The writing assignments are a way of challenging students to engage with the arguments and to see how they are formed. I think short cuts around really reckoning with ideas are wrong.”
Elizabeth Rosdeitcher is a freelance writer in Bloomington.
