Buying a research paper online or just recycling a friend’s work might have seemed like a good idea to stressed-out students who’ve been crunching to finish spring-semester projects in recent weeks.
But in the escalating the fight against academic fraud, the work of even high school students is being judged using anti-plagiarism software familiar to their college counterparts.
“It is something that all the high schools need to have,” said Christine Phenix, coordinator of the International Baccalaureate program at Bowie High School in Arlington. The $2,300 annual licensing fee for the Turnitin anti-plagiarism software used on the campus is money well-spent, she said. “The rationale is that plagiarism is a problem worldwide because students have access to everything. It has a great deterrent effect.”
Most cribbers have no idea how conspicuously their own writing style differs from that of their (unacknowledged) sources.
And Google is an amazingly powerful tool for ferreting out those sources.
My favorite story is that of a college professor who while grading papers came face-to-face with a paper SHE had turned in when an undergraduate student, with someone else’s name on it.
It turned out the student had bought the paper from an online source.
classic.
However, it can backfire. My daughter spent many hours working on a paper, carefully citing sources, etc. We would proofread and offer suggestions, but never took over the work.
When she turned in the paper, she realized that she had not cited one of her sources. We advised her to go to the teacher with the citation and see if she could correct it. The teacher went ballistic, accused her of plagerising the entire work (since it was obviously too advanced for an 8th grader anyway) and gave her a ‘zero’. In spite of my wife and I BOTH going to the teacher and explaining what happened, the grade stuck.
Daughter was able to pull up her grade later on, but the lesson she unfortunately learned was “don’t be too honest when dealing with teachers and grades!”
Sad, but true. Some things can be too worried about to the detriment of the whole. in other words, nit-picked to death.
Jim Elliott
Oh, did I mention that our daughter was homeschooled for a good part of elementary school? We sent her to public middle school when we moved over here.
When some of these kids launch into life and become successful in a given field, they will “hire” someone to do their writing but affix their own byline to the article or book without acknowledging the work was really someone else’s — and they will be hailed and rewarded financially. But look out. I love it when some snoop using Google or other software discovers that the celebrity’s anonymous ghost himself or herself has plagiarized large chunks of the content. 🙂
w.w.
My favorite plagiarism moment came when I was helping a new faculty member. This was her first time teaching and she had caught a student plagiarising. He had simply did a ‘cut and paste’ from a blog post. She contacted the post’s writer and it was not her student. She was nervous, so I sat across from her in the faculty lounge with the student’s back towards me. She showed him the blog post and it was attached to his work along with a plagiarism notice that we used at the College. He lookeed at ans said “I didn’t cheat. This is my own work.” So she pointed out that it was exactly the same and he repeated that he had not cheated. She then showed him how the grammatical errors, the typos and the incorrect punctuation were identical. He said: “I will admit that it is a HUGE coincidence, but I didn’t plagiarize!”
He received a zero for the project and a copy of the plagiarism was sent to his advisor and his program chair. But I have to say I kind of admired the staggering bravado that that took. As far as I know, he never plagiarized again.
A solution to this problem (and many others that affect education) is to seperate the job of Teaching from the job of Certification. This actually occurs in adult life at least some of the time with great benefit to everyone. Right now, for example, in my own professional life, I am preparing to take what is called the PMP exam. My teachers — combinations of actual instructors, mentors, colleagues, books I read, and so on — don’t grade me in any way. When I am in relation to these teachers I have what is in theological language called a grace-centered relationship: no demand, no penalties for failure, no need to brownnose them or impress them, and so on. The whole relationship is focused on them helping me learn stuff.
To get PMP certified though, I go to somebody else. These people are not my friends, they are not there to help me learn or be comfortable or anything else. They are there (in a highly structured environment) to assess whether I do in fact know this stuff. In theological terms this would be called the Law! (Grin.)
Some of the problems in education occur because we have the same person performing both jobs. As a teacher myself I always thought it was funny to see teachers at liberal arts institutions bewailing the habit of grade grubbing or brownnosing — well, I kept wanting to say, they are doing that because you the Teacher (who wants them all to develop a free love of learning) are also the same person holding the carrot and the stick, administering rewards and punishments.
To see how this would play out in the case of teaching English composition (the matter of this particular T19 thread), in the scenario I describe there would be no advantage for the student to plagiarize with the Teacher — because the teacher would not be the person certifying his ability to write well. With the teacher it would be in his interest to expose all his deficits and weakness in fullest relief — because (a) there would be no penalty for doing so (no bad grades) and (b) by so doing the Teacher would be most able to help him improve and later do well when it came to being Certified. The Certification process doesn’t need to be some “standardized” bubble-sheet test, and indeed for composition would most certainly not be. But it could be controlled in ways that are impractical for daily teaching. (For example, you could have students arrive at 8 am and leave at 8 pm — checking them beforehand for any crib sheets or cell phones and giving them topics to write on that they couldn’t know in advance.)
The key, however, is seperating the two functions, which causes plagiarism with Teachers to vanish: not by exhaustive effort to punish evildoers, but by simply making it no longer in the students interest to do it.
“As far as I know, he never plagiarized again” —#5
But I’ll bet he did lie again.
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Jon [#3]: Exams are certainly an important way to validate many kinds of skills. But writing papers is also an important part of learning in many fields.
As indicated in comment #1, plagiarized text often glitters like fool’s gold. But even when you see no fool’s gold, you can double-check by Googling some combination of key words.
The key to deterring plagiarism is teachers’ willingness to report it and schools’ willingness to punish it. Word gets around.
“The key to deterring plagiarism is teachers’ willingness to report it and schools’ willingness to punish it”
I received an unforgettable reminder when I registered for my freshman year in college. The very first words of the memo were:
“Plagiarism is a serious offense in an academic community and at this university normally results in expulsion.”
#1 Irenaeus,
In my freshman ‘University Studies’ class, I had a paper turned in where the styles dramatically changed from text message blogging (“Ur gonna luv my paper”) to a rather learned style. We have a program that quickly finds out the source of the material – in this case, a rather expensive prep school in Tennessee.
On the other hand, a colleague of mine ran the same program on a Junior’s paper and got a 95%+ match. Without telling the student, she took it to the department head and then to the Dean of the College. The young man was called in to stand a academic trial – the first time he had heard that he was suspected of anything (NOTE: poor form on the part of the College and particularly the professor). The dean accused him of plagiarism and he calming told us that it was his own website; he promptly logged on in front of all of us and updated his site and blogged the event in front of us.
Heh, I have a friend who teaches history at Bowie….small world!
He has some interesting stories to tell of students cheating.
RevK [#9]: Ouch! A good reminder about how sound process can benefit both sides.
#7… Hello Irenaeus (great handle, by the way). I agree with you that writing papers is an important part of learning in many fields. So in my model I think it would be great for the Teacher to assign papers for students (depending on the field, as you say). I am all about teachers providing great learning opportunities for students. But note that, in my model, the Teacher is not the Certifier — and this is critical. Because the teacher is not the certifier there is no longer any reason for the student to present to the teacher phony work.
The certification of a student’s ability to construct arguments, write lucid prose, even do research, could be done inside controlled environments (e.g. a library lockdown for 12 hours where topics are announced only upon walking in the door). Naturally a student can’t produce a perfect 200 page dissertation in 12 hours; but you can see (in that controlled environment) whether he has the necessary skills to do that. If he can write a well-reasoned 6-7 page paper, with good research and lucid prose, and do so in 12 hours, then he can almost certainly do something longer. Or perhaps you could seperate the certifcations: one day could be a certification of his ability to write clear and lucid and attractive prose; and a seperate day to evaluate his ability to do research and construct complex arguments (but not requiring him this time to create polished sentences).
It’s worth noting that the Great Google and similar internet devices for detecting plagiarism only work if the person is downloading text from an online source. It does nothing to detect plagiarism where one person is writing a paper for another person in real time (e.g. a girlfriend writes a paper for her boyfriend, or a rich person hires another person to write it for him). Except in cases that are wildly obvious (a person who can’t otherwise write one coherent sentence produces something that sounds like it was written by E.B. White) — it’s not easy to prove this sort of thing, especially if the malefactor gets consistent help. Controlled certification environments prevent this, and they also improve student teacher relations, where the teacher is no longer an enemy to be tricked or feared.