The Plagiarism Plague

THE PLAGIARISM PLAGUE
May 14, 2012 Issue [1]
Raymond A. Schroth [2]

Declining standards make getting caught the primary offense
My heart sank. Joe Hotz (not his real name) had
struck me as one of the better students. The
assignment had been to read James Joyces short story
The Dead, watch John Hustons film adaptation of it
and then write a one-page essay analyzing one scene.
But something did not smell right. I had already
graded a half-dozen short essays by Hotz, so I knew
his style. This was not it. I searched for one suspicious
sentence using Google, and voila! He had cribbed his
report from someone else.
That was an English class. Worse, in a way, was the case of two students in a journalism ethics class
who knew well the current scandals of a humiliated young trio of reporters: Janet Cooke of The
Washington Post, Stephen Glass of The New Republic and Jayson Blair of The New York Times.
Their careers had shattered like a dropped glass after they had faked stories. How could these
students commit the very offense their course aimed to prevent?
To some, academic dishonesty, including plagiarism, is neither a crime nor a sin; it is a mistake. To
me, because I see a university education as not just intellectual, but moral, it is all three. The 19- to
25-year-old conscience is still being formed. But the student who finds someone else to write his
research paper today is more likely to become the driver fleeing the scene of an auto accident
tomorrow than is the student who presents his true self in the classroom.
Evidence shows that academic dishonesty in its various forms is spreading like the flu. A recent
New Yorker article profiled a young man who compulsively writesthat is, pastes togethercrime
novels using passages pilfered from piles of other books. To some this is merely a copyright
violation that hurts no oneno one except the deceiver, who degrades himself and the culture he
typifies, where in business and politics the contradiction between the face and the public mask do
not matter as long as the charade makes money for some and amuses others.
The China Syndrome
An explosive investigation by The Chronicle of Higher Education, co-researched with The New York
Times, assesses the increasing recruitment by U.S. universities, anxious to boost both diversity and
income, of students from Chinas expanding middle class. As a result of Chinas one-child policy,
nouveaux riche families are free to invest heavily in their one offsprings future. This can include
sending him or her overseas for an American education and paying (hurrah for the university!) full
tuition, whether or not the young person speaks any English or has been intellectually prepared by
Chinas rote-memory learning system to meet American standards. Many of these students stumble
through their early college years and drag down the standards in classes, as teachers limit
discussion and cut down oral presentations to give the foreign students a break.
Wanting Tang, for example, described on her Facebook page as really fun and really serious,
was guided by an agency in Shanghai to the University of Delaware. Her family paid the agency
$3,300 to prep her for the universitys entrance exam and another $4,000 to write her admissions
essay and put together her application. Some other agencies falsify school letterheads and create
doctored transcripts and counterfeit letters of recommendation. After interviewing 250 students
headed for the United States, a consulting company in Beijing concluded that 90 percent provided
false recommendations and 70 percent had other people write their personal essays.
Delawares president admits that many of the applications are false but notes that it is a problem
many universities are grappling with. Interviewing applicants in China would assess their real
aptitude, but that would be costly. The Chinese plagiarism phenomenon has been explained on a
Georgetown University blog as the result of cultural differences, like the Chinese pressure to
conform, the tendency to consider the professor a sage on the stage and an understanding of term
papers as a copy-and-paste collection of information. American individualists, by contrast, consider
academic papers to be creative research projects where one missing reference could get someone
expelled.
How Widespread?
But recent headlines demonstrate that plagiarism and its near relatives are not foreign imports.
Plagiarists present themselves as people they are not: the Yale University head football coach
described himself on a rsum as a candidate for a Rhodes scholarship, which he was not; the vice
president of Claremont McKenna College submitted false statistics for the U.S. News and World
Report rankings; a 19-year-old Long Island college student was charged with scheming to defraud,
criminal impersonation and falsifying business records after he took the SAT and ACT tests for at
least 15 students, charging each $3,600.

More troublesome are the academic blackor graysheep who by theory or practice facilitate
plagiarism. In his article Uncreative Writing, Kenneth Goldsmith of the University of
Pennsylvania extols patchwriting, a way of weaving together various shards of other peoples
words into a tonally cohesive whole. Its a trick students use all the time, rephrasing, say, a
Wikipedia entry into their own words. He describes a published essay strung together in this
manner as a self-reflective, demonstrative work of original genius. This is a trend among young
writers, says Goldsmith; For them the act of writing is literally moving language from one place to
another.
A commentator counters that this practice is perfectly compatible with the larger cultures recent
depredations: the corporate cooking of the books at Enron, the bundling and sales of toxic
mortgages by Americas leading bankers, the daily misrepresentations of advertising, the
stonewalling by church officials in the pedophilia scandals, the mendacity of campaign ads, etc....
reframing issues with no regards for facts or consequences.
In The Shadow Scholar, in the Chronicle, Ed Dante (a pseudonym) confessed that he has written
5,000 pages a year of term papers that students handed to professors as their own, including 12
graduate theses of 50 pages each. His staff of 50 is overwhelmed dealing with English-as-a-secondlanguage students who probably should not be in college and lazy rich kids who would rather buy a
paper than write one.
Faculty member readers of the Chronicle blamed admissions offices for letting in weak students,
grade grubbers who threaten to sue professors who mark them too low, parents who pressure
faculty, students who cheat rather than workas if faculty members had nothing to do with the
students decision to fake it. Some faculty members solve the plagiarism problem by not assigning
papers. Dante answered: None of his clients reported that the originality of his or her work had
been questioned. Not one had been caught.
George Mason Universitys Web site History News Network, in an article posted in 2010, summed
up academic plagiarism charges against the popular American historian Stephen Ambrose. In
January 2002 Fred Barnes had reported in The Weekly Standard that Ambroses history of the Air
Force, The Wild Blue, included phrases and sentences from another book without attribution. This
opened a floodgate. For five months other writers scoured Ambroses work and came up with
phrases in seven of his books that had been borrowed from 12 writers. Ambrose defended his
methods: He writes at his computer, surrounded by interview transcripts, documents and books,
which he mixes together to describe an incident. He uses quotes to set off material from interviews,
footnotes to source material in other books.
In the end, the Network judged Ambroses offenses as misdemeanorsjust sloppy accrediting,
although still ethical lapses. Ambrose survived, but two problems remain. One reporter found the
same manner of mistakes in Ambroses 1963 University of Wisconsin doctoral thesis. A more
thorough faculty mentor at the beginning of his career might have helped spare him his later
embarrassment.
Plagiarisms End
Why cheat? Cultural forces promote it. A university must ask itself to what degree it is willing to
distinguish its code of behavior from that of the larger society. Is education moral or merely moneycentered? The underlying reason students like Hotz cheat is that they have not committed
themselves to the level of work they are obliged to do in college. They do not see study as a priority.
When study interferes with their real prioritiesfootball practice, frat or sorority life, an offcampus job, romantic interest or just hanging outthey calculate that they can con their professors
and get away with it.
They may be right until they run up against a professor who cares about the quality of their work.
Modern professors can be firewalls against plagiarism if they assign readings by the best stylists
Thoreau, Orwell, E. B. White, Joan Didion, Rebecca West, James Baldwin, Virginia Woolfso
students get a feeling for great writing as something to be imitated, not abused; assign a short
written reflection (or more) each week to get a sense of each students style; assign major paper
topics inspired by the course, so the student is familiar with some sources; require that half the
sources be from printed sources, not material snipped from the Web or Wikipedia; meet personally
with the student a week before the paper is due for a progress report, including three pages of a
rough draft and discussion of two of the library books; and explain the purpose of documentation,
that the reader must be given access to the writers sources.
Uncovering plagiarism demands effort. Google any suspicious phrases or use the Internet-based
service called Turnitin, which will reprint papers with every purloined passage in a separate color.
Return papers in class and read aloud, without naming the author, an offending passage, followed
by the same passage from its original source. It is another way of saying, You will be caught.
The sanction for plagiarism must be at least an F on the paper, accompanied by a letter in the
students file to be consulted if it happens again, with the understanding that a second offense
would mean expulsion. This policy will be effective only with leadership from the president and full
cooperation from the faculty. If, however, some faculty respond to the plagiarism plague by not
assigning papers or by misguided mercy, the problem will continue. As one of my students said
recently, You plagiarize because you dont value what you are doing. And if the teacher doesnt
expect much of you, youll cheat.
About 40 years ago, I published an article on Norman Mailer in Commonweal. A few years later I
saw an ad in a journal for a collection of essays on Mailer and ordered the book. It turned out to be
a self-published collection of student seminar papers. The professor had made publication part of
the syllabus. And there was my article with a students name on it.
I was not angry, but sad. Why had this professor allowed this young man to hurt himself in this
way? Did the student do it again? Where is he today?
Raymond A. Schroth, S.J., literary editor of America, has taught at five Jesuit and three
secular universities.
Source URL: http://americamagazine.org/issue/5140/article/plagiarism-plague

Links:
[1] http://americamagazine.org/toc-past/2012-05-14
[2] http://americamagazine.org/users/raymond-schroth

The Plagiarism Plague

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Plagiarism Plague

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Plagiarism Plague

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

THE PLAGIARISM PLAGUE

May 14, 2012 Issue [1]

Raymond A. Schroth [2]

least 15 students, charging each $3,600.

Source URL: http://americamagazine.org/issue/5140/article/plagiarism-plague

You might also like

Pfad - The Proxy pFad of © 2024 Garber Painting. All rights reserved.