Plagiarism

We are in Seattle for my nephew's graduation and I will pull together some photos and thoughts regarding this adventure soon.  For now, I will post here my newspaper article from last week.  It's certainly nothing profound, but I guess it does remind me of the effects of The Fall and how tempting it is to take short cuts and tell lies:

It is May and I have wrapped up my grading of research papers just in time to tackle final exams.  In my last article I shared my perception that research papers are even less popular with English teachers than with the students, due to the time and mental energy consumed by the evaluation process.  (This is when I dream of being a gym teacher.)  To be done properly, each 5 or 6 page paper I receive requires not only grading with a fairly complex rubric, but also a healthy dose of detective work.  I have to be on guard against plagiarism.

 At the heart of the research paper assignment lie fundamental cognitive skills undeniably worthy of several weeks of class time:  analyzing the words and ideas of others, processing them accurately, and then synthesizing them into a coherent and independent piece of writing.

Plagiarism is a short cut which bypasses all that is worthwhile about the research paper.

My students are generally honest and hardworking, but in the age of the internet, the temptation to steal another person’s words or ideas has never been greater, and the means to do so never easier:  a simple copy and paste job can add multiple paragraphs to an anemic paper. And just like that, the five page minimum is within reach.

Fortunately, spotting the most blatant plagiarism is actually fairly easy.   Once I received a paper where all the plagiarized paragraphs were printed in a recognizably different font.  And in blue.  Another time I received a short story in which my Hoosier student had unexplainably picked up the British penchant for spelling “color” as “colour” and “favorite” as “favourite”, etc.  But even when there aren’t such obvious signs, it is not terribly difficult for me to recognize the difference in writing style and vocabulary between a high school sophomore and someone with a PhD.  Finding the proof becomes the time-consuming part.

The funniest thing about plagiarism is that it is always “accidental”.  Always.

 I caught a rough draft a few years ago that was entirely a free paper found online.  (Apparently, some students don’t realize that I can Google too.)  When confronted, this student stared at the paper in disbelief a brief moment and then explained, “I can’t believe my friend did this to me.  I gave her my handwritten rough draft to type since I don’t have a computer.  She must have run out of time and just printed this out with my name on top.  I’m sorry – I should have looked at it before I turned it in.”

“Who was this friend?” I asked.

“You don’t know her; she goes to East.”

I was impressed.  An “F” for analyzing, processing and synthesizing, but an “A+” for impromptu creative storytelling.