Seeing double

April 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Several of us have been preparing and sharing ideas ahead of our faculty roundtable discussion today. For you Baruchians, it will take place Tuesday, April 12, 2:3o-4pm, in the SOC/ANT department conference room.

We will talk about sources, citations, designing plagiarism-resistant assignments, using technology in research, turnitin.com, and more.

The subject has me reflecting on a book that I read months ago but has yet to release me of its coiling grip. It seems absurd to say this, but The Culture of the Copy, by Hillel Schwartz (Zone Books, 1996), is utterly original. It’s hard to imagine a more kaleidoscopically visionary 565 pages. Maybe I exaggerate, for irony’s sake, but this is essentially a cultural history of copies, fakes, forgeries, doubles, twins, reproductions, and the like. The focus is a sidelong view of our obsession (and ambiguity) vis-a-vis originality, authenticity, singularity, and identity. Its central argument is, I think, that our human nature, the making of ourselves, has always been the making of doubles and likenesses. Schwartz is keenly interested in moments when facsimiles stand in for originals, when duplicates dupe, when samples take on their own lives. The book’s introduction (cleverly titled “Refrain”) is the story of the man known as the Real McCoy, and this biographical story itself also functions as a recapitulation of the rest of the book. It’s an entertaining read, letting the myriad curiosities and strange tales speak for themselves, and yet the back of the book contains more than 150 pages of endnotes to satisfy the scholar.

I will stop short of a book review here. There are some very provocative insights throughout, but I will stick to the several pages Schwartz discusses plagiarism, which comes on the heels of this conclusion about sampling: “Sampling is what imperialists did when they colonized ‘undeveloped’ lands, calling theft ‘development’; sampling is what ghettoized colonies do in revolt against property laws wired around them” (310).

Schwartz traces complaints of plagiarism back into antiquity, suggesting that it is not a feature solely of literate societies. There are audacious examples galore: “Samuel Taylor Coleridge rabidly charged others with theft, but his own perpetual plagiary he considered a form of spirit possession: ‘I regard truth as a divine ventriloquist. I care not whose mouth the sounds are supposed to proceed…” I doubt many Baruch students can claim the right to rip off with such transcendental air, perhaps underlining how plagiarism is defined morally as a debased form of copying. Appropriating in the name of poetry is not quite plagiarism?

Plenty of ironic cases in the history of plagiarism:

  • A passage on seeing double was stolen repeatedly by 18th-century scientists.
  • The first book on photography published in the US retouched an English book.
  • Victorian ministers hand copied sermons on honesty from printed books to make them look like originally penned texts.
  • The Boston Globe ran a story on a plagiarized 1991 commencement speech that was published in the New York Times.
  • Lexicographers responsible for defining plagiarism were accused of plagiarizing definitions.
  • A University of Oregon booklet plagiarized its section on plagiarism. (312-13)

Schwartz is gloomy about defending against plagiarism: “our culture of the copy tends to make plagiarism a necessity, and the more we look for replays to be superior to originals, the more we will embrace plagiarism as elemental.” (313)

The radical left has offered solutions: “the 1988 Festivals of Plagiarism in Glasgow, London, San Francisco, and Berlin exalted plagiarism as a defiance of capitalism, whose commodification of the world and of art proceeds upon the pretense of originality and the projection of uniqueness… plagiarism must be a thoughtful assault upon privilege, retaking that which should belong to everyone” (314).

After more citations of students and scholars caught plagiarizing papers and exasperatedly insisting they thought it was their own words, Schwartz concludes: “Plagiarism in our culture of the copy is sticky with feelings of originality-through-repetition, revelation-through-simulation. That plagiarism should be taken up on all sides–as a means for subverting the System and as a means for getting an edge in business, science, or politics–is proof of its centrality and the reason why plagiarism is treated so gingerly, defended so boldly, resumed so intemperately. Like forgery, plagiarism is a personal addiction… Plagiarism is, moreover, a cultural addiction, and I use that word with malice, for the ubiquity of the metaphor of addiction is itself a clue to our embrace of the rhetoric of replay despite a professional anxiety about disorders of repetition” (315).

Do you think plagiarism is not an epidemic but endemic not only to the academic world but also scientific, political, business, and cultural life? If so, do we need a new paradigm to deal with the matter of intellectual and cultural property in an age of mass duplication and duplicity?

Filed Under: Acacademic Integrity, Art, Baruch College, Faculty Development, Higher Education, Internet, Literacy, Media, Plagiarism, Politics, Scholarship, Search Engines, teaching, Technology, To Ponder, What if . . .

Tales From a Ghostwriter

November 15, 2010 By 2 Comments

keyboard ~ blur
Creative Commons License photo credit: striatic

This is the point during the semester when my Facebook feed starts to fill up with laments from my teaching friends about the scourge of rampant plagiarism by their students.* Plagiarism is, indeed, the bane of my teaching existence, and I know that no matter how hard I try to “plagiarism-proof” my assignments, or threaten my students with the wrath of the grading sword, some poor sap is going to try to get away with swiping text from Wikipedia anyway.

When I get papers from students that seem to be too polished, or do not match up with their previous writing efforts, off to Google I go, to try to weed out the plagiarists. If I get a match–bingo. If I don’t, should I assume that the students did in fact write the paper themselves? Because I’ve been so focused on battling plagiarism, I haven’t given much thought to another form of academic cheating: paying ghostwriters. How common is this, anyway?

Ready to be scared? The Chronicle of Higher Education just published an essay apparently written by a guy who sells papers. He claims to have written about 5,000 pages for his clients. 5000 pages! And it’s not just undergraduate work either–he also claims to have written masters and doctoral theses. Dude writes, oh so smugly:

I live well on the desperation, misery, and incompetence that your educational system has created. Granted, as a writer, I could earn more; certainly there are ways to earn less. But I never struggle to find work. And as my peers trudge through thankless office jobs that seem more intolerable with every passing month of our sustained recession, I am on pace for my best year yet. I will make roughly $66,000 this year. Not a king’s ransom, but higher than what many actual educators are paid.

Read the whole thing. It is quite troubling. But, it also reminds me of one of my favorite under-appreciated television shows: “Undeclared.” Here’s a clip of Will Ferrell, playing a–what-else–ghostwriter for lazy college students:

*See also these previous cac.ophony posts on plagiarism here.

Filed Under: Acacademic Integrity, Education, Plagiarism

Starting at the top: Notes on cliché and seduction in academic titles

November 4, 2010 By 4 Comments

As a writing fellow, I’ve had a few glimpses into the importance, faculty tell their students, of doing research. Part of this activity inevitably involves going to the library, or at least the library website, and scouring publications for pertinent scholarship to one’s inquiry. Since conducting “original research is a novelty for undergraduates, and since the electronic media offer myriad sources of information ready for the cutting-and-pasting, it make sense that a professor would be concerned with (1) making sure the student does not plagiarize others’ work and (2) instilling a sense that one’s research must enter an already ongoing conversation. So much of instructors’ pedagogical emphasis tends to lie in two fields: the moral and the intellectual, oftentimes in that order. I suspect that students do not make the connection between the two, too terrified of not (appearing to) tread on someone else’s intellectual toes to recognize that the point is to stand on their shoulders. Or, for those enterprising cheaters, the exercise may consist in, as Hillel Schwartz puts it (since I have no original way to put it), “mak[ing] their name by standing on shoulders buried in sand.” But my point here is to draw attention to a third register of the research experience: the aesthetic. Every stroll down the stacks aisles, every click through JSTOR articles, what faces the browsing scholar are titles, titles, and more titles. There soon appear patterns, styles, conventions, some kind of comforting regularity to the vastness of knowledge. Here I want to make some observations of the norms of titling in academic writing. These remarks are not (all) disparaging or snarky about the re-use, mis-use, or abuse of certain linguistic conventions in academia; I simply want to draw attention to how scholars label their work, reproducing in playful or unintentional ways specific kinds of headlines.

  • Present participles: This seems to be a symptom of the interest in and championing of processual approaches, that is, to present the world as in motion, in circulation, always becoming. The title of this post is parodying this cliché of the -ing verb. I am looking at my bookshelf right now and can spot them everywhere: Re-Presenting the City, Losing Control, Colonising Egypt, Exploring the City… I also see some clever variations on the theme: for example, where the title referencing another, more famous title (Coming of Age in Second Life), or where the present participle suggests multiple meanings (Enduring Innocence). Generally, however, the present participle has become a tired trend in titles. (I credit a former boss in publishing for bringing this to my attention and making it a minor obsession of mine.) Moving on…

  • The colon: You know you’re reading academic work when the title is cloven in two by the two dots. There’s not a precise anatomy, but generally the title proper is allusive in tone. The subtitle buttresses it with an explicatory phrase, as in: Reason to Believe: Cultural Agency in Latin American Evangelicalism. The latter part is the only bit you really need to get a sense of the topic of the book. Usually the title itself is, ironically, a stylistic flourish, as if to communicate that the book also contains some panache and wit (not a guarantee).
  • Quote as title: I feel like this became vogue during the 1990s when high postmodernism celebrated the voice of the Other and pastiche between high and low culture. But you will still encounter titles, especially in anthropology, that headline a pithy phrase uttered by an ethnographic informant, or a Biblical or other textual bit. I suppose the function of this strategy is to convey some sense of the author’s egalitarianism vis-a-vis her subject.
  • The casual approach: This can go either way. “Notes on…” or “Reflections on…” or even “Some thoughts on…” can communicate the sense that the text will not be especially pedantic, written merely as some loose ideas that suggest more than they argue. Of course, if upon reading the piece disappoints and betrays the airy mood of the title, it can become a marker of pretentiousness.

In a winking gesture, I’ve tried to incorporate all these features in the title to this post. But I wonder what the undergraduate novice, wading through vast oceans of titles, makes of these kinds of conventions, if she makes anything at all of them. The title is not only the first thing you see about an article or book, but in the case of those you don’t actually sit down with–that is, the majority, the title can also be the last thing you read.

Filed Under: Acacademic Integrity, Art, Asides, Copyright, Education, Fun, Higher Education, Language, Literacy, literature, Pedagogy, Plagiarism, Scholarship, Style, To Ponder, What if . . .

Cheating for Adults

September 24, 2010 By 1 Comment

Earlier this week, at the first Great Works faculty roundtable of the semester, faculty and fellows discussed the overlapping worlds of plagiarism and assignment design.  Toward the end of the session, talk turned to the role classroom conversations about plagiarism play in the larger context of teacher-student power dynamics.  So often plagiarism reduces the complicated acts of composition and grading into a parent-child chase marked by sneakiness, discovery, and punishment.


Sherrie Levine shoots Walker Evans

Do we do our students a disservice by failing to place plagiarism in the larger spectrum of discourses about linguistic re-use? It seems that to really usher them into “adult conversation” would be to move beyond invokation of rule-based compliance and to acknowledge and explore the larger arena of poetic re-use.  The point is not at all to re-brand academic plagiarism as acceptable or as poetry, but rather to open up the dialogue so that students themselves are responsible for naming and analyzing varieties of borrowing and stealing, and become full-fledged participants in the larger contemporary cultural dialogue involving writers and artists such as Kenneth Goldsmith, David Shields, and Sherrie Levine.

Filed Under: Acacademic Integrity, Pedagogy, Plagiarism

Agents of the Information Age? Perhaps Not.

March 22, 2010 By 3 Comments

Last month, Lauren blogged about Helene Hegemann, a 17-year old author from Germany whose novel Axolotl Roadkill has become a best-seller and a finalist for a major prize in fiction—despite the fact that entire passages of the book were lifted from a novel by another author.  After reading Lauren’s post, I decided to assign the New York Times article on Hegemann to the students in my Writing II course here at Baruch.  We read the article last week, and while discussing it in class, I was quite surprised by a lot of what my students had to say; their comments really got me thinking about how they view both the web and the act of writing.

For one thing, though I tend to (mostly) agree with them, I was shocked to find that all 26 of my students thought this was a case of shameless and unacceptable plagiarism—not a single one of them bought the idea of Hegemann as “the representative of a different generation, one that freely mixes and matches from the whirring flood of information across new and old media, to create something new.”  Furthermore, despite being members of this generation themselves, many of the students said, to my surprise, that they find that “whirring flood of information” intimidating at times, particularly when it comes to the web.  As one student spoke about how she’s leery of using online sources for academic assignments both because they might not be as “good” as print sources and because she doesn’t want to be accused of plagiarism, I noticed a number of other students nodding in agreement.  Yet, though students certainly need to use more caution and discretion with online sources than with print ones, they shouldn’t be afraid to use the web for academic assignments.  As teachers, it’s our job to help them learn how to use the web cautiously and properly (for what I think is a particularly useful resource for students regarding this, see UC Berkeley’s Guide to Evaluating Web Pages), but perhaps we also need to place more emphasis on teaching students how to harness the web’s endless possibilities.  Personally, I’ve always assumed that because my students are the so-called representatives of the “information age” that this automatically means they make constant use of the web, not just for socializing, but also for academic purposes.  Our conversation in class forced me to re-think this assumption, and has also left me wondering how many of my students really understand how to make the most of what the web has to offer them as students (and beyond the worlds of Facebook, twitter, and youtube).

I was also surprised to find that my students might not have come down as hard on Hegemann had she been a musician rather than a writer.   We discussed in class how mixing and sampling are prominent in the music industry today, with artists like Girl Talk making enormously successful careers this way:

Yet, while most of the students didn’t think that what Girl Talk does is either “wrong” or unoriginal, they all argued that Hegemann’s version of mixing is unacceptable and that the praise her work has received is undeserved.  For some reason, it seemed to them that there is something almost holy about the written word on the page—that to lift that and put it into your own work—even if you give credit where credit is due (which Hegemann didn’t)—is somehow both more unethical and less original than to, say, re-use an old MJ song in a new remix.  In general, they were willing to allow authors far less room for “artistic play” than they were willing to allow musicians and other artists (photographers, filmmakers, etc), which I found curious, fascinating, and perhaps a little troubling.  As we begin the seventh annual Ethics Week at Baruch today, I can’t help but wonder if academia’s constant emphasis on stamping out plagiarism hasn’t made some students a little fearful of the writing process—or, at the very least, caused them to view writing as more “restrictive” and less creative than other forms of art.

Filed Under: Art, Internet, Online Learning, Plagiarism

Vanilla Ice All Over Again

February 17, 2010 By 1 Comment

Yesterday I spoke with a faculty member about her frustration with plagiarism by students. One “innovative” technique that she noticed some students employing was the pastiche: whole paragraphs comprised of phrases and sentences culled from websites, press releases, newspapers, and textbooks, mashed together without any attribution or acknowledgment that the words were not entirely their own. While some students probably knew that they were plagiarizing but thought they could get away with it, others apparently have more benign intent: they haven’t yet internalized academic norms about appropriate use of sources and citation. Perhaps we can call these two types of plagiarism “bad faith plagiarism” and “good faith plagiarism.” Both types deserve penalty, but it is the former, I believe, that deserves more scorn. Students who plagiarize because they don’t know any better are students who are capable of learning proper citation techniques.

With this conversation fresh in my mind, I’ve been thinking about the recent case of plagiarism in Germany by a 17-year-old novelist. Apparently, author Helene Hegemann lifted passages, including an entire page, from someone else’s novel. Unlike the 2006 scandal involving teenage author Kaavya Viswanathan, who claimed that she had plagiarized in good faith, Hegemann readily admits to using another author’s words in her novel without any attribution–what I would call “bad faith plagiarism.” She claims, however, that her novel is akin to a musician who remixes or samples.

Some of Hegemann’s defenders claim a generational defense. The Guardian UK’s Robert McCrum argues that Hegemann’s novel is actually an example of “good faith plagiarism”:

Disentangling fact from fiction in a spat that looks like a nasty blog-war is tricky, but it’s clear from the reports I’ve read that Hegemann, a child of the internet age, simply does not understand, or recognise, the charge of plagiarism. To her, coming from the cut-and-paste world of blogs and Facebook, what she’s done is no more than “mixing” (she seems to use the English term, by the way.)

Laura Miller isn’t having it:

Kids these days, this Cassandra-ish line of reasoning goes, have unfathomably different values, and their elders had better come to terms with this because children are, after all, the future. You can’t tell them anything! It’s as if people under 25 have become the equivalent of an isolated Amazonian tribe who can’t justly be expected to grasp our first-world prohibitions against polygamy or cannibalism — despite the fact that they’ve grown up in our very midst.

The New York Times article hints that in addition to a generational defense, culture plays into it too. That is, remixing is just part of Berlin youth culture:

Ms. Hegemann finds herself in the middle of a collision — if not road kill exactly — between the staid, literary establishment in a country that venerates writers from Goethe to Mann to Grass, and the Berlin youth culture of D.J.’s and artists that sample freely and thereby breathe creativity into old forms. Or as one character, Edmond, puts it in the book, “Berlin is here to mix everything with everything.”

My issue with the “Oh, she was just remixing” argument, however, is that Hegemann did not merely incorporate someone else’s words into her novel. By not acknowledging her sources, she was, in effect, passing off the entire novel as her own, and this, from my perspective, is what some of us stodgy old folks used to call “stealing.” Remixing and sampling can be great, innovative art forms. I’m a fan of Creative Commons. I think copyright rules are too strict. However, if you are going to riff on another person’s words, music, or ideas, you should at least give them credit for it.

If Vanilla Ice couldn’t get away with it, why should Hegemann?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rog8ou-ZepE[/youtube]

Filed Under: Acacademic Integrity, Copyright, Plagiarism

Give or Take a Few Hundred Billion

May 18, 2009 By 2 Comments

I recently came across a particularly glaring plagiarism that highlighted the goofy (and troubling) game of telephone that can happen to information as it circulates through the web. I’ll call the student Cac. It didn’t take me long to diagnose Cac’s speech outline as an out-and-out plagiarism. It was a shoddy piece of work all around—supposedly an outline for a Persuasive Speech about Plastic Bag Recycling, Cac had left out the requisite Topic, Central Idea, and Specific Purpose Statement that belongs at the top of each outline. Cac also neglected to shove his stolen text into a speech outline format—it was laid out in bullet points, obviously ripped from an advocacy website’s FAQ.

Suspicious, I pulled out a short phrase and googled it: “about 2.5 billion plastic shopping bags.” The first hit did the trick. Cac had copy-pasted the entire script, complete with headings—“Facts about Plastic Bags,” “What We Can Do,” “Benefits of Using Reusable Bags.” But did Cac realize, I immediately wondered, that he was plagiarizing from the National Environmental Agency of Singapore?

But I soon wondered which website Cac had ripped this info from; my search for this “about 2.5 billion plastic bags” factoid revealed the same info on many, many sites. Some were repeating it in the context of Singapore (which it no doubt belongs in, given that one of the facts relates to landfills in that country), but many weren’t. The first example I found drew conclusions about Malaysia’s plastic bag usage based on Singapore’s. No biggie. But then I saw a website for RV-lovers based in Canada that used the very same stat for Canada’s plastic shopping bag usage. And Todaysparent.com claimed that “Ontarians alone” used 2.5 billion shopping bags yearly. Even the city of Alexandria, Virginia employed the same stat for justification of their Environmental Action Plan, although in their usage it was unclear who used that many, just that they were used. An online Pakistani daily newspaper listed almost all of the very same “facts about plastic bags,” and they made the 2.5 billion stat sound as though it was global, not national. Even an American company peddling reusable bags used this fact, suggesting that it was the U.S. that used 2.5 billion plastic shopping bags.

I could go on.

Doing some quick Internet research of my own pulled up figures for U.S. yearly plastic bag usage between 100 billion and 380 billion—even more stunning numbers than the 2.5 billion Cac was so impressed by. (And the global annual figure seems to be closer to 1 trillion. If my sources are to be believed.) False information on the web isn’t much of a newsflash, but this incident quickly became less about plagiarism for me (a separate issue) and more about the minefield of Google when used by students for (legit, non-plagiarized) research. Sure, 2.5 billion is a persuasive number any way you slice it, and it’s being employed to make the same argument each time: plastic bags are bad, and we use an awful lot of them.

Somewhere In The World

Somewhere In The World

But each of these filchers was too careless to put the stats in context, or to read closely enough to figure out exactly what the stat was referring to. It calls to mind Jeff Jarvis’s question (referencing Nicholas Carr) at the recent Symposium: does Google make us stupid? (And another of one of his questions: how do we structure the information that we have?) The breaking down of media orthodoxies through Jarvis’s “conversation as content” model perhaps works best when it relates to an individual journalist/blogger taking corrections and comments from a diverse and vibrant peanut gallery, but there’s easily 2.5 billion cases of downright incorrect information streaking across the web, posted on sites without external or internal fact-checkers.

Filed Under: Acacademic Integrity, Blogs and Blogging, Higher Education, Internet, Plagiarism

Lessig on Remix

March 19, 2009 By 1 Comment

A couple of weeks ago I went to see Lawrence Lessig, the intellectual property rights expert, speak at the main public library with Shepard Fairey, the artist who created the famous red-white-and-blue poster of Obama.  Lessig was promoting his new book, Remix, which again tackles the impact of increasingly stringent copyright laws on creativity.  The panel was moderated by Steven Johnson, who also has a new book, which looks at the history of ‘sampling’ by artists in all media, and they had some interesting examples, including work by Thomas Jefferson.  Lessig said he’s pulling away from the Free Culture movement in the next phase of his career, and will be focusing instead on Corruption (yes, capital C).  I think by that he means big business’s unseemly influence on our legislative process.

One surprise for me was how articulate Shepard Fairey was, considering that he’s a visual artist, not a lawyer/professor like Lessig, who’s used to harnessing the power of words.  Maybe Fairey has gotten some practice, defending himself against the legal battle he’s in with the Associated Press over his use of the photo he tweaked to create his ‘Hope’ poster.  After the talk, I created a similar image of myself at the site Obamicon.me.  Try it, it’s fun, although I found it hard to come up with a single word I embody, promote, or aspire to, like ‘hope.’

Here’s a short clip drawn from the much longer talk they gave:

Lessig at NYPL

Filed Under: Copyright, Internet, Media, Plagiarism, Technology

How and when do we begin learning about plagiarism? Why don’t we always learn?

April 4, 2008 By 2 Comments

In the past several months I’ve been a volunteer tutor for an eighth grader whose homework assignments often involve looking up terms and concepts on Wikipedia or Dictionary.com.  For her most recent project she needs to provide visual images to illustrate her points; these images are also found online.  While working on her project, my student often has an IM window open on her screen; she clicks on it every time I turn away.  The computer screen thus becomes a single entity containing the private chat and information resources. 

Why am I surprised when she is reluctant to reference her sources then? And, how do you reference 50 images from Google that are glued to index cards?  

Filed Under: Literacy, Plagiarism

Plagiarism in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

February 26, 2007 By 6 Comments

I used to take plagiarism seriously; even worse, I used to take it personally. If you are the type of instructor who makes it a business to track down the source of a plagiarized text in order to prove that a student is a plagiarist, then you’re probably finding, in the age of Google and Turn It In, that catching a plagiarist can be a pretty easy job.

The same tools that make it easy to locate sources of plagiarized texts, however, are the same tools that are making it easier for students to plagiarize. Some papers are even constructed by cutting and pasting information from internet sites, and in extreme cases, the student will keep the original html formatting in their papers, not bothering to change the font, color, or line spacing of the lifted material. The internet is also a host to companies that will offer to write or sell papers to students.

In my discussions with faculty members, I try not to spend too much time discussing plagiarism for two reasons. First, plagiarism is not going to go away, and I would rather that faculty walk away from my sessions with ideas of how to make their classroom and teaching more innovative. Second, I think that how we deal with plagiarism is oftentimes touchy and personal–there’s a taboo surrounding the measures that one could take and the measures that one actually takes when confronting or not confronting a student who is inadequate in the area of attribution.

I feel strongly, however, that not confronting a plagiarist will ultimately thwart the student’s ability to develop crucial communication and critical thinking skills.

My method of dealing with plagiarism isn’t the best, I’m sure, and it’s certainly not fool-proof; however, I’ve so often been asked how I go about confronting inadequate attribution that I feel compelled to list my steps here.

1.) Don’t take it personally. The student is not throwing your teaching back in your face, as it were. The student might be suffering from feelings of inadequacy, fear of writing, fear of English, or other feelings that we, in our capacity of instructors, aren’t able to relate to. Of course, the student might also just be trying to get an easy way out of an assignment or just waited until the last minute, only to discover that the work involved in the assignment was too much for one all-nighter.

2.) Don’t spend your time commenting or marking up a paper that you suspect is plagiarized. It’s a good idea to hand back the plagiarized paper with the rest of the class’s papers with a little note. What you want to say is up to you, but I find it best not to use the “P” word.

3.) Always give the student the benefit of the doubt. I always tell myself to assume that the student just didn’t know better, even if the paper is an article on the internet. I ask the student to talk to me after class or during office hours, and I go over citation and attribution with them personally. Some of us might feel that we don’t want to deal with the situation, that sending the student to the Writing Center for a lesson in attribution would be less awkward, but having this lesson straight from the instructor is really the best way to let to student know about the seriousness of the issue. Besides, the student has already been caught, as it were, and probably doesn’t want to face someone else–it’s embarrassing and shameful.

4.) In some cases, when I am able to find the source of the plagiarism on-line, and depending on the case, I will staple the print-outs to the student’s paper with a note that says, “Sally, could you please go through your paper and properly attribute what you’ve written here and then resubmit it? I’ve printed out the sources to make it easier for you to cite the websites in your paper and the web addresses in your Works Cited page. I think you’ve chosen a good topic, but I’m interesting in seeing what YOU think here.”

5.) If a student does it twice, well, then I might consider the measures that I could take, but students, I find, generally don’t do it again.

Filed Under: Acacademic Integrity, Pedagogy, Plagiarism