PLAGIARISM: DO’S AND DON’TS
As a college teacher, though,
I am concerned about regular old classroom plagiarism. The meaning of the word plagiarism in
college is very simple: students copy
writing that they did not do, and turn it in with their names on it. In the days before the Internet, some
students made good money by writing papers for other students, or by offering
their old papers for sale. There were
"mail order" services where students could buy papers on the topics
they needed. These methods required
time and extra planning. There was no
way you could get a paper through the mail-order service at midnight the night
before a paper was due.
But now, the Internet is
available, and students can get a paper an hour before class. They can also "cut and paste"
paragraphs or whole pages from different web sites, depending upon the subject
of their paper. Sometimes students
don’t realize that they are plagiarizing when they copy or "cut and
paste" entire sections of web pages without citing them, or giving
credit to the original authors. There
is an easy solution to this type of plagiarism: every time you use a web page for information, be sure to quote
it, paraphrase it, and cite it.
Even better, rewrite the information in your own words, and cite
it. Your professors may not think that
you have done a lot of original work, and they might not like that you were
using the Internet so much, but you won’t be plagiarizing. In fact, visiting these web pages and
reading the information is something that all professors encourage students to
do: research.
Most professors --
and yes, we do live in the "real world" - come down hard on "cut
and paste" plagiarism. But the
more serious type of plagiarism is out-and-out copying a paper from the Internet
and putting your name on it. You can buy
one of these papers quickly and easily.
Right now, the average cost is $8.95 a page. So, a ten-page essay costs $90.00. Some sites even offer services that will write a whole paper
individually for you, following any format you want. These services cost $30 a page, up to $60 a page for "rush
delivery." So, you would spend
between $300 and $600 for this type of ten-page paper. A deal, huh? Maybe if your parents are paying $2,000 or more per class, per
semester, they might not think this was such a "great deal." If you’re paying for college yourself, then
I am not writing this essay for you:
you already know what a "great deal" it is.
There are also many
"free" essay sites on the Internet.
The temptation to save time and money is probably very strong for some
people. Why not just visit one of these
sites and find a paper similar to the one you’ve been assigned? Just copy it into your handy word-processing
program, put your name on it, maybe even change a few words here and there, and
turn it in.
Your teacher will never know. Wrong!
The chance that you take is
that your instructor may not have the Internet search skills to find the
original source paper on the Internet.
Any alert teacher will see that there’s "something wrong" with
this copied paper that you turned in.
How can the teacher
know?
Well, the emphasis in
college teaching is not on discovering plagiarism, it’s on learning and
growth. Experienced teachers aren’t
just familiar with your own writing over the course of a semester, we have read
hundreds, and even thousands, of student papers over the years. Nearly every professor in every discipline
can "smell a rat." We know,
usually after reading only a few sentences of a plagiarized paper, that this
writing was not done by the student who turned it in. Each professor in each discipline has his or her own reasons for
coming to these conclusions. In
Sociology, they may recognize phrases or terms that came from a familiar
article, but which are uncited and uncredited.
In History, the professor may recognize the ideas and writing style of a
famous historian - and the chances that this historian would be
"reincarnated" as a student in his class are pretty slim. And in English? Well, any good English teacher can tell you exactly why
they believe a plagiarized paper is not the work of a particular student. We teach grammar, syntax, and
structure. So, when those elements of a
paper are different from anything a student has written before, either
out-of-class or in-class papers, then English teachers have specific, objective
cause to think that a paper could be plagiarized.
If you’re going to be a
successful plagiarist, you also have to understand the "level of
writing" that appears in different college courses. Since most students do not plagiarize, and
do their own work - for better or worse! - professors in all disciplines are
familiar with the general range of papers that they see in each of their
classes, from Freshman to graduate-level.
Any time a paper outside that "range" comes across their desk,
professors have reason to question that paper’s legitimacy. Ask yourself whether the subject matter and
level of diction in a graduate-level paper is really going to "fly"
in a Freshman English class. It doesn’t
matter if this is a "good" or a "bad" graduate-level
paper. By the time any student gets to
graduate school, they are writing differently and expressing themselves
differently than students who are starting out in college.
Let’s say that you are in an
English class, where you discuss material, take notes, have exams or quizzes,
and papers are assigned on various topics.
Let’s say that during the course of the semester, you study Hamlet. You, and about four million other students
across America! Often, professors will
assign papers on topics that aren’t "popular," or that are related to
stories or poems that aren’t extremely well-known. In that case, if you’re a dedicated plagiarist, you know that you
probably can’t find a "free" Internet paper that will match the
assigned topic. You’ve got to choose
the "paper written especially for you" option discussed earlier. However, let’s say that you are studying one
of the works that everyone goes through. Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth,
or Oedipus the King. Compare and
contrast any of those plays. A quick
Internet search will give you scores of free essay options.
Should you choose one of
them?
Unless
your professor is truly "asleep at the wheel" - No!
Your
topic might be "typical," but it’s very unlikely that any of these
hundreds - even thousands - of Internet papers are going to match what was
discussed in your individual class.
Here
is a sentence from a paper on Hamlet that I recently received from a Freshman
English student: "But Fortinbras
was not prepared to accept his constitutional dispossession so easily"
(Artist_of_1999 1).
You
know, I never knew that!
Let’s
break it down. First of all, the
sentence begins with "But."
Most college Freshmen won’t do this, because they’ve been taught in high
school not to do this. It’s not
"wrong," and it’s actually a hallmark of more sophisticated
writing. A confident, experienced
writer does sometimes begin sentences with conjunctions, like "and"
or "but." Then we come to the
phrase, "constitutional dispossession." You don’t need an advanced degree to recognize this as an
"academic pedanticism." In
everyday language, that means "what the bull does after he
eats." This type of phrase might
appear in an upper-division or graduate-level history paper.
What does it mean? Why did I say, "I never knew
that!" Because at the beginning of
the play, the three watchmen talk about how Fortinbras is raising an army to
get back his lands that were taken from his father, the King of Norway,
after he lost a war with Hamlet’s father. "Constitutional dispossession" is just plain
wrong. This phrase describes what
happened to Mad King George during the Revolutionary War. The colonies banded together to fight for
freedom against the British mercenaries (as seen in the movie The Patriot). George Washington didn’t become the first
U.S. President by pouring poison in King George’s ear while he slept.
If
I hadn’t read that phrase, none of these issues would have crossed my
mind. "Constitutional
dispossession" is a pointless anachronism. After reading this one sentence, I knew that this paper did not
come out of my class.
When
confronted with the evidence that this paper existed in three separate,
identical copies on the Internet, and questioned about the writing and ideas,
the student insisted that an unknown party had stolen this paper from her
computer, and put it on the Internet without her knowledge. "Anyone can steal anything from your hard
drive." Mmm-hmm. Well, I would think they would be more
motivated to steal your credit card number or other valuable personal
information, but what do I know?
Obviously, they’re hacking computers looking for priceless
"Hamlet" papers.
"You
don’t think that I write well enough to have written this paper?" the
student said, angrily.
"It’s
not very well-written," I said. I
really didn’t have time to explain about "academic pedanticisms,"
what bulls do after they eat, and what a "constitution" was, because
we were talking about very serious matters.
"It’s written differently from your other writing this semester,
and it’s written at a different level from all Freshman English papers."
The
student had already committed herself to lying in addition to cheating. The paper didn’t talk about any of the ideas
- pro or con - we’d discussed in class, and it certainly wasn’t the type of
writing that I teach or encourage or reward.
That type of writing would be clear, understandable and straightforward. That’s why my University pays me, and why
people pay the University good money to be in my classes.
I
guess that smarter people than me could explain why a student thought she could
"skate by" copying this paper off the Internet, or who believed that
I wouldn’t do exactly what I did - decide after a few sentences that she hadn’t
written the paper herself, and gone off to find out who did write it,
taking less than one second to come up with it. By way of defense, she said, "I wrote this paper in high
school."
I
also don’t know what to say about a high school teacher who wouldn’t question a
student Hamlet paper that used phrases like Fortinbras’ "constitutional
dispossession." The Dean believes
that the paper was plagiarized twice - once in High School and a second
time in college. To "ice the
plagiarism cake," the student turned in a rough draft of her research
paper - which also "read wrong" in terms of diction and syntax. When questioned about this, she said "I
turned that in last semester in English 103."
The
student also said, "I am an ‘A’ student.
I would never cheat." When
I said, "this paper and your research paper aren’t like the other papers
that I do believe are your own work," she responded with, "I only
spent an hour or two on those papers."
Those
were hours better-spent than the few minutes it likely took to plagiarize the
Hamlet paper and the research paper.
"What
grade did you get on your research paper last semester in English 103?"
"A
‘B+,’" the student said.
The
other instructor, whose office is next to mine, said that she had awarded the
paper a "C."
Since the grades were already finalized for
the previous semester, there was no point in my telling the other instructor
that I thought that large portions of this research paper were likely plagiarized
- the first two-thirds, I believed.
Cutting-and-pasting and slapping a paper together like that between
someone else’s words and your own would result in a "C" or worse - if
the plagiarism was not discovered.
When
I talked to other students about plagiarizing papers online, most of them were
shocked at how much papers cost, and surprised that people would pay that much
money just to avoid doing the work.
When we talked about the "free essays" that were available,
they all said, "Why would you take that chance? If they’re free, how good are they anyway?" Even if you get behind on your work - and
you can only spend an hour or two, like the student said that she had - you
will still get a better grade than the "F" you’ll receive if you are
caught plagiarizing. The absolute
mildest penalty that an instructor can award for plagiarism is to give the
student an "F" for the assignment.
My initial attitude after I
discovered the plagiarism was that the student had become desperate due to
pressure of a lot of assignments being due, and perhaps that she had personal
problems. So far as I knew, this
was a legitimate student who’d gotten into trouble and made a very bad
choice. I was going to give the mildest
penalty: an "F" for the
assignment. If she confessed to taking
this desperate action, I was even willing to offer her an option for make-up or
extra credit, as long as she did her own work.
But she did not confess. I was
asked to believe that not one, but two, unknown Internet bandits stole the
paper from her computer and put it on a free essay site. And then she said that this was a high
school paper, supposedly, that had been turned in without discussion or
permission in my class. Then, I learned
that her research paper was from last semester in another class. And though I didn’t want to go through the
whole time-consuming plagiarism search again, I believed that this student
didn’t write large portions of that paper, either. It read like more poorly-digested criticism.
Hard
to say what the truth really is, except that this student didn’t write the
Hamlet paper - "Artist_of_1999" did from the planetpapers.com
Internet site. By inventing elaborate
stories instead of accepting responsibility, this student talked herself out of
the initial mild penalty, received an "F" for the entire course, and
is now facing four separate, well-documented charges of academic integrity
violations. The rules of our University
state that students have a file set up after one violation, and if a second
violation comes in, no matter how minor it might be, they are dismissed from
the University.
Dismissed means "kicked
out" - permanently. The registrar
writes "dismissal for violations of academic integrity" on the
transcript. That transcript will follow
the student to any future school. The
only way to avoid other schools finding out in the future is to go without
financial aid of any kind. These days,
the same computers that make Internet plagiarism so easy can track plagiarists
who have been caught from any school to any school that participates in the
Federal financial aid system.
I
don’t know any teacher who "makes it their mission" to discover every
instance of plagiarism in their classes.
And if my classes are any evidence, I don’t think that hard-core
plagiarism is that common. This is the
first instance I’ve had of out-and-out copying a whole paper from the Internet
in four years of teaching, and as soon as I read a few sentences from this
paper, I could tell that there was something wrong.
But
on the very same day that I discovered this paper’s identical twin on
planetpapers.com, the chairman of my department bought an Internet paper from
one of the sites that offers them for sale - word-for-word the same as a paper
that was turned in to one of his classes.
This occurred at a Southern California university of about 8,000
students, in the same department, and on the very same day. Nearly every other instructor in my
department has had some problems with plagiarism this semester, although these
two incidents were the most clear-cut and the most dramatic.
As
the Dean of Students asked the young woman who plagiarized in my class,
"Why would you want to plagiarize this paper? The person you are cheating most is yourself." This student now faces very severe
consequences, but in addition to that, what type of education was she
receiving? There’s no way to know how
many papers she has copied from the Internet, or recycled, and turned in to
different classes. She already made the
choice - even if you believe her story of computer hackers stealing from her
hard drive - to turn in a high school paper to a college class, and to turn in
a paper from another college class to a second class. That shows no commitment to learning, much less actual learning
taking place in her case.
Sadly,
she may never know the truth: the
papers that she said only took her an hour or two to write were better than the
papers she plagiarized. They were her
own work, even if she was doing them hastily.
I have many students who work full-time jobs, or who have family
commitments that mean that they have to study late at night or early in the
morning under a lot of pressure.
There’s never been any question that these hard-working students weren’t
putting in the hours of study that are required for an "A" in
college-level classes. It seems
bizarre, but the only students I’ve ever questioned, or who have had trouble
doing their work and turning it in on time, have been ones who didn’t have jobs
outside of school, and had no family commitments. In other words, they were in an ideal position to study during
normal daytime hours and to have active social lives. But they chose not to do so.
They had lots of free time, and they were investing it very unwisely.
If
you plagiarize in college and get caught, at the very least you’ll get an
"F" - the grade you were trying to avoid in the first place. At most, the school will dismiss you and
you’ll have a permanent record of being a cheater.
But
let’s just say that you do it, and you get away with it. Why not ask yourself why you’re in college
in the first place? If you put in the
time and effort, you will leave college with two things, and one thing is a lot
more important than the other, no matter what you might think. The first thing is your degree, or
"sheepskin." You’ll have a
piece of paper that proves you were there - you "did the time" and
you have completed all the requirements for that degree. This degree will ensure that you get a
better job after graduation, and that you can go on to graduate or professional
school if that is your goal.
The
second thing you get is what actually happens during your four years of
college: you’ll learn and you
will grow. At the end of the
four years, you’ll be a different person than the one who arrived on that first
day of Freshman orientation. You’ll be
more confident, more capable, and more skilled in countless ways.
The
student who plagiarized in my class made no growth of any kind that I could see
over the semester. Eventually, she quit
even trying to do her own work, taking the plagiarism route. I’m sure that she feels that this is
"my fault." Probably it was
her high school teacher’s fault, too, and the fault of the other teacher in her
English class last semester. It’s
probably "the fault" of every teacher in every class where she’s ever
cheated. It might be "the
fault" of the whole educational system that seems to have rewarded her for
being a cheater up to this point. Maybe
it’s even her parents’ fault, for "pressuring her." Now she’s going through a real
"learning experience" that she cannot avoid by copying, plagiarizing,
lying, failing to do the reading, or by skipping class and making up some
feeble excuse later. She is caught in a
situation that she created because of her own actions and statements -- with
severe consequences, nowhere to turn, and no way out.
At
some point, maybe the "lesson" that most of us learn as little kids
will get across to her: do your own
work no matter what grade you get. When
she realizes this, she’ll have to face her own weaknesses and inadequacies as a
student. She’ll have to figure out why
she was so eager to copy someone else’s work instead of doing her own, why she
thinks she’s better than those other "dumb" students who have been
doing the work, and why it’s so easy for her to lie, and so hard for her to
tell the truth.
And
that is a very important skill that I do teach to my writing students who do
their own work. I hope that you have
understood every word that I’ve written here.
My job is to teach students how to write and think well and honestly -
thinking for themselves, not anybody else. That’s one of the most important
skills that anyone can have in any field - from education to business to law to
medicine.
Yes,
what the Dean said was true. Every time
you cheat, the person you cheat the most is yourself. If you do your work honestly, even if you don’t get the grade
that you hoped for, eventually you will get those grades. You’ll be the real "A"
student. You will surpass your teachers
- and that’s something that every good teacher stands up and cheers to
see. You can look at yourself in the
mirror and feel genuine pride, confidence and accomplishment.
Even if you’re the most
practical, success and money-oriented person in the world, seeking to get
through college with the least investment of time possible - think about doing
your own work as an investment. If you
buy a paper over the Internet, you are truly wasting that money, whether or not
you get caught, because by doing that, you’re not learning anything except
"how to cheat." If you
"get one free," then you know what they say: "you get what you pay for." And if you’re more interested in ethics and
morality than the "bottom line," consider the other thing that most
kids learn in Kindergarten and at home:
the good old Golden Rule. Treat
others as you would like to be treated.
Becoming a teacher was not
the hardest thing I’ve ever done, nor was completing four years of college and
three years of graduate school.
Becoming a professional writer was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and
in order to do that, I had to sit down and do the work, one word at a time. I have just written something of the length,
and with the organization, facts and reference to "real events" that
is similar to a term paper in an upper-division or graduate-level course, and
I’ve done it in about an hour and a half.
I couldn’t do that when I was a student. It took me hours of sweat and toil to write papers, just like
everyone else. It is only a lifetime of
writing and work - and not plagiarizing - that got me to this point.
No matter what you want to
do for a living, or where you hope to be when you graduate from college, one
thing is certain: your future dream job
is probably not "professional plagiarist." Believe it or not, there is such a thing. I learned about a real professional forger
and plagiarist who stole the work of several good writers a couple of years
ago: he’s doing 7 to 10 in the Florida
State Penitentiary. He’s pursuing his
"writing career" by copying other writers from prison, except he
can’t cash any of the checks he dishonestly earns. They don’t let prisoners earn money that way in Florida.
Whatever field you enter,
you’re going to have to learn and demonstrate real skills in that field, and
the only way that you can do that is through learning and practice. But again, you don’t have to learn that
lesson from me, or from any other teacher, or even from the guy in the Florida
State Pen. You could learn it the way
my student is learning it right now:
the hard way. By doing it
and experiencing the results.