Cheaters and plagiarizers — once and future
Plagiarizing was once clear-cut. Those intrepid college students who drove to a paper mill (which back in the day was a real warehouse full of papers) and bought someone else’s paper — they knew they were cheaters. If someone wrote a paper for you, you knew you were a lazy cheater. Xeroxing a big chunk of an encyclopedia and putting it word for word into your paper: Obviously, cheating!
But today we’re going through this massive, largely uncontrolled, cultural/social experiment, as a generation of children grow up with digital tools. These tools and the practices and behaviors that accompany them provide engines of astonishing human promise while enabling some bad behavior along the way.
One thing the digital enables is perfect reproduction. These digital natives have grown up with it. It’s in the nature of their virtual interactions. Represent yourself on your profile with this clipped image. Take that quote and put it on your status. Cut and paste. Copy. Children today have come of age with easy access to the Web and its words, images, videos, and ideas. Free information at a click, information that is easy to use and easy to copy — exactly.
Then they get to school, and someone says, “You better know how to cite your sources.” But they not only don’t know what to cite, but sometimes they don’t even know what cheating is. What if you use an online article and refer to it throughout your essay but forget to cite in one place that you used an idea from it? What if you can’t find the author of a Website? What if the info you found on one site is really from another? What can inform your ideas — and what’s forbidden? Students grow up with mixes and mash-ups; ownership boundaries are not always clear.
I remember taping songs from the radio when I was younger (believe it or not, I still have these tapes, grainy, imperfect songs with a DJ’s voice chipping in at the start and finish [yep, Pierre Robert was at WMMR back in the 80s]). Now, of course, you want a replica of a song, you can file share it, and you get the exact song. It’s perfect.
The college students I have worked with the past few years have a peculiar relationship with copying. I learned this in an interesting way, when several years ago I had the most passionate argument I’d ever had in a first-year writing class: It was not about abortion, gun control, prayer in schools, or the death penalty. It was about file sharing. I found them articulate but sometimes earnestly convoluted about the ethics of file sharing their beloved music. And so the RIAA has found in its ongoing battles with their generation. Many of them crafted their view so the sharing wasn’t really theft.
They seemed ethically bewildered in the face of the astonishing ease — and peer popularity — of this copying. This confusion of course would carry over to school. Teacher and scholar Annette Rosati, in a thoughtful article about plagiarism co-written with Danielle DeVoss, described how three of her students submitted papers downloaded from the Web as their own. When she announced in class that some had plagiarized and if the plagiarists didn’t come see her in her office, they would fail, the three word thieves were joined after class outside her office door by 11 others; the 11 innocents all asked a version of the same question, “It wasn’t me, was it?” They didn’t know if anything they had done in their papers was wrong too, including one person who wondered if Cliff’s Notes constituted cheating.
DeVoss and Rosati see intellectual property as a lens to help students think about the constraints of borrowing: What have they used, why, and how will that affect the person who created it? Similarly, writer and teacher Dave Saltman said educators need to teach “digital natives how to become good digital citizens”, at least partially by having dialogue about fair use, a sometimes elusive legal standard for copyright, especially in the digital age. (The RIAA I guess deals with so much of this that it has a Webpage called “For Students Doing Reports.”)
Kids start their technology habits early in school. When they make a PowerPoint in third grade, they may not even think about any of this when they clip that picture or that little block of text, when it’s so easy and anybody can search for the thing and find it.
What is the cost of students’ digital research habits? Even if they can’t articulate it this way, do they see their mash-ups, their patchwriting (a term I’m borrowing from Rebecca Moore Howard) not as cheating but as part of the world of knowledge they inhabit — after all, Google’s operation is basically as a gigantic copier of texts, pictures, and documents?
In my classes, informed by those like DeVoss and Rosati and Moore Howard, I encourage students to step back and look at the Web practically, but critically. What’s the purpose of a given document? Why are you writing it? How are you representing other people’s ideas? How would those people feel about that? What are the rules for citing in this case? (For instance, I’m violating all kinds of official rules in my casual linking here. It’s a blog. Is that okay?)
I’m not talking about free passes for cheating, because the outright digital cheating can be numbing. I have seen “cases” in which three or more college students all submitted the same paper. Teachers turned into detectives, tracing a file’s meta-data for last date saved or what computer a document was written on, while the students cooled their heels in separate offices, like interrogated crime suspects.
I don’t think we need much teaching to say you’re a cheater if you buy a paper or let someone else write it for you. It always has been. But there’s also an open digital space. Watching screenagers — whether my students or my own kids — meander through the Web sometimes makes me wonder what we can claim as authentically our own. Once, you could sit in class and write with keen insight about Hamlet’s indecision, and you would never know 120 other students had the same idea in other schools that term. That Web offers ways of reducing that redundancy of knowledge, maybe allowing us collectively to reach higher than we ever thought we could. But it also may show us how difficult it is to be original.
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Another great article, Scott! I so enjoy your work. Thanks for sharing and keep them coming.
This topic may be addressed in the instiutions of higher education but I am not seeing it addressed well in elementary or middle school. Mine is a limited experience I am commenting on as I have only the one child but the impression he is taking away from elementary and middle school is that it is okay to use web content, especially photographs if his project or homework “needs to be more interesting.”
It is another ongoing conversation in my house – along with what exactly is wrong with downloading songs, movies, and TV shows before they are released.
In the age of “shareware” and open-source coding, which is the better value to honor? Making a living from your ideas or freely giving them to the world to make the world a better place?
Terrific piece, Scott. It also puts me in mind of cultural differences with respect to using others’ material. I know in China they are working hard to teach what plagiarism is because the culture has been traditionally less focused on originality. Perhaps this is part of the movement toward globalization–we are struggling to come to terms with this from one direction; the Chinese, from another. Maybe we’ll meet in the middle. By the way, Shakespeare did an awful lot of “patchwriting”–I love that term.