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| Oh, you thought we didn't know about this......remember, we were students once as well. |
The unspoken reality of university life is that cheating and plagiarism are everpresent. It is something that professors rarely want to admit, but it is part of an escalating problem within most academic settings. With all of the access to digital materials and increasing capabilities to find new technological avenues for cheating, there is little doubt that students have been faced with the temptation to pass off other ideas as their own and/or find ways to smuggle information into examination rooms. Keep in mind however that most professors have become incredibly savvy in spotting the signs of cheating. I won't reveal all of our tricks (let's just say we have as many new and technological ways to do it) but sometimes it doesn't take much to find it. This week in fact I found the tell-tale signs of a rookie plagiarist's classic mistake-- not changing fonts on a badly executed cut and paste in an essay. This is about as bad as the thief who leaves his cell phone behind at a bank robbery. Lame indeed.
What prompted my post in particular was Claire Potter's advice column (AKA Tenured Radical) I came across yesterday on The Chronicle of Higher Education. It was a very useful, entertaining, and highly pragmatic tongue-in-cheek interview discussing the pitfalls of cheating. Part of what may surprise students is that a professor will more often respect a student who attempts and fails or does poorly on a class assignment versus cheating and/or plagiarizing (however unknowingly) to earn a higher mark. And over time, cheaters will find that the short term payoffs are never worth the long term damage to your university experience. Another wonderful part of this interview deals with the moment of confrontation with a suspected cheater-- this is a scenario that I can completely relate to, having successfully caught both plagiarizers and cheaters in the relatively short span of my teaching career.
Here is the interview for you to enjoy below (cut and paste I might add, but clearly cited!). It is also worth visiting the original post to read the response of other academics in the comments section. It should prove eye-opening to many students:
If I Had College-Age Children, I Would Give
Them This Advice for the Final Weeks of School: Don’t Cheat
I imagine this conversation would occur
sometime during Thanksgiving, perhaps as we were washing up the endless number
of dinner dishes and de-greasing the kitchen. No, no: let’s put it in a
neutral location, as Tenured Radical and the returning college student are
having a final cup of coffee at the airport while waiting out a flight delay.
This is how it would go:
Spawn of the Radical: Esteemed
Parental Unit, you have taught at a selective liberal arts college for two
decades. What advice do you give for the hellish, final weeks of school?
Tenured Radical: I am so glad you
asked, Spawn. (Ruminates briefly.) OK, here goes. First piece of
advice? Don’t plagiarize, buy a paper off the internet, pay someone else to
write for you, or retype an ancient term paper secreted away in the files of
your Greek organization. I will be far more sympathetic if you simply
fail the class, or get a bad grade, than I will be if you are hauled up before
a disciplinary board and hung out to dry for preventable a$$hattery.
Spawn: Why? It seems like such
an easy and obvious solution to not having done the work for the course.
Besides, so many of my friends get away with it.
TR: True dat. And yet, if your
friends jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge and managed to live, would you do it
too? My point is this: because cheating is evidence of rank stupidity,
many people do not get away with it. In fact, many people are no better
at cheating than they are at doing the work for the course. Others spend time that
might have gone into conventional studying devising elaborate systems
for cheating (Profs, follow these links and track what your students
already know.) It would be far better to fail a course, take an
incomplete, or throw yourself on the mercy of the professor than to be expelled
from college. As my
dear friend Flavia Fescue points out, even though it “breaks her
heart” she catches one or two plagiarists every semester and she takes them
down. It is part of our job to take you down (think, selling crack on the
steps of a police station, ok?) Historiann
concurs. “Message to students,” she writes. “We care. Please don’t f^(k up.
But know this: we will work you over if you f^)k up, and it will hurt you more
than it hurts us, for realz. In my experience, it never pays to give a
plagiarist a break. Hang’em high, regretfully if you must, but hang’em high,
friends.”
Spawn: Parental unit, have you ever caught
a plagiarist?
TR: Indeed, and those who cheat on
exams. Even though there are some who slip through my net, even before
Turnitin.com I have always known when I have snagged a plagiarist that I was
right, even prior to being able to prove it. And I can always prove it because
I am a far better at research than an undergraduate is at covering up
plagiarism.
Spawn: How do you know before you can
prove it?
TR: It’s all in the
confrontation. The almost uniform response of a guilty plagiarist is to
deny the offense with a kind of astonishment and disbelief that is meant to
simulate innocence. Students who are actually innocent (and this was
certainly the case when one student had copied from another on an exam, and the
challenge was discovering which one had copied and whether the other had
permitted it) get genuinely angry.
Spawn: (taking notes furiously) Wow.
So, if accused of cheating and innocent, do not defer — let it rip?
TR: I would advise so. You will
end up in a disciplinary procedure anyway, so you really have nothing to lose.
And here are some precautions worth taking, from my perspective. Sit away
from other students in exams, and don’t leave drafts of your papers and notes
for papers on campus computers for anyone to find. There are a fair
number of students who cruise around looking for digital work that has been
abandoned in computer labs. Even if you are unaware that this has happened, you
will be implicated. And if you are aware of it? Most honor codes
require you to notify someone, and if you don’t, you could be disciplined
anyway. Read over your college’s policies about
plagiarism, so that you are clear about which of the things that your high
school teachers turned a blind eye to, and might have even encouraged you to
do, constitute plagiarism. Using commercially available outlines rather
than reading and using the books for the course is cheating. Having someone
help you with your paper (for example, the fact that you send your papers to
your mother for a final edit just like you did in high school) is acceptable:
not acknowledging that you had help is cheating. Using research that you
found on your roommate’s desk is cheating. Copying things off the Interwebz or
directly out of books is cheating. Make sure you know how to write a good
citation and use more of them rather than fewer. As Flavia points out in
her post, when in doubt, cite, cite, cite.
Spawn: Is there anything I might not
recognize as cheating that actually is?
TR: Glad you asked that question
clever Spawn. What few undergraduates grasp, given that dollars are paid
in exchange for their heads being cracked open and education poured in, is that
you don’t purchase ideas with tuition. The people you read actually own
their ideas, and deserve credit for them. Think of it as idea rental:
you are free to use any ideas you want, but you must distinguish between
an idea, or point of analysis, that is actually yours and one that has been
offered up by someone else whose book you have read. For example, to
announce in your opening paragraph that the workers have nothing to lose but
their chains may seem like common knowledge to you, particularly given the
Radical home where you have been raised. But actually, we must credit
this phrase to Karl Marx, even though he never made a nickel off of it and
never will. As another example, you might note that I
credited two of my colleagues in the blogosphere for inspiring this post in the
first place by linking them. This is not only respectful, it allows
someone to follow up an idea to its point of origin, evaluate the idea and
address how you made use of it. They are calling your delayed flight,
Spawn.
Spawn: (Gathering bags and an
extraordinarily expensive airport snack.) Is there anything else I
absolutely need to do during exam period?
TR: Yes, Spawn. Don’t stop
bathing. I know it will be tempting, but have mercy on the faculty and
wash diligently.