Not yours for the taking

Plagiarism, or taking other people’s words and ideas and passing them off as one’s own, has burst into the news in the past week. While many universities around the world consider it a silent epidemic, the very public transgressions of Mr Benny Johnson, a high-profile editor of popular Internet site Buzzfeed, and United States Senator John Walsh have cast a bright light on the issue of the proper attribution of source material and brought it into the open.

As unfortunate as these instances are, they act as a reminder that plagiarism can have severe and career-damaging consequences. In the case of the editor, his bosses fired him after finding more than 40 instances of plagiarism in his recent posts, while revelations that the Senator copied parts of his 2007 Master’s thesis at the prestigious US Army War College has put both his degree and re-election into jeopardy.

In higher education, faculty and administrators grapple with the issue of plagiarism which, while less headline grabbing, is commonly viewed as an endemic and growing problem on college campuses across the globe. Intellectual fraud does not occur only in the classroom — top universities now routinely check their admissions essays for pilfered paragraphs.

WHAT DRIVES STUDENTS TO COPY?

Many explanations for the rise in plagiarism are offered. They suggest a downward spiral that is hard to stop: Compared with the past, there is less social stigma, punishments are less harsh, detection is more difficult and pressures on students to excel are greater. In short, the risk and reward calculus has shifted and, as more people cheat and roughly get away with it, the numbers continue to rise.

Certainly, colleges and universities are fighting back. Commercial anti-plagiarism software, such as Turnitin or Viper, is now commonly used to detect the percentage of overlap between a student’s work and other works that are published or available online. In Singapore, all the national universities adopted Turnitin five years ago to try to decrease the incidence of plagiarism.

While such software is a useful tool, it is not a panacea. Not only do the programs fall far short of complete accuracy, but when we rely only on detection rather than prevention, it is an imperfect way to root out the problem and sends the wrong message to students. The most common question from students when told they must use the software is: What percentage of overlap is acceptable?

This sort of pre-emptive plea bargaining misses the point entirely. We need to ask what drives students to appropriate the work of others. Researchers say that typically, when students turn to plagiarism, it is because they run short of time, they feel overwhelmed by work, they feel pressure to succeed at all costs or they do not fully understand how to use source material.

Plagiarism at most institutions tends to be a mix of the intentional and inadvertent. Mr Raymond Singh of the Singapore Management University conducted a recent study of students who suggested that their peers cheat despite knowing the rules because of stress or fears about getting poor grades.

Nanyang Technological University don Mark Featherstone has argued that, while purposeful deceit is an issue, too many students in Singapore arrive at university without having learnt how to credit sources, leading them to unintentional academic misconduct.

TEACHING STUDENTS TO ANALYSE

This is an area where education systems around the world need to do a better job, not simply in explaining the rules of proper citation and attribution, but in teaching students to read, write and think critically. Rote memorisation and a focus on examinations that have a correct answer do not teach students the skills of writing. Analytical writing is not only necessary for good university performance, but is a 21st-century skill increasingly demanded by the high-skilled labour market.

To do that well, a writer needs to understand at a deep level what the source material is saying and how he can use that to build his own argument. The source material may be supportive of the writer’s point or the writer may be taking issue with it but, in any case, it becomes part of an expanded narrative newly created by the writer, who appropriately credits the debt to the source’s author.

This act of reasoned creation is difficult for students who have not been forced to wrestle with texts and their meanings throughout their school careers. In some cases, their inability to put the work of others in their own words is explained by Albert Einstein’s famous dictum: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

In other cases, they have not had enough practice in expressing their own views, using logic and well-supported argument to make their case so, out of panic, laziness, lack of confidence in their own ideas or fear, they wind up using the ideas of others when called upon to produce serious writing.

The term plagiarism comes to us from Latin and shares its roots with the words for kidnapping and piracy. For students to understand that unattributed writing really is theft, they must learn to produce writing that is truly their own and take ownership of their ideas.

Thus, in addition to the impediments to plagiarising that we design via technology and the strong sanctions we institute against those who are guilty of it, teaching our students to master analytical writing is imperative. In addition to helping them acquire the skills they will need throughout their lives, we may also help them avoid career-ending headlines in the future.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Dr Trisha Craig is a social scientist and executive director of Wheelock College Singapore.