Rethinking Plagiarism

Jerry Nelms, a professor of rhetoric and composition at Southern Illinois University, recently posted to WPA-L about the types of "plagiarism" articulated by the Australian scholar Brian Martin. Most the types are in fact not legally or ethically considered plagiarism at all, even though they are functionally very similar to the acts of plagiarism we traditionally penalize heavily in writing classes.

Martin identifies one whole area of "plagiarism" as "institutionalized"; Nelms amends that slightly to talk about the transfer of authorship credit in institutionalized contexts. There are, he says, three such contexts: hierarchical, for-pay, and open-access.

In hierarchical contexts, Nelms writes, "authorship credit is distributed up the hierarchical ladder. So a tech writer writes a report that the entire organization takes authorship credit for, or a speechwriter writes a political speech for a politician, who, in effect, takes authorship credit for the ideas expressed in and the language of the speech."

In for-pay contexts, a writer is paid to create a text whose authorship is then implicitly or explicitly claimed by someone else--ghostwriters are the main example here. Nowadays ghostwriters usually get writing credit, on the cover of the book: LT, Over the Edge: Tackling Quarterbacks, Drugs, and a World Beyond Football by Lawrence Taylor, with Steve Serby. We assume there that Lawrence Taylor talked into a microphone and Steve Serby did the actual writing (Taylor tells us in his preface that the only books he ever reads are the ones he himself wrote--using "wrote" there loosely). But there are still cases where a paid ghostwriter remains an uncredited ghost.

In open-access contexts, Nelms writes, "the discourse community itself provides access to previously produced texts for its 'authors' to adapt and even fully adopt 'as their own.'" Technical documentation, for example, is rarely "authored" in the Romantic sense. It is written piecemeal by lots of technicians and tech writers over many years, revised at regular intervals, always facelessly. Legal documents typically contain long stretches of so-called "boilerplate" that is reused by every "author" who writes a new document. Even at universities, the evaluation and assessment and other reports that administrators write contain such boilerplate or other text borrowed casually from other such reports. Not only is this not considered plagiarism; it is expected.

As Nelms writes: "Young employees, given the assignment to draft reports, might actually find themselves criticized if they try to write an original text. That takes too much time. Efficiency trumps originality."

Nelms also writes about research into plagiarism proper that undermines key myths we have about it: that it is invariably a sign of laziness or immorality or both. This research establishes, for example, that "most plagiarism is unintentional--e.g.., due to a lack of sufficient familiarity with academic citation conventions." If the student changes all the nouns in a sentence but leave the sentence structure intact, legally that's plagiarism; but for the student it's almost certainly unsuccessful paraphrase. If the student cites the source but neglects to put quotation marks around the quote, that's plagiarism too, but it's pretty obvious that the student is not trying to "steal" the original author's words, take credit for them; it's an error, a lapse. In correct citations, in fact, we don't put quotation marks around indented quotes--and not remembering the difference between the two types of quotation, in-text and indented, hardly seems like a capital crime. For example:

A considerable body of research and scholarship has been published since the early 1980s that testifies to the overwhelming importance of self-efficacy and other forms of self-concept to learning. Self-efficacy is the set of "people's beliefs about their capabilities to produce designated levels of performance that exercise influence over events that affect their lives. Self-efficacy beliefs determine how people feel, think, motivate themselves, and behave" (Bandura, "Self-Efficacy," Encyclopedia of Human Behavior. Vol. 4. Ed. V. S. Ramachaudran. NY: Academic Press, 1994. 71-81. Rpt. in Encyclopedia of Mental Health. Ed. H. Friedman. San Diego: Academic Press, 1998. http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/BanEncy.html. Paragraph 1). Students with low self-efficacy doubt their ability to accomplish the task assigned. They tend to shy away from taking on difficult tasks and view them as personal threats, rather than challenges to overcome. They cannot commit themselves to any goals related to these tasks, and they tend to dwell on their own personal deficiencies, on obstacles they encounter (or just expect to encounter), and on the adverse outcomes they anticipate (the less than stellar grade, the teacher's thinking less of them as students, and so on). "Self-efficacy beliefs also help determine how much effort people will expend on an activity, how long they will persevere when confronting obstacles, and how resilient they will be in the face of adverse situations. The higher the sense of efficacy, the greater the effort, persistence, and resilience. People with a strong sense of personal competence approach difficult tasks as challenges to be mastered rather than as threats to be avoided. They have greater intrinsic interest and deep engrossment in activities, set themselves challenging goals and maintain strong commitment to them, and heighten and sustain their efforts in the face of failure. Moreover, they more quickly recover their sense of efficacy after failures or setbacks, and attribute failure to insufficient effort or deficient knowledge and skills that are acquirable" (Frank Pajares, "Overview of Social Cognitive Theory and of Self-Efficacy" [2002],
http://www.emory.edu/EDUCATION/mfp/eff.html, paragraph 14). (Nelms)

Most likely, therefore, Nelms adds, "students with low self-efficacy are more likely to intentionally plagiarize than those with higher levels of self-efficacy": they don't trust themselves to produce adequate text, so they rely on sources they know (or believe) are authoritative, namely, those in print (or in Wikipedia)--and they rely on them to the point of grabbing whole segments of the authoritative text and claiming it as their own. Nelms concludes by citing an empirical study that did indeed find something like this to be true: Helen Marsden, Marie Carroll, and James T. Neill. "Who Cheats at University? A Self-Report Study of Dishonest Academic Behaviours in a Sample of Australian University Students." Australian Journal of Psychology 57.1 (May 2005): 1-10.

I used to have a colleague who delighted in catching plagiarizers. He bragged about it to all and sundry, about how he gave the offenders the choice between failing the course or facing disciplinary action at the university level, possibly leading to expulsion, and invariably they agreed to take the F for the course. Since he caught between five and ten such offenders every semester, I have to assume that most of these students had plagiarized unintentionally, through ignorance of proper citation and paraphrasing techniques, and that the ones that did plagiarize intentionally were students with low self-efficacy. When I tried out that line of argument with him once, though, he scoffed: "So what," he said, "I should feel sorry for them? If they can't handle the norms of academic discourse, they shouldn't be at the university."

Maybe. But maybe also it's part of our job to teach them the norms of academic discourse? And, if their previous education has instilled low self-efficacy in them, maybe it's part of our job to help them develop strategies for overcoming that low self-efficacy, and not just to throw the book at them?

Student Intolerance

The University System of Georgia has responded in a novel way to pressures from conservative pundits and lawmakers all across the country to require universities to demonstrate "intellectual diversity," by conducting and releasing a survey on student perceptions of intellectual diversity on their campuses. "Intellectual diversity" as a concept is a conservative response to "cultural diversity" or "ethnic diversity," which they consider inappropriate values in an academic venue (why should educators care about the color of their students' skin or what cultures they come from? why should it matter if, say, a student body is predominantly white and middle-class?); since their brief is that universities have become exclusively liberal and anti-conservative, "intellectual diversity" would mandate some tolerance for conservative views in the classroom.

This new study was planned, as Scott Jaschik writes in his Inside Higher Ed piece on the survey, "both with faculty groups and with Republican legislators who have previously called for intellectual diversity legislation — thus making it difficult for either those in higher ed or who like to criticize it to write the study off as politically fixed."

What they found was that students perceived the greatest threat to "intellectual diversity" on their respective campuses to be coming not from professors but from other students. Professors were far more open to differing ideological views than students. The complaints about intolerant students came from both sides of the aisle, finding the left just as intolerant as the right, but both to be about twice as intolerant as professors.

The study also suggests that about one-third of the students surveyed were unwilling to have their ideological views challenged by their professors, and that nearly one-quarter said that they had felt at least once in their college careers that they had to agree with a professor to get a good grade--the majority saying that this had happened only once. One-tenth of the students surveyed felt that some of their professors had spoken inappropriately about their political views, but two-thirds of those said that they had felt free to argue with those professors. And fewer than half of those who complained that they felt they had to agree with their professors to get a good grade said that the professors had done or said something to make them feel that way; apparently the other half-plus brought those fears to the classroom from their stereotypes.