A recent study about the cultural elements of academic dishonesty said their participants reported that “it sometimes appeared as if university leadership were more interested in catching perpetrators than in offering training” (p. 149). The participants were talking about universities in a particular country and they were from a particular cultural group. But I want to sidestep the “culture clash” discussion and ask to what extent colleagues see this as a description of their own contexts.
Where you work or study, now or recently, does it feel like the administration is more concerned with catching plagiarists than in training everyone to understand and avoid plagiarism?
[For those interested in following up on the article I quoted above, here is the reference:
Thompson, L. W., Bagby, J. H., Sulak, T. N., Sheets, J., & Trepinski, T. M. (2017). The cultural elements of academic honesty. Journal of International Students, 7(1), 136-153. Retrieved from https://search.proquest.com/docview/1861257012?accountid=14548]
1. Where I once worked, there was a retired lawyer who was employed full-time to handle all the serious plagiarism cases (and cheating cases). He divided his time equally between them.
2. There was no single, equivalent academic employed full-time in educating incoming students. There is no compulsory Non-plagiarism101 course! All subject lecturers regard it as "not being in my syllabus"!
The anomaly arises from the university "having" to do 1., to visibly uphold its standards, but not having funds to do 2.
However, if you stand back, it would make more economic sense (and logical and humane sense) for the university to employ a full-time no. 2 with support and resources.
The root of the anomaly is because the university "assumes" all the incoming students have been inculcated at school not to plagiarise and cheat. This assumption is generally false. Another problem is that certain branches of the university publicly propagate lies like: "You should paraphrase to avoid plagiarism".
Ian, thanks for your reply. I suspect that what you describe may be true in many universities across many parts of the world.
I totally agree with the false economy you describe and also agree it would be more humane to educate than to punish (my interpretation of your point).
"Where you work or study, now or recently, does it feel like the administration is more concerned with catching plagiarists than in training everyone to understand and avoid plagiarism?"
I'd have to say no.
- Turnitin is used as a training device for students as well as to assist in plagiarism detection (http://www.port.ac.uk/departments/services/dcqe/Enhancingyourteachingwithtechnology/Technologywecanadviseon/turnitin/).
- Learning support tutors provide study skills advice including good academic writing http://www.port.ac.uk/library/help/studyskills/
- There is also work at course level (e.g. induction/personal tutoring) and at unit level.
This has been a "hot topic" at my university for a while now. While our students do receive specific training in what we call managing information and oral and written communication, there is no university-wide policy to catch or handle plagirism cases. So, on the one hand we are trying our best to educate and train our students on how to avoid plagirism, but at the same time we do not have clear guidelines to deal with it when it happens, because, of course, it happens!!
I think more effort should be directed at sensitizing upcoming scientists and students on the need to avoid plagiarism. this will help to build a better scientific community.
Given the Anti-Plagiarism workshop that I received at the beginning of the semester, (MA TESOL) I would say HKU is well aware of this issue.
I cannot say the same for my undergraduate studies though. In the UK, I was never given training (no workshops or individual modules dedicated to avoiding plagiarism). I believe what Ian said applies perfectly to my experience: All the lecturers and Graduate Teaching Assistants just kept telling us to paraphrase, changing structures to circumvent TurnitIn. It was as if we were taught "Test-wiseness" as opposed to actual knowledge.
Anti-plagiarism was never explicitly taught to us, but was expected of us!
University should be more interested in preventing that and that is what most of them are doing. The truth is that once you write your assignments originally your score will be low. The truth again is that the software does not automatically tag you a plagiarist. Human experts will determine that.
A number of replies mention the use of software to detect plagiarism and the use of it for training about plagiarism. In my own experience this usually means allowing students to access the software similarity reports and then to change and resubmit their work if necessary. While this has the potential to train students to avoid plagiarism by showing them where they have plagiarized (whether intentionally or accidentally), it can also train them to disguise their plagiarism by paraphrasing until the software no longer recognizes it as a copy. This is a problem because, as Ian Kennedy pointed out, paraphrasing is not the solution and, as Edward Yeung pointed out, this approach breeds a "test-wiseness" which I believe results in continued plagiarism, albeit more complicated and more difficult to detect. Incidentally, a downside for students is that when such plagiarism is detected they cannot claim ignorance of the conventions because they have demonstrably put so much effort into disguising their source.
It is possible to have the culture of witch-hunting in some institutions while in others, greater efforts are directed to training staff members on how to avoid plagiarism. There others that are committed to maintaining a near-perfect balance. It depends on the leadership of each institution. It is the direction in which the "academic council of gods" in an institution gives that dictates the trends.
In Spanish universities, no. Spanish universities do not pursue the plagiarism of their professors, but the students' plagiarism. There is no academic awareness to educate in work that does not infringe intellectual property.
Pedro, thanks for your contribution. Are you suggesting that professors in Spain can plagiarize and it is ignored? Forgive me if I have misunderstood. I just want to make sure we all get a clear picture from what you have said.
I admittedly take a somewhat jaundiced view of this topic based on past experiences, but as far as American universities are concerned, in my experience, I've never seen anybody working all that hard at catching plagiarists, either at the student or the faculty level. I find that administrators, from department chairs on up, typically would rather ignore the issue or sweep it under the rug, and that's what normally happens. Back when I was a history professor, any time there was a plagiarism or any similar instance of academic dishonesty on the part of any of my students, somebody would always explain it away as best it could be, even by what struck me as sort of twisted logic. [One classic example that doesn't involve plagiarism: one student of mine left a small, folded, micro-printed cheat sheet for the final exam in his exam bluebook. When I showed that to the department chair, he asked whether I had any evidence that the student actually used the cheat sheet. I sort of felt as though demonstrated conspiracy to cheat should be enough to constitute an act of academic dishonesty in that case, but the chair didn't want to be bothered.] When I had a situation where, on a take-home midterm exam, I could see pretty clearly that a student had copied some other published source (but I didn't know which) word for word, I chose to give her the benefit of the doubt, and explained to her and instructed her at some length to be sure that any future assignments she submitted should be either written in her own words, or else attribute the source of quotations. Her term paper then included up to ten or more entire paragraphs taken verbatim from a source I knew quite well, so I could identify the pages and paragraphs in the original. I failed the student, because I had given her more than fair warning, but I believe she was able to go up to some higher level and get the whole matter "fixed." Where schools have some procedure regarding academic dishonesty, my unhappy impression is that it is often just another formality to go through before sweeping the matter under the rug--maybe the student is given a chance to say "I'm sorry" and "I didn't realize I was plagiarizing" (even when s/he frankly should have). Similarly, where I went to graduate school, the undergraduate program in particular had an "Honor Code" and an "Honor Council" to police academic dishonesty. From knowledgeable sources (including somebody who served on said Honor Council), it was basically a kangeroo court with the job of finding all the accused innocent (and sweeping the matter under the rug). I also recall what I heard from a colleague years ago who had taught at some school either in Canada near the U.S. border or in the U.S. near the Canadian border, but anyway, she had a student whom she caught plagiarizing bald-facedly and at substantial length, and she called the student on it; he denied the charges, and then his rich parents got my former colleague embroiled in a lawsuit that ruined her life for two full years. The administration at her university didn't back her up, either. As she said, she learned the hard way why professors frequently wink at or ignore academic dishonesty on the part of students; why bother with policing it more aggressively when nobody else really cares and there's no reward for you, but only additional burdens and frustrations? Although these examples are anecdotal from only a few institutions, of course, I've also seen and heard enough over the years to get the feeling that these patterns are fairly commonplace.
Here I should emphasize: when I'm talking about cases of plagiarism here, I'm talking about clear-cut, entirely provable cases, as where entire pages of an original source have been copied word for word without attribution of the source. I'm well aware that there are gray areas with regard to plagiarism where students or professors could be legitimately uncertain that they were doing something "wrong." Sometimes I, personally, might find some of those situations not to rise to the level of plagiarism or wrong-doing, or to be excusable based on reasonable confusion or uncertainty under the circumstances. I am not terribly upset by an occasional paraphrased sentence that remains structurally fairly similar to a similar sentence in an original source, where it's simply sensible to structure the sentence that way--and I'm especially not troubled much by such situations where that author, in a footnote or citation, has identified the source and even the page number of the similar sentence. [I believe I recall that was true of some of the "damning evidence" when Doris Kearns Goodwin got called out for plagiarism in her book on FDR and the New Deal, and in such situations, I found it a stretch at best to say those examples were evidence of wrong-doing.] But bald-faced plagiarism is a quite different thing, and basically, if any college student out there doesn't know that you cannot take multiple entire paragraphs or even pages out of some other source without attribution, then s/he frankly shouldn't be in college.
I haven't seen much aggressive enforcement of plagiarism rules at the faculty level, either. [I studied the issue at some length in the past, including reading various case studies regarding academic plagiarists, including some notorious examples; it was also striking how often such people were simply prolific scholars, churning out books and articles faster than most of the rest of us could ever hope to do--sort of like Bernie Madoff's investment fund miraculously outperforming the stock market year after year.] Most such plagiarists landed on their feet pretty well, after whatever relatively minor scandal blew over soon enough. Thinking in particular of mighty Harvard Law School, when three of its faculty members were found to have plagiarized other sources all within a fairly brief period, said professors first blamed their law student research assistants (who do much of the research and perhaps even writing for big-shot law professors), said it was the students who had made mistakes or failed to clearly attribute sources, and the issue was promptly swept under the rug. Law schools are a little different from other academic programs in that a kind of pseudo-plagiarism--close following of language from earlier cases as precedent--is part of the practice of law in common law jurisdictions, and law professors, for whatever reason, are expected to churn out articles at a much higher volume than professors in most other fields if they want to have any hope of getting tenure, but regardless, Harvard didn't take the matter all that seriously, especially when three big-name professors were involved. In another story, a conscientious scholar who will remain nameless here actually explored and exposed in depth the plagiarism by a much bigger-name scholar; the bigger-name and very well-connected scholar, whose misdeeds were promptly swept under the rug by his home institution, then mounted a nationwide campaign of contacting and pulling strings with hiring committees and college or university administrations to destroy the exposer's career and make sure he could not get hired anywhere.
Again, those are some anecdotes, but I fear they reveal a wider pattern. Namely, that U.S. universities really don't care all that much about policing plagiarism or other academic dishonesty, and mostly just pay lip service to that task. And I'd say the reason is, in large part, that universities are now major money-making machines and large-scale marketing operations that are concerned with maintaining and promoting their "brand" and "franchise," and as such, it's much more convenient to ignore or sweep under the rug incidents that might tarnish the brand and bring down its market value. [Sort of like certain pricey suburbs in the U.S. that systematically undercount or downplay local incidents of crime to help keep the local real estate values sky-high.]
From my same jaundiced viewpoint, I tend to see efforts at training people regarding how to avoid plagiarism to be, all too often and in effect, something of a minimal due-diligence procedure by universities to show that they actually care about plagiarism and academic dishonesty and are doing something about it, while not actually doing much about it. I wholeheartedly support such training programs and efforts, especially given the gray areas of plagiarism that people can wander into relatively innocently, and I support the drumming into students' and faculty members' heads that they should be careful and fastidious about giving proper attribution to other sources (as they would want done to them--sort of a "Golden Rule" of proper scholarly behavior), and should be well aware that they must not take substantial pieces of other people's work and copy them without attribution. But a proper training program should go together with a proper policing program, and vice versa. My unhappy conclusion is that usually they don't.
Apologies for rambling on too long . . . .
Scott, thanks for your contribution. You cover a lot of ground but paint a generally depressing picture of the real attitudes to plagiarism in your part of the world. Your portrayal of the contrast between what I think of as the official position and the actual position reminds me how that distinction always makes researching plagiarism difficult. I think it is even likely to impact on something as simple as reporting the number of incidents.
plagiarism or academic fraud is looked at seriously and punished.in my university, but those involved who choose to approach the court not only delay justice but sometimes get away with it. some faculty members are trying by educating the younger academics on the danger .
Enoch, thanks for your comment. I am interested in your use of the phrase "approach the court". Are you using this metaphorically or do you mean some people actually enter into a legal battle over accusations of plagiarism? I am interested because I have seen/heard colleagues use legal terminology to describe issues related to plagiarism (I, for example, frequently use the words "theft" and "guilty") but I have also heard of some (although not many) real court cases related to accusations of plagiarism.
It's a burning question in todays world. It is quite conventional to find mistakes but unconventional to befall someone with a reasoning that one has accomplished some research dishonestly. Most of the high ranked universities precaution their graduates not to copy and paste any paper but they barely teach them how not to be palgiarist. Such initiative actually discourages one to avoid learning. Moreover, it affects his/her ability to go into further.
I find it very limited in the educational institutions to provide students with the relevant skills to avoid plagiarism. One lecture would say use any type of referencing, the other one wants a specific type of referencing in which no formal tutorial was given for such. Also the system used top pick up plagiarism is flawed and inconsistent. It cannot even pick up types of referencing techniques or the fact that you have referenced. Formal Education just simply does not offer more training and information for students or academics in terms of avoiding plagiarism.
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