Justify plagiarism?

Great Debates
1

On Coldfire’s recommendation, I’m starting a GD on the civil portion of this thread

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=143717

that was apparently getting out of control. If you look at the last dozen or so exchanges, I was trying to find out E.D.'s point in arguing that the degree requirements at his university were so arbitrary as to justify plagiarism. He denied that that was what he was saying, when Coldfire suggested taking the discussion here, so I’ll open it up like this:

Is there any justification for committing plagiarism in a U.S. university?

2

NO.

3

- jjimm, 2003

4

Tom Lehrer

5

Grrr, I’ve been rumbled! :mad:

6

No, however…

I had a prof who creamed a student who “crossed-referenced” a source. He wrote a paper on women’s experience in early slavery from a black/white perspective (not a great deal of sources in the library for this topic). He had one great book that referenced other sources that were unavailable so he quoted the sources mentioned directly. As in, author X quotes A, he quoted A directly without reference to X as the original quoter. He had a complete list of citations as found in the orginal text.

The student did not take the intro text/theses directly, however, professor got a hold of the book and realized that the student could not get these resources at the library=BIG FAT F.

He said it was plagiarized, I say it’s sticky. When a professor knows that there are not enough resources (pre-internet) to complete the minimum sources, especially.

On another note, one twit in a creative writing class actually submitted another published writer’s work as her own. She thought it was obscure enough to prevent getting caught…should have checked the acknowledgement page to see the professor’s name mentioned. Duh.

One last one: I worked as a writing tutor so I helped a lot of non-native ESL speakers clean up their work. We had a lot of profs complain that we were doing the work for them as their sentence structure improved…not the ideas themselves, just something that any grammar-checker would have caught. Though, I did help many students with the structure of their ideas (brainstorming and the like). These are my ideas, are they being dishonest? They always raise their grade due to my resources, should I be cited?? (slight sarcasm there)

7

As a teaching assistant, I once had four students submit the same exact essay answer to an engineering question. The answers were identical, word for word.

Their excuse? They worked “together.”

Balderdash. You can work together to solve a problem, but don’t you DARE submit the same exact answer, down to the last word. Collaboration is fine, but duplicate essay answers is plagiarism and cheating.

8

Scenario: I’m an 18-year-old who wants to be a writer. I get offered a full scholarship to the Ivy League university with the strictest core curriculum requirements on the planet. I have no ambition to study science, math, and fifteen or so other courses unrelated to my interest in writing, but because this university has some terrific writers with whom I’d never get to study otherwise, I accept the scholarship and fake my way through the courses I have no use for in the hopes of sticking it out long enough to qualify for the senior seminars I desperately want to take.

I know I’m committing expellable offenses every time I hand in phony papers to my science prof, I know I’m violating rules against academic integrity every time I copy off my neighbor’s exam in math, etc. If I get caught, and punished, I’m willing to take my punishment, mostly because to me it’s worth it for the chance to study with the brilliant writers. I fully recognize the university is right to punish me, if they catch me, and I’m not claiming to be innocent or ignorant of the university’s rules, nor even to find fault with them. They’re just not for me.

As it happens, with a few slight elisions and simplifications, this isn’t too far from my actual experience. I didn’t get caught, and I consider my stupid teenage self very lucky not to have gotten caught, and by the time I graduated, I was beginning to realize the value of the education that, wastefully, I had gone to great trouble to avoid. So alll turned out okay for me, but even if I hadn’t come around to my change of heart, was my teenaged plan a valid justification for committing plagiarism? If not, why not? I didn’t really want the degree at the time, thought that I had no use for it or what it represented, and was willing to give it up for the chance to educate myself as I wanted to. Where exactly did I go wrong here?

9

As a freshman comp teacher, here’s my take on sj2’s scenarios:

I’d treat this as a pedagogical problem rather than as deliberate plagiarism. It sounds like the student was making an honest attempt to document correctly but didn’t know how to cite a source quoted in another source.

As far as I’m concerned, help is OK as long as the student submitting the paper is the one holding the pen. Brainstorming ideas, for instance, is fine (heck, how many of us don’t bounce ideas off our colleagues?), provided the author of the essay makes the decisions about which ideas to include and how to phrase them. ESL help is a tricky area; I’d say that marking errors and telling a student how to fix them is OK, but rewriting sentences for the student is crossing the line.

10

You went wrong because you now have a degree that does not accurately reflect your college experience. You did not learn the material you were intended to learn; you did not learn the discipline that is required to do your own work when it may not be something that is “fun” or “interesting” for you; and you did not develop the moral integrity that would require you to follow the university’s rules, rather than to simply “not find fault” with them.

Extrapolating to the real world – first of all, your degree now implies that you do have a core understanding of science and math which you do not have. You are a very poor representative of your university, and any future employer may expect things of you which you are unable to give.

Second, your degree from a prestigious Ivy League School with a strict core curriculum implies that if you are assigned tasks, even if they aren’t specifically to your liking or directly in your field, you will be willing and able to complete them. Whatever you seek to accomplish in life, not all of it is going to be fun. Being a successful writer requires doing publicity and promotion for example. Depending on your field, it may require occasionally writing about subjects that don’t interest you, or doing dull, boring research so that what you end up writing is accurate. Part of the discipline of core curriculum is teaching people how to do the stuff that they don’t like, as well as the stuff they do like.

Finally, obtaining a degree from a prestigious Ivy League School implies a certain amount of moral integrity. You may well be hired or chosen over people with less exalted degrees because you will be assumed to have a higher standard of integrity. It’s good to hear that you have had a change of heart, and have now developed more integrity, but your college experience itself would indicate that you lacked one of the most critical life skills – the ability to follow the rules as they are set out. Yes, it’s valuable to be able and willing to criticize rules that are wrong, but it’s also important to know how to do things the right way, and crucial for almost any profession to do the work that you are asked to do.

My father drummed into our heads a quote which I have never been able to track down, but which I have taken to heart: “The chief purpose of education is to train the mind and the will to do the work that has to be done, when it ought to be done, whether you want to do it or not.”

Plagiarism and cheating are wrong not only because they are stealing both from the author of the plagiarized work and from the school whose degrees have value, but because they keep the plagiarizer from learning how to do the work that has to be done.

11

Pretty good answer, SpoilerVirgin. I’ll buy that for a dollar. I don’t know if you read the thread I referenced above, but (although I exaggerated my offenses in oversimplifying them above) now I understand from both sides what plagiarists are thinking. It’s kind of safe for me say this now, and maybe even hypocritical, but I think it might have been a good thing in the long run if I had gotten caught, and punished, in college, because I had to learn the hard way how to do my own work after I decided to go to graduate school and eventually to become a professor. I’ve had to learn some math and some more science and several foriegn languages without the advantages that many of my fellow grad students had already under their belts, and which they thought that I had too.

As a professor, I’m strict with plagiarists in part because I understand why I did what I did. Insecurity about my abilities in college lay behind all of my carefully rationalized explanations for cutting corners. I feel I’m doing the right thing by making my students confront weaknesses in their characters, as no one did for me. After I forced myself to do some of the work that my massive insecurity had prevented me from doing, I found out that it wasn’t as bad I’d feared, and that I learned something from some of it. (I wouldn’t claim to have found value in it all, but there was value in having accomplished it all eventually.) My lesson was that’s it’s never to late to become a person of integrity. I suppose I could beat myself up, expose my wrongdoing, demand my college strip me of my diploma now (though I’d still keep my post-graduate degrees that I earned honestly) but I think I’m doing more good by teaching young people how to avoid wasting the opportunities I wasted, and to become better people than I’ve been.

12

Just yesterday a woman I know who works at the local university was saying that she knew of a plagiarism case where a graduate student actually lifted a large chunk of text directly from…wait for it…Cliff’s Notes. Now that, I think, is beyond any possible justification.