In high school and college I noticed that plagiarism was generally punished very severely and there were often specific codes and teacher tirades on the first day of class against it. In many instances, plagiarism could result in failing the class or even expulsion. On the other hand, complete fabrication of facts was never specifically mentioned in the codes or by teachers, and I imagine that when discovered would result in poor grade on the specific assignment only.
Recognizing that time is valuable and much of the work assigned was not, I responded to the disincentives established by the academic community. This meant I would fabricate the fact I needed and reference it to a random page on an out of print book (something I knew the teacher would have to spend significant time and some money to verify). In my mind this seems much worse than plagiarism. Your thoughts?
Also, for the sake of argument lets keep the debate to classroom assignments that are only intended for the instructor only. I can understand why both are equally unacceptable for works intended to be published.
I like your way of thinking. Did any of your teachers ask how you had access to such a fine library of out of print works?
I tend to think there are several levels here - if you are word for word copying someone else’s work - an argument could be made that not only are you benefiting from it - but you are harming that person (that you copied from) - in some way. Some people get really pissed of about this - and I wonder if some of the rules are/were designed in order to instill a level of respect against this type of “harm”. Since it is unlikely that any work you do in high school/college is ever going to be noticed by the real author - I don’t know how much this counts.
But yes - as far as sort of a moral flaw - I think that just making shit up is much worse.
Well, what sort of thing are you making up? If you are completely inventing facts that are fairly central to the argument of your essay then, in most cases, your teacher is going to know that what you are saying is wrong (no matter what uncheckable citations you come up with to back your assertions), and mark you down accordingly. Obscure books and journals are full of nonsense. Part of your education is supposed to be about learning to tell the what is reliable and what is unreliable. Even if they do not twig that your citations are fake, they are still going to know that your work is no good.
On the other hand, if your facts, or at least the overall story you are telling is basically correct, it probably does not matter all that much (at this level) if you simply pulled it from your memory, and your citations are not real. You know what you are supposed to have learned, even if your moral character is not so good.
Frankly, though, finding the names of plausibly relevant out-of-print books sounds like a lot of work to me. It would probably be easier, and certainly not all that much harder, to find real citations. (If you are saying you were just making the books themselves up, that would be quite easy for someone to check.)
I think the OP confuses the things that a teacher finds it necessary to tell students because they might not know them with the things that are important to know because violating those rules would damage the usefulness of what’s written. Teachers don’t generally find it necessary to talk much about the fact that you don’t lie in the papers you write because that’s a lesson that you learn from early childhood. On the other hand, children don’t learn about plagiarism because the concept doesn’t make much sense in anything they do until around high school age (and often until much later). How could a child even understand plagiarism until they are older? Do they get punished for repeating word-for-word what a parent orders them to do? Do they get flunked for remembering the exact wording from the textbook on a test? Plagiarism is a difficult concept that’s hard to teach to a young child.
Lying in your work certainly is considered a major offense in many fields. There have been cases where a scientist simply faked the research that they were doing. When it was discovered, they were fired and had a hard time finding another job. Journalists have been fired for making up the facts in the news stories they wrote and have had a hard time finding another job. (They have also been fired for plagiarism.) I think that not lying is a requirement in lots of jobs where it’s not considered necessary to state that.
I suspect that a teacher will flunk you if they discover that you’ve been faking facts and the references for them. Claiming that you weren’t specifically told not to do it won’t matter. Not lying is a pretty basic matter that you’re supposed to have learned from childhood.
Also, what happens when the teacher asks you how you got a copy of that obscure out-of-print book? If they happen to think about it at all, they would realize that either you ordered the book through interlibrary loan, you bought the book from some online used book dealer, you found it by accident in a used bookstore, or you just made up the book. They can ask you to show them the book or they can get it through interlibrary loan themselves. You’re relying on the teacher not thinking about the references in the paper very well (which happens sometimes). If they have time to look at the paper carefully, lying will hurt you as much as plagiarism.
Libraries are filled with obscure out of print books. You wouldn’t have to do anything exotic to have a pile to cite. This sort of thing is very hard to catch if the paper isn’t entirely bullshit. For example, if you are supposed to have 5 sources, and you only have 3, so you attribute a handful of facts from those 3 to a 4th and 5th text that you do no actually have a copy of, randomly assigning pages. Unless you are writing about a specific topic where the professor happens to have focused their personal research, you aren’t going to get caught. On the graduate level, it’s more likely your professor will be familiar enough with the research to notice something is “off”, but undergrad? Highly, highly unlikely.
The problem here is thinking that the point is to get a grade. The point is to learn how to research, synthesize, and present an academic argument in a particular field. Not doing so means you lost an opportunity to make yourself a little smarter, a little more skilled, a little more educated.
It’s not the teacher’s job to craft a perfect incentive program that forces students to learn. It can’t be done. It’s the teacher’s job to craft assignments that present opportunities for a student to learn, and the student’s job to take full advantage of them. I mean, a teacher should monitor for academic dishonesty, but it’s a secondary concern.
I dislike how much focus is put on catching academic dishonesty and making the punishments so draconian. In a way, I think it sets up the idea that it’s all a game, and if you get away with it, you didn’t do anything wrong.
I would say that making up the facts themselves would just earn you a poor grade on that particular assignment, but making up attributions for your made-up facts is an ethics issue, and can have more severe consequences (starting with a grade of 0 on that assignment, at the least, if it’s caught).
At my university, they both carry identical penalties; the difference is that outright fabrication is rare and plagiarism is common, which is why we spend most of the time in the classroom talking about plagiarism. I usually report two or three cases of plagiarism to the Provost’s office every semester, and I see at least twice as many cases that are technically plagiarism but apparently unintentional on the student’s part (e.g., the student lifts half a sentence from a reading assigned for class without using quotation marks). If it looks unintentional, the student gets a lecture on why this is unacceptable and what he or she needs to do to cite the source appropriately, but I don’t take any further action.
I have seen one case of fabrication in thirteen years of teaching at the college level. (It was an entire annotated bibliography, and it was hilariously bad. The student obviously did not read enough to recognize what sort of information one was likely to find in books, so she claimed, for example, that the specific color codes our university uses to designate student, faculty, and visitor parking spaces were to be found in a book called Chaos: Parking that was published by Penguin Books in 1987. She was also very surprised when I pulled up WorldCat and proved that no such book was in the Library of Congress in about two seconds.) It’s possible that I’ve had more skilled students who have gotten away with it, but it’s still very rare, and, as Wendell Wagner pointed out, students who make up facts or sources know perfectly well that they are doing something dishonest. The reason why teachers and professors spend so much time belaboring plagiarism is that students often don’t know the difference between fair use and plagiarism, or say they don’t, and there are so many more nuances (what counts as common knowledge, how much you have to reword something for it to count as paraphrase, why you still need to include citations even if you’re paraphrasing or summarizing, how those citations should be formatted).
Plagiarism damages only the author who copies the material.
Fabrication damages the collective body of knowledge.
On a college ethics level, maybe both are the same degree, but in the real world, plagiarism is just sad while fabrication can and has destroyed lives.
That’s an interesting dilemma. My wife was a teacher and our son is a researcher. Both of them have been primary authors on academic papers. To them, plagiarism is just about the gravest sin possible.
I was a journalist. To me, fabrication is an even greater sin.
When I was in journalism school, either one of them would have been grounds not just for my failing the course, but actually being thrown out of school.
As someone with scientific training, I say fabrication is the worse scientific offense and plagiarism is the worse personal offense.
Fabrication of data means you’re reporting results that aren’t real, which means that you’re messing up other people’s understanding of the world, and in the worst case can lead to terrible real-life effects as a result of people believing your words (coughAndrewWakefieldAutismcough). That’s the worst scientific offense I can imagine.
On the other hand, while plagiarism doesn’t involve that kind of thing, it does involve stealing from another person, so on a purely personal level it is the worse offense.
Since I’m a science person, I tend to rate fabrication as worse (to the extent that I had the knee-jerk reaction when seeing the question of “of course fabrication, why is there any question?”), but I can see why in a non-scientific field, or e.g. in the case where work is plagiarized from someone who is materially hurt by it, plagiarism could have worse effects.
I can’t agree. Plagiarism damages the plagiarist almost exclusively.
For academic plagiarism, whether piecemeal or total (a whole work, or close to it), the original author loses nothing except credit they would not have been given anyway.
If it’s commercial plagiarism, it’s very often quickly caught and the plagiarist’s career is over while the original work and author get a slight halo-buffing and possibly renewed sales.
Can anyone outline a reasonable scenario where (discovered) plagiarism damages the original author or work?
People die because of fabrication. Dead. Corpses buried in the ground kind of dying. People fabricate evidence of vaccines causing autism, crane safety checks, drug efficacy, WMD ownership. People fabricate evidence of properly investing your retirement fund, properly paying taxes, properly documenting crime scene evidence. People get hurt by data fabrication, personally and tragically hurt.
Plagiarism? Rand Paul plagiarized a number of sources for his speeches/writings and the only thing that happened is that he looks like a fool. And this is a guy who has his staff write 90% of what goes out under his name in the first place.