Case Study: Plagiarism

1. Cheating, plagiarism, and academic dishonesty are receiving much attention lately. As a group, discuss what you know about this issue before turning the page. Why is it so prominent an issue today? Note some points made in the discussion. What questions do you still have?

2. Examine the citations and excerpts or abstracts attached. Do you have any new information to add to what you already knew? Are there some surprises?

3. As you examined each citation, what “markers” helped you decide whether a source would be useful for understanding this issue or not? Make a list of markers you used to evaluate each source. Which are the most difficult of these markers for non-specialists to understand and apply?

4. Who are some of the apparent claims-makers in the formation of this social issue; that is, what groups might benefit from it being defined as an important issue and how? Who might have an interest in discrediting the concept?

5. A loaded question: Some of the excerpts attached are from scholarly sources and others are from the popular press or the Web. If students were told to use only scholarly sources, would that mean they would be limiting their search to sources that were reliable and based entirely on objective research? Why or why not?

Citations and Excerpts

Susan Lawrence. "Watching the Watchers." Science News 119 (1981): 3+.
. . . Although virtually all scientists agree that data falsification and plagiarism are cardinal sins in research, opinions differ on how common they are and on what their causes may be. Furthermore, no one seems quite sure how they can be detected or prevented without damaging an already stressed research system . . . Ironically enough, the one point virtually everyone discussing the issue agrees on is that there are no data on the incidence of fakery in scientific research. That lack of data makes it difficult for the scientific world to offer an effective response . . .

Anthony DePalma. "Plagiarism Seen by Scholars in King's Ph.D. Dissertation" New York Times 11 Oct 1990: A1.
Torn between loyalty to his subject and to his discipline, the editor of the papers of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. reluctantly acknowledged yesterday that substantial parts of Dr. King's doctoral dissertation and other academic papers from his student years appeared to have been plagiarized. . . .

"By the strictest definition of plagiarism -- that is, any appropriation of words or ideas -- there are instances of plagiarism in these papers." . . .

"Becoming Martin Luther King, Jr.: An Introduction." Journal of American History 78 (1991): 11-22.
. . . Instead of viewing this news as an opportunity to probe how and why a great American used language in this way at this time and place, most commentators worried instead about how much King’s plagiarism diminished his greatness and heroism. In reading many of these accounts, I find it hard to escape the conclusion that commentators were simply trying to decide how many points they should subtract from King's greatness score. . . .

The language that King knew best, as Keith Miller shows in the accompanying essay, was the oral language of the African-American pulpit. Even when he crossed borders into other worlds, King envisioned interaction between speaker and audience in ways he had learned from the folk pulpit. In this oral tradition, repetition was highly valued because it assured that knowledge would be remembered. . . .

Philip J. Hilts. "Plagiarists Take Note: Machine's On Guard." New York Times 7 Jan. 1992: C1.
Few figures in science have engendered more emotion than Walter Stewart and Dr. Ned Feder -- and that was before they invented their little "plagiarism machine."

"You put the papers in here," Mr. Stewart said as he bent forward and peered through thick glasses bound to his head by a rubber band. The scanner digests the paper, transforming it into a computer file ready for the test.

. . . "I find it chilling," said Dr. Maxine Singer, president of the Carnegie Institution, a research organization in Washington. "We don't normally in our society go looking for behavior not consistent with accepted practices. The whole system is designed to protect people. I don't know why in science we have to do these more threatening kinds of things."

Mr. Stewart and Dr. Feder "may be well-intentioned," Dr. Singer said, but she does not make the same allowance for their machine. "Of the various uses modern technology would be put to, this machine is one we didn't expect. We would have expected the C.I.A. or Interpol to use it, not scientists."

Rebecca Moore Howard. "Plagiarisms, Authorships, and the Academic Death Penalty." College English 57 (1995): 788-806.
. . . Hypertext makes visible what literary critics have theorized: the cumulative, interactive nature of writing that makes impossible the representation of a stable category of authorship and hence a stable category of plagiarism. . . . The Internet user surfs through a universe of information, stumbling quite by accident upon all sorts of materials without knowing quite how he or she got there or how to get home again. Citing data from such sources can pose near-impossible challenges for the writer. And when any of these phenomena occur in hypertext, with its multiple authors whose contributions are untraceable, the matter becomes hopelessly entangled.

Turnitin.com [home page] 18 October 2001. Found through the Internet Archive Wayback Machine (retrieved 23 Dec. 2004).
This is the new website for Turnitin.com, the world's leading intellectual property protection service for education. Our service is designed to assist both educators and students concerned with the growing problem of Internet plagiarism. Turnitin.com has proven itself, both in independent comparison tests and through successful implementation in academic institutions across the globe, to be the only reliable means of tracking student misuse of intellectual property on the Web.

Nick Carbone. "Turnitin.com, a Pedagogic Placebo for Plagairism." Bedford/St. Martin's Technotes. 5 June 2001. (retrieved 23 Dec. 2004).
. . . Turnitin.com keeps a copy of every paper submitted and adds it to their database. Students have no choice in the matter; if a professor submits a student's paper for a check, it's archived -- essentially inhouse-published -- for future use by the Turnitin.com database. The Turnitin.com privacy policy and user agreement say nothing on this that I could find. And that in itself is problematic in my view. . . .

With Turnitin.com, students' work is captured and held without their permission. This goes against the grain of most writing pedagogy, which premises that students are 'authors' and 'authorities' and owners of their own work (coincidentally, the assumption used to establish copyright). It also goes against the grain of one's right to their intellectual property that Turnitin.com, in its pursuit of plagiarists, seeks to uphold. So using Turnitin.com presents students with a double standard.

David D. Kirkpatrick. "As Historian's Fame Grows, So Do Questions on Methods." New York Times 11 January 2002: A1.
.. . . Mr. Ambrose borrowed words, phrases and passages from other historians' books. . . .

But even while conceding mistakes, Mr. Ambrose also defended his overall methods. He noted that in each case he included a footnote to the works he used, and he sometimes praised the books in his text.

"I tell stories," Mr. Ambrose said. "I don't discuss my documents. I discuss the story. It almost gets to the point where, how much is the reader going to take? I am not writing a Ph.D. dissertation."

"I wish I had put the quotation marks in, but I didn't," Mr. Ambrose said. "I am not out there stealing other people's writings. If I am writing up a passage and it is a story I went to tell and this story fits and a part of it is from other people's writing, I just type it up that way and put it in a footnote."

Ariana Eunjung Cha. "Harry Potter and the Copyright Lawyer; Use of Popular Characters Puts 'Fan Fiction' Writers in Gray Area." Washington Post 18 June 2003: A1.
. . . In the past few years, a curious literary genre known as "fan fiction" has been flourishing. The term refers to all manner of vignettes, short stories and novels based on the universes described in popular books, TV shows and movies. Similarly derived works are appearing in music, where fans are using their computers to mix songs from popular artists into new works that they call "mashups." Movie fans are taking digital copies of films such as the "Star Wars" epics and creating alternate endings or deleting characters such as the much-maligned Jar Jar Binks.

The explosion of these part-original, part-borrowed works has set authors of fan fiction against some media companies in a battle to redefine the line between consumers' right to "fair use" and copyright holders' rights to control their intellectual property. . . .

"A Cheating Crisis in America's Schools [transcript]." Primetime Live ABC News. 29 April 2004 (retrieved 23 Dec, 2004).
. . . Lifting papers off the Internet is one of the newer trends in plagiarism - and technology is giving students even more ways to cheat nowadays.

Authoritative numbers are hard to come by, but according to a 2002 confidential survey of 12,000 high school students, 74 percent admitted cheating on an examination at least once in the past year.

In a six-month investigation, Primetime traveled to colleges and high schools across the country to see how students are cheating, and why. The bottom line is not just that many students have more temptation - but they seem to have a whole new mindset. . . .

Fortunately, educators have technological options too. Schools have been subscribing to a service called Turnitin.com, which can help teachers compare students' papers to all the available literature in its database.

"It's typically 30 percent of all the papers submitted have significant levels of plagiarism," said John Barrie, founder of Turnitin.com.

Turnitin.com [home page] 2004 (retrieved 24 Dec. 2004).
What if the Internet could help students take more responsibility for learning and let teachers focus on teaching? Now it can. Recognized worldwide as the standard in online plagiarism prevention, Turnitin helps educators and students take full advantage of the Internet's educational potential.

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