Brent Staples
(This article is cited as it is included in the new curriculum of BBS First Year (TU)
A friend who teaches at a well-known
eastern university told me recently that plagiarism was turning him into a cop.
He begins the semester collecting evidence, in the form of an in-class essay
that gives him a sense of how well students think and write. He looks back at
the samples later when students turn in papers that feature their own,
less-than-perfect prose alongside expertly written passages lifted verbatim
from the Web.
“I have to assume that in every class,
someone will do it,” he said. “It doesn’t stop them if you say, ‘This is
plagiarism. I won’t accept it.’ I have to tell them that it is a failing
offense and could lead me to file a complaint with the university, which could
lead to them being put on probation or being asked to leave.”
Not everyone who gets caught knows
enough about what they did to be remorseful. Recently, for example, a student
who plagiarized a sizable chunk of a paper essentially told my friend to keep
his shirt on, that what he’d done was no big deal. Beyond that, the student
said, he would be ashamed to go home to the family with an F.
As
my friend sees it: “This represents a shift away from the view of education as
the process of intellectual engagement through which we learn to think
critically and toward the view of education as mere training. In training, you
are trying to find the right answer at any cost, not trying to improve your
mind.”
Like many other professors, he no
longer sees traditional term papers as a valid index of student competence. To
get an accurate, Internet-free reading of how much students have learned, he
gives them written assignments in class -
where they can be watched.
These kinds of precautions are no
longer unusual in the college world. As Trip Gabriel pointed out in the Times recently, more than half the colleges in the country have retained services that check student papers for material lifted from the Internet and elsewhere. Many
schools now require incoming students to take online tutorials that explain
what plagiarism is and how to avoid it.
Nationally, discussions about
plagiarism tend to focus on questions of ethics. But as David Pritchard, a
physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told me
recently: “The big sleeping dog here is not the moral issue. The problem is that
kids don’t learn if they don’t do the work.”
Prof. Pritchard and his colleagues
illustrated the point in a study of cheating behavior by M.I.T. students who
used an online system to complete homework. The students who were found to have
copied the most answers from others started out with the same math and physics
skills as their harder-working classmates. But by skipping the actual work in
homework, they fell behind in understanding and became significantly more
likely to fail.
The
Pritchard axiom - that repetitive cheating
undermines learning - has
ominous implications for a world in which even junior high school students cut
and paste from the Internet instead of producing their own writing.
If
we look closely at plagiarism as practiced by youngsters, we can see that they
have a different relationship to the printed word than did the generations
before them. When many young people think of writing, they don’t think of
fashioning original sentences into a sustained thought. They think of making
something like a collage of found passages and ideas from the Internet.
They become like rap musicians who
construct what they describe as new works by “sampling” (which is to say,
cutting and pasting) beats and refrains from the works of others.
This
habit of mind is already pervasive in the culture and will be difficult to roll
back. But parents, teachers and policy makers need to understand that this is
not just a matter of personal style or generational expression. It’s a question
of whether we can preserve the methods through which education at its best
teaches people to think critically and originally.
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