Dear colleagues:
My experience with plagiarism at various institutions is that no matter
how carefully documented a case I have been able to present, the
administration/upper echelons of faculty have been consistently
reluctant to take any real punitive action, either because they are
litigation-averse, or are loathe to dissuade fee-paying students in any
way from enrolling with/staying at the institution.
Without wishing to appear too starry-eyed, I do believe from experience
that it is a very small minority of students who plagiarise (I would
guess less than 1%); I actually doubt that the proliferation of cheater
web-sites actually increases the number of cheaters. Parallels in other
areas of life may be found...
As professors we must offer clear moral instruction regarding our
expectations of honesty and originality. Students in turn need and
expect this from us. We can also be clear that we will work to the
extent of our capacities to detect and punish plagiarism, for the
benefit of (i.e. not effectively to penalise) those students who turn in
original (and perhaps slightly shabbier) papers.
At the same time we need to ensure that we do not assign a volume of
work that exceeds our capacity to read it carefully, train our teaching
assistants in plagiarism detection (and accordingly regulate the
workload of graduate students to ensure that they have time to read UG
students' work carefully) and to resist vehemently any further
encroachments by administration on our available time.
Cheating, is at the root, a moral problem, and I feel it is a mistake to
"blame the capitalists" for it, unless one is willing (as perhaps one
should be) to go further and interrogate the fundamental moral basis of
our capitalist society.
Cheers,
Bill
_______________________________
Bill Hipwell, PhD
Honourary Research Associate
School of Geography, Environment and Development Studies
Victoria University of Wellington
New Zealand
Director of International Projects
DAI Inc.
Suite 300, 67A Sparks Street
Ottawa, Ontario K1P 5A5
Canada
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