I don't know why, but my take on this whole plagiarism/academic dishonesty thing is pretty different from others.
1. I don't think it is very hard to detect plagiarism. In fact, one of the colleges I teach in has a subscription to Turnitin.com, and I find that I am actually better than the website is at finding plagiarism. As long as the assignments you use are pretty unique, students will find it very hard to actually download a paper or parts of a paper that fit right in with the assignment. When the paper seems pretty different from what I assigned, when certain paragraphs have writing styles that vary quite a bit from the other paragraphs, it is very easy to pick out the paper as an example of plagiarism. In addition, I often know what sites come up on Google when you search for the main topic of my paper assignments, and I have caught students plagiarising from websites that I had read a few days earlier. While unique assignments do prevent students from purchasing pre-written papers (as do assignments that require the use of specific research sources or some emphasis on autobiographical content as a way to practice the sociological imagination), none of these techniques prevent students from purchasing individually-written papers. However, assignments that are due in seperate parts can be purchased too. They are just more expensive and mean that we will see more and more class stratification in which of our students can afford to cheat. 2. Of course, it is really very time-consuming to check for plagiarism. It seems to me to be less time-consuming than if we had to look at the encyclopedia each time, but it is time-consuming. I know that we all have many other demands on our time, but I think it to be pedagogically irresponsible to transform our teaching merely because we need to spend 20 extra minutes per paper assignment Googling. If it really is too time-consuming, press your campus to purchase Turnitin.com service and require all papers to be submitted to the service. It does work relatively well, and I am happy to comment on my experience using it. 3. I think it is important to put complete and detailed plagiarism policies on the syllabus. Partly, this is to protect ourselves--when students come say that they didn't think whatever particular nonsense they did was plagiarism, you can point to the syllabus and say that they would have known if they had actually read the syllabus or paid attention when your discussed it in class. In fact, many students will go away in about five minutes if your policy spells out that exactly what they did is prohibited, particularly if you can tell them exactly which webpage they copied from. But partly, and I know that this is suprising to many people, it is important because increasing numbers of students are entering college without a clear understanding of what plagiarism really is. They have had the opportunity to write papers in high school by copying out of the encyclopedia, or they've plagiarised off the Internet before and never been caught, or their parents encourage them to purchase papers, or maybe they never have been asked to write a paper at all. A policy, a good lesson class on plagiarism and citation formats, and maybe a breif reading like the one I used this spring in my intro course (Lanegran, Kim. 2004. "Fending off a Plagiarist." The Chronicle of Higher Education. July 2, 2004.) highlights for the students what academic dishonesty is and why they should not engage in it. 4. My final point, related to my last comment about what students do and do not know, is that we are loosing something really important if we stop asking for complete and coherent research papers in mid to lower-level courses. Yes, there is often a pedagogical justification in asking for parts. But the paper should be written once in its entirety as well. Not all of our students (and in some cases, very few of our students) will go on to careers or graduate programs that require the ability to write a complete research paper or report. But some will need this skill. If we do not teach it to them early and often, we have failed these students. I think that every undergraduate, whether they have the fortune to attend an elite liberal arts college as I did or whether they are in the underfunded urban public institution in which I now teach, should have the opportunity to learn the skills of inquiry and written communication which we rely on within the discipline. Is the chance that one plagiarised paper might inadvertantly slip by despite our best efforts really worth impoverishing the education of all of the rest of our students? Mikaila Mariel Lemonik Arthur New York University Queens College, CUNY
