Rise in student plagiarism cases attributed to blurred lines of digital world

A rising tide of student plagiarism during her three years as director of composition at Colorado State University left professor Sarah Sloane reeling.

She saw it all: blatant cut-and-paste copying from the Internet; only a word changed here and there, “sort of like Mad Libs”; chunks of material lifted straight from a university-issued brochure.

But why? Last time she counted, CSU’s website featured at least five different prohibitions on plagiarism. In recent years, the university instituted an honor code to stem academic dishonesty.

“It’s a time of change — we’re in flux,” says Sloane, noting that plagiarism always has been community-defined, not only by geography but also by history and culture. “Sometimes I think plagiarism rules, as currently codified, haven’t caught up.”

Teachers see it in high school and college — with varying frequency, but a sense that many students remain unclear about the evolving rules for crediting other people’s work. Now, as ever, the teachers see literary scofflaws brazenly claim content under their own name, but most emphasize that the majority of their students try to do the right thing.

In the digital age, though, plagiarism is being re-examined on many fronts through the lens of technology. Today’s students — the so-called digital natives — have grown up with concepts such as online file-sharing and rapidly changing notions of intellectual property.

“I don’t know how much of that plays into the idea that everything is fair game, and how much is just complete lack of understanding,” says Chris Cooper, who teaches English at Douglas County’s Castle View High School, where he saw a rash of plagiarism late last year. “When I explain what they did, they break down and cry, like you convicted them of a crime.”

A recent study by the Pew Research Center found that 55 percent of university presidents surveyed thought plagiarism has increased over the past 10 years. Of those presidents, 89 percent said technology had played a major role.

Intentional plagiarism

CSU’s Sloane estimates that in the past year she learned of about 100 incidents of intentional plagiarism among 6,800 freshman and advanced composition students — more than in previous years. She became so fascinated by the dynamics that contribute to plagiarism that she designed a graduate-level course called “Writing and Ownership: Plagiarists and Pirates, Forgers and Frauds.”

But Teddi Fishman, director of the International Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson University, says other studies have shown incidents of plagiarism to be fairly consistent over time — fluctuating only 3 to 4 percentage points in higher education.

What has changed, she says, are the attention paid to cheating in an era dominated by standardized testing and a greater ability to catch plagiarism using computerized tools.

But she also notes that students tend to be two steps ahead of the technology in finding ways to circumvent the algorithms used by such plagiarism filters as the popular online Turnitin.com.

“I do worry,” she says, “that we’re teaching people to evade plagiarism detection rather than to cite sources and build upon other people’s ideas.”

But today’s students suffer from an understandable confusion over what constitutes “common knowledge” that requires no attribution or citation, some experts say. Wikipedia — the most popular single online source among high school and college students, according to a Turnitin.com survey — represents a case in point.

“In a vague sense, they know it’s written communally and published for anyone to use,” Fishman says. “Common knowledge is difficult. There are good reasons students don’t know where the boundaries are.”

Michael Mazenko, an English teacher at Cherry Creek High School, figures that one of his most important tasks is to help students define those boundaries. He notes that all members of the English department lead discussion on the topic during the first two weeks of school.

“I don’t have any feeling that we have a generation of cheaters,” he says. “Some might argue that because of technology, they’re better at it. I don’t think it’s any worse these days than it has been in the past — though we might be better at catching them because of technology.”

Turnitin.com, a website that scans and archives millions of papers and employs algorithms to scrub them for lifted material, has been a key tool in that effort — serving about 10,000 institutions in 13 languages in 126 countries, according to spokesman Chris Harrick.

In Colorado, it claims to be used by 100 schools — split evenly between secondary and higher education — and more than 200,000 students. Worldwide, the service examines about 40 million papers a year. In December, during final exams, the site processes 400 new submissions per second.

Fishman, who serves on Turnit in.com’s board in the United Kingdom, finds no substitute for teachers simply knowing their students, but also recognizes that instructional time amid growing class sizes makes it difficult to give plagiarism the attention it deserves.

“Culture of integrity”

“Concentrating on a culture of integrity, where you actually show students how to make good decisions and how to reason through ethical issues, that’s the way to go,” Fishman says, “because you don’t have to try to out-technology them, which we probably can’t, and you also don’t have to set up an adversarial system.”

Tuned-in teachers often catch plagiarism on their own.

Castle View High’s Cooper echoes the experience of many instructors who simply hear a discordant tone in the writer’s voice. He might then confirm it with a quick Google search.

“I assume they don’t know the rules,” he says. “Even if my gut tells me they do, I give them the benefit of the doubt the first time. A zero on the paper, we have a conversation, contact the parents and it usually doesn’t happen again.”

Those who do embrace plagiarism-seeking technology sometimes make a point of displaying its capabilities early in the school year to discourage any willful attempts to shortcut the writing process.

“There’s a lot of ‘scared straight’ involved,” said Steve Schriener, an English teacher at Cheyenne Mountain High School in Colorado Springs. “I’m kind of old school. There’s a running joke in my class where I say, ‘If you cheat, remember: It’s just your soul.’ They come to see that as me being more concerned than sarcastic and biting.

“They want to do the honorable thing.”

Some teachers don’t try to scare kids straight with technology so much as use it as a tool to help them revise their work.

But as some veteran plagiarism detectives note, students tend to find work-arounds. One method involves running the target material through an online foreign-language translator and then back to English, where it assumes a form that may be sufficiently different from the original to thwart the software algorithms.

At the University of Colorado at Boulder, Will Hauptman, a 20-year-old sophomore, serves as chairman of the Honor Code, a student-run organization that handles cases of academic malfeasance.

Of 461 reported incidents from the spring semester of 2010 through the just-completed fall semester, 33 percent involved plagiarism. That makes it the second-largest category, next to the catch-all “cheating” incidents that account for about 40 percent.

Although the plagiarism stakes tend to be higher in college, Hauptman says that sanctions for first-time offenders aim to educate more than punish. A two-week writing seminar that talks about plagiarism and stresses the importance of citation rules is a common remedy.

“We don’t get many repeat offenders,” he said. And for good reason: Those students can face suspension or expulsion.

Across the campus, at the Norlin Library, business writing instructor Eric Klinger helps direct the Writing Center, a free service for CU students, faculty, staff and alumni. He comes across one or two cases of plagiarism every semester — almost always of the inadvertent variety — and draws a stark contrast between academic laziness and students who don’t understand attribution rules that have changed and blurred as technology has created new entities such as wikis and blogs.

International setting

“There are differences in how we take in information, how we view and credit information now — it’s just inescapable,” he says. “Any of these electronic media complicate things. But it doesn’t mean there isn’t a right or wrong.”

Klinger also notes that in an international setting such as a university, culture plays a role — an observation echoed by many experts. For instance, he says, some cultures condone quoting well-known material verbatim without attribution. Those students can face a tough transition.

At the Writing Center — and in his classes — he encourages all students to view writing as a process, not an event, to avoid turning to shortcuts in an eleventh-hour panic.

“I’m encouraged by how much students want to do the right thing,” says Klinger, noting that the center’s constant capacity crowds speak to students’ desire to become better writers.

But there will always be some who try to cut corners and, in the process, produce anecdotes such as the one told by Cheyenne Mountain’s Schriener of a poetry assignment turned in by a student early in his career.

It was a beautiful piece. But with a stunning lack of originality, the student titled it “Imagine.”

“It was the song by John Lennon,” Schriener recalls. “I said, ‘Honestly, I was born in 1957; do you think I don’t know the Beatles?’

“He just said, ‘I was hoping you didn’t.’ ”

Kevin Simpson

Author: Mile High Mamas