Plagiarism

New! (June 2006)

Why the writing is on the wall for the plagiarism police

This paper highlights two related developments that I see as doing profound damage to the UK education system: the increasing propensity to test students (including schoolchildren) on what they have not been taught, and the growth in the number and activity of people who are policing plagiarism. Both developments are taking reasoning out of learning. Because coursework is treated as a test – which teachers are required to police – rather than a vehicle for learning, students are not schooled in marshalling evidence and drawing reasoned conclusions from it, while the activities of the plagiarism police – especially in higher education – place a premium on the cataloguing of sources as opposed to reasoning from them.

Underlying these two developments there appears to be a centrally-promoted ideological presumption that ideas should be treated as property, as possessions that have an owner. Not only does this presumption have no foundation in English law: it is in fundamental opposition to the principle of free and democratic exchange that both education – in its true sense – and the internet embody. Taken together, the two developments have a remarkable resemblance to Margaret Thatcher’s poll tax, a wilful aberration that was bound to end in tears.

There has to be a better way! I suggest that all teaching materials and all student writings that gain a pass grade or better should be posted on the web (the date of posting would be registered and the authors could use aliases if they wished) and made freely available to everyone under a Creative Commons licence. The web would be flooded with free essays. To test a student’s understanding of a topic he or she could be asked to analyse and critique an unique handful of these essays and teaching materials, and synthesize them into an essay of their own. Learning would be – as it should – a matter of gaining, assimilating and building on knowledge and ideas from any source. Teachers could go back to teaching. And essay sellers and the plagiarism police would go out of business. Bravo!

To see the full document, CLICK HERE

For easy direct links to URLs of works cited, the notes and references are available as a separate read-only Word document. To open it, CLICK HERE

(November 2003)

Beat the Witch-Hunt! Peter Levin's Guide to Avoiding and Rebutting Accusations of Plagiarism, for Conscientious Students

Not long ago I spent the best part of three months checking out instructions to students and material circulating among academics on the subject of 'plagiarism'. I was shocked by what I found. Academia seemed - and still seems - to be in the grip of a 'moral panic': its values, principles and interests are seen as under attack from legions of plagiarizing students. And students are faced with regulations, instructions and injunctions that contain emotive language and terminology that are open to a variety of interpretations, as well as varying from one institution to another.

While I fully support efforts to detect and prevent deliberate attempts by some students to pass off other people's work as their own, I am very concerned about the effect that the present situation has on conscientious, hard-working and law-abiding students - who in my experience are the great majority. Look at it from their point of view:

 ***  You get a message from your teachers saying, in effect: 'We regard you as potentially dishonest, a cheat and a thief, and we are watching you.'  (What a delightful welcome to the academic community for first-years!) 

 ***  You check with your mates at other universities and colleges and find there's no consistency in regulations: not reassuring about standards across the higher education system.  

***  You find out that many definitions of 'plagiarism' require interpretation, so you have to guess how your teachers will interpret them.   

***  You find you've got to ask yourself not just: 'How do I avoid plagiarism?' but: 'How do I avoid being suspected and accused of plagiarism?'  

***  And then you realise that not only are you in a game you don't know the rules of, you're in a game where the other side is able to make up the rules as they go along.

As a long-standing academic (I started in 1967), I'm also dismayed by what I see of the thinking behind what's going on. I see six major failures: 

 ***  A failure to appreciate that plagiarism, in the particular sense of appropriating the learning of others, is actually integral to the Western system of propagating knowledge and ideas through higher education, because - as Diana Laurillard puts it in Rethinking University Teaching - 'it is a peculiarity of academic learning that its focus is not the world itself but others' views of that world'. 

 ***  A failure to distinguish between plagiarism, in the above sense, and the deliberate passing-off of another's work as one's own, i.e. cheating. Cheating has given plagiarism a bad name. 

 ***  A failure to appreciate that much academic writing is so idiosyncratic and lacking in clarity that students have to translate it into language they can understand, a process in which close paraphrasing – often regarded as indicating a lack of understanding – is a necessary and important step. 

 ***  A failure to be realistic in expectations of students. Given that experts in detecting plagiarism don’t always find it possible to unearth the exact origin of ideas they have drawn on,  it seems very hard on students that they must do so. And the injunction to students in some places that their work should be ‘original’ is plain bizarre given that originality isn't even a requirement for the University of London MPhil. 

 ***  A failure to separate emotions from practicalities. Highly emotive terms, like ‘cheating’, ‘theft’ and ‘dishonesty’, are simply not appropriate to a rule-book.  

***  A failure to distinguish between phenomena and words, labels. The websites of many institutions carry the question ‘What is plagiarism?’ and/or an answer to this question in the form of a ‘definitional’ sentence beginning ‘Plagiarism is ...’. The implication is that there is an unique behaviour or kind of behaviour which plagiarism unambiguously is. But ‘plagiarism’ is a word – a word to which different institutions and indeed different academics attach different meanings, as can be seen by comparing their instructions to students: it is a label that signifies different behaviours to different people. You surely don’t need to be exceptionally bright to see that the question should be ‘What do we mean by “plagiarism”?’ and that definitions should start with ‘By “plagiarism” we mean ...’ The failure to distinguish between a label and a phenomenon betrays a mind that is confused or superficial or both. How is it that people capable of such an elementary error are in charge of drawing up regulations for university students?

What's to be done? I've put together a Guide designed to help conscientious students to cope with the situation. It's called Beat the Witch-hunt! Peter Levin's Guide to Avoiding and Rebutting Accusations of Plagiarism, for Conscientious Students. The Contents page is reproduced below. To see the full document,  CLICK HERE.

For live links to the URLs cited in the text and footnotes, CLICK HERE.

For a short follow-up piece written in response to comments that I've received on Beat the Witch-hunt!, CLICK HERE. 

Peter Levin

November 2003

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