I have to agree with Jenna wholeheartedly. While blatant cheating as
described by the "Shadow Scholar" does cross some ethical boundaries,
students are ill-prepared for academic writing. Jenna gave a wonderful
account of these issues in higher education. The line, "But we do our
students a deep and lasting injustice by placing the blame solely on
their
shoulders," really resonated. The probelm, however, starts much
earlier in
education.
We, as educators, simply do not do justice when it comes to teaching
students to use multiple sources in primary and secondary school.
I hear it all the time when providing professional development to
teachers
in the US. When I start talking about student combining ideas from
online
sources a teacher (usually high school) shouts out, "The middle school
doesn't teach students to cite sources." To me that is the crux of the
problem. Educators equate a complex intertextual process of
constructing new
ideas from old with the act of putting a comma in the right place
using APA
or MLA.
Instead of addressing the issue teachers look to software such as
TurnitIn.
While the courts and I disagree I have issue with students having to
unwillingly give up copyright of their work to TurnitIn which then
owns the
rights to that paper, makes a profit off the work, and offers the
original
author no credit. It seems like a business model built on plagiarism
to
catch plagiarism. I have to agree with those that comment taking a
sentence
(find the one with the semicolon) and throwing it into Google.
I think though, instead of trying to catch plagiarism we need to teach
students to use multiple sources and introduce academic discourses
much
earlier in education. It is the only way to stop the cycle of Colleges
claiming high schools are to blame and high schools laying the blame
at the
doors of middle schools.
Greg
On Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 9:02 AM, Jenna McWilliams <jennamcjenna@gmail.com
>wrote:
I have loved reading this thread over the last several days. It's
an issue
that interests me enormously, and one that I've thought about a
lot. So
pardon the lengthy ramblings below....
A few iterations of myself ago, I was a college composition and
literature
instructor. Anyone who’s taught this particular category of courses
knows
that cheating is an enormous issue: take the ramped-up pressure on
young
people to set themselves apart from their peers in an era that has
seen the
highest rate of college enrollment in the history of America; add
to that
the increasingly fuzzy borders around what counts as ‘plagiarism’
in this
mixed up, multimodal, shareable world; and toss in a generation of
students
who have received little guidance, if any, from adults on
navigating issues
of plagiarism, copyright, appropriation and sharing of ideas and
content.
What you get: students who either don’t know or don’t care about why
universities care so much about the ethics of plagiarism.
But we do our students a deep and lasting injustice by placing the
blame
solely on their shoulders. One reason students plagiarize is that
it’s easy:
Writing instructors often distribute the same essay assignments
semester
after semester; they use essay prompts that are so worn, and so
widely used,
that even students who honestly intend to just find supporting
resources for
their essays online may end up having their entire papers mapped
out for
them. (cf. Is Willy Loman a tragic hero?; Take a position on gay
marriage.)
If we want our students to leave our classes and universities as
independent, creative thinkers, then we need to offer them
opportunities to
think and write about things other than the stuff that every
student in the
history of college has already had to slog through.
Here’s the two-pronged approach I started to implement right before
I left
teaching in favor of gainful employment and health insurance (I
lived in
Massachusetts at the time, was an adjunct instructor and therefore
not
offered health insurance, and could not afford to purchase state-
mandated
insurance on an annual income that stayed safely below $20,000–even
with the
part-time job I worked on top of teaching a full course load every
semester.): I developed writing assignments that a.) required
students to
draft original writing and b.) offered a way in to conversations
about the
difference between ethical appropriation and plagiarism. Here’s one
thing I
tried: I asked students to draft a creative rewrite of a source
text–they
could write a prequel, add a scene into the text, or rewrite or
extend the
ending. Then they were required to analyze how their rewrite
changed the
story, and in so doing, to demonstrate an understanding of the
themes and
characters of the text. I only had time to try this once, but if I
were to
do it again I would also have students think and write about the
appropriation / plagiarism issue as it relates to this assignment.
I don’t
think it’s a perfect assignment by any means, and students who were
determined to cheat could still find a way to succeed, but it’s
certainly
better–and more interesting–than the hackneyed old prompts that end
up being
so easy to lift from teh Google.
Being more creative instructors doesn’t solve the cheating issue,
but it’s
certainly better than the strange alternative of simply adding more
policing
to our learning environments. Did you see that NYTimes article
about Caveon,
a security program that detects cheating by comparing students’
responses on
standardized tests (
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/28/education/28cheat.html?_r=1)?
Apparently, lots of students are using their phones to give each
other the
answers to test questions. Caveon also mines the internet for sites
where
students discuss their answers on high-stakes tests like the LSAT.
Presumably, it notifies the makers of the test, who then remove the
flagged
items from the next version.
As you can imagine, this is a lucrative endeavor: "As tests are
increasingly important in education — used to determine graduation,
graduate
school admission and, the latest, merit pay and tenure for teachers —
business has been good for Caveon, a company that uses “data
forensics” to
catch cheats, billing itself as the only independent test security
outfit in
the country."
Well, at least students find out early what it’s like to live in a
country
that generally believes that the best defense is a good offense: That
catching and punishing wrongdoers will deter others from going down
the
wrong path. Never let the facts get in the way of a good theory:
We’ll keep
passing ridiculously harsh drug laws even though they don’t deter
people
from buying, selling, and using illegal drugs. Our politicians,
supported by
right-wing pundits, will resist extending unemployment benefits in
the worst
economic recession we’ve seen since the Great Depression. Why?
Because
they’ve decided, in direct contradiction of the evidence, that
America’s 15
million unemployed adults are lazy bums who just need a swift kick
in the
ass.
That’s the world our students are headed for, so they might as well
learn
the lesson early that it’s a world that prefers punishment over
dialogue,
short-term fixes instead of enduring solutions, and using bandaids
to fix
gaping wounds.
Look: students cheat on standardized tests because they know that the
stakes are really effing high. They cheat because they don’t see
any reason
not to–because it’s not clear why ‘authentic’ achievement on a
multiple-choice exam is even worth striving for. They cheat because
they
don’t see any connection between the contents of those tests and
the subject
areas that matter to them as human beings. They cheat because the
tests are
stupid but the scores are important.
So instead of fixing a broken system with an overreliance on
standardized
tests, we just add more cops–this time, in the form of computer
programs.
Sure, that should work just fine. Just like it worked to add more
proctors
to testing locations. Just like it worked to collect students’
cellphones
before they began the exam. Just like it worked to guard test
questions like
they were matters of national security.
The low road is easier to walk, but it doesn’t offer much
opportunity for
scaling mountains. In the coming decade, I would like to see us
take the
higher road a little more frequently.
~~
Jenna McWilliams
Learning Sciences Program, Indiana University
~
http://www.jennamcwilliams.com
http://twitter.com/jennamcjenna
~
jenmcwil@indiana.edu
jennamcjenna@gmail.com
On Jan 10, 2011, at 8:50 AM, Larry Purss wrote:
I don't want to take a position on this topic, but was curious
about what
seems a contradiction between issues of "control and trust" in a
manner
similar to Engstrom's article on the use of technology in middle
schools
and
putting computers in the hallway. I wonder if the concepts
"control" and
"trust" are primary or basic constructs when discussing
institutional
structures or containers. I was wondering when reading Engstrom's
article
if the terms control and trust were explanatory terms within 2nd
person
actor narratives or if Engstrom abstracted these terms as
explanatory 3rd
person narratives of what he observed in the middle school
environment.
Do
others see a contradiction or tension in the discussion of
plagarism or is
it a clear case of civic virtue?
Larry
On Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 12:40 AM, Rod Parker-Rees <
R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk> wrote:
And I can also confirm that this extends to submissions to peer
reviewed
journals, too. I have had the experience of receiving a paper
which was
noticeably more lucid than the email which accompanied it, a
quick bit of
googling revealed that the paper was the work of a student at a UK
university where the submitter had been working as a visiting
academic.
Rod
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New Literacies Research Lab
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