Results tagged “plagiarism” from PEDABLOGUE

I watched this video this morning, as part of my preparation for a course in "The Teaching of Popular Fiction & Writing" next Spring. I liked the level of advocacy here for educational use of pop culture material in the classroom, as well as the emphasis on 'best practices.' You can download the full report from the Center for Social Media.

I share these professors' enthusiasm. But fair use can be a muddy area to define and the issue can get complicated. Even so, the essays available at EDUCAUSE on educational fair use are enlightening for those who are trying conscientously to sort out these matters. One essay from EQ that struck me was "Managing Intellectual Property for Distance Learning" by Liz Johnson, which offers a decision-making model for breaking down the numerous choices that a teacher could consider when sharing materials in an online course, for instance.

Most of what I know about copyright, I learned as a writer, not an educator, and the coverage in the Chicago Manual of Style stands at the foundation of what I know of the subject. I'm no lawyer (so please don't ask me any legal questions on this topic), and whenever I reseach the subject of copyright and fair use in online environments on the web, one of the things that trips me up are nagging questions about new laws: "am I reading the most recent law? does it cover new emergent technology and the latest digital copyright standards or is this an outdated article?"

Regardless, I think it is important to be clear with students about the 'situational ethics' of using copyrighted material in the classroom or in an online environment. I once had a student download an article I shared in an online course, only to turn around and post it to their blog to share with others...I had to inform them that this was a copyright violation, because when I shared it the first time, it was only for educational use and that the author's rights were protected because it was online downloadable behind the firewall/password-protected CMS service. Now I go out of my way to make sure students understand that the principle of fair use is in place in the classroom, and explain that it is a little bit different than how material is shared in the outside world. It might even make sense to make 'fair use' itself a topic for students to study, particularly in any course where the students are learning how to work in an area that produces intellectual property (the arts, writing, journalism, etc. etc.). If one thing is clear to me about fair use doctrine, it's that the context of any use is everything.

A few additional informal points that guide my own praxis on this subject (your mileage may vary):

+ Avoid using outside sources as "window dressing" -- they should be the lumber of the learning mill. Analyze, utilize, discuss, work with whatever you bring into the room.

+ It is wise to do a little research and contact an author if you wish to use their material in a classroom. I have never met a writer who said 'no' and having permissions gives you license to use the work in a way that might expand what 'fair use' dictates. Some will expand your permissions, or offer tips on how to acquire more material on the cheap/free (e.g. have their publisher send you an instructor's guide, or point you to a discount on a book); some will even offer to appear in an online chat or take interview questions. This also expands your network.

+ When in doubt, err on the side of conserving the copyright holder's rights, and be clear about the 'boundary lines'. Not only does this reduce your likelihood of violation, it teaches by example and will set a precedent for respect of property in your classes and with your own intellectual property.

+ Cite as you would like to be cited. Teach as you would like to be taught.

Date: Thu, 21 Apr 2005 13:40:21 -0000 From: "writinglance" Subject: NEW FREELANCE PROJECTS on Directfreelance.com 4/21/2005

Dear Freelancers!

Recent Projects:

4/21/2005 - #21192 Foucault Philosophy Term Paper ...Article/News/Press Release Writing/Editing I need a writer to write a 25-page term paper (double-spaced) on Foucault''s philosophy. I have an article that contains all the ideas that are needed to write this paper. However, those ideas need to be re-written so this term-paper is original. Please provide quote me a flat-fee to for this service.

I subscribe to a fairly good Yahoo group called Work For Writers that sends out job opportunities for freelance writers, as a way of both finding new markets for my work and maintaining my own newsletter for writers and journalism students looking for work, The Handy Job Hunter for Writers. But this week there's been a spate of job listings coming in from student plagiarists looking to hire professionals to write their papers for them, like the listing above.

Subscribers to this list have been expressing their outrage and strongly recommending that others don't take those jobs. But some are defending the practice as legitimate "Work-for-Hire." "Work-for-Hire" is common in the freelance writing game -- it's what you do when you are contracted to write a single document for a company, who generally tells you what to write, claims all rights to what you've written, and almost always removes the writer's byline (replacing it with their own). It's the lowest job on the food chain for the freelancer, but for many it is unfortunately a necessary way to supplement income so they can pay their bills.

In most cases "Work-for-Hire" is legitimate, but being hired to commit a fraud in the classroom is obviously unethical (and illegal, though I've yet to hear of a school convicting a student with "fraud" for plagiarism). But it appears to be a widely growing trend. I recall seeing an interview with a person who makes a VERY good living writing papers for college students on the ABC special report, Cheating Crisis in America's Schools...and that writer was netting more money for a single term paper than most writers get for writing a department for a magazine. Nate Kushner's weblog got a lot of attention recently, when he "outed" a student who approached him via instant messaging, trying to negotiate rates for writing a paper on Hindu religion. And, obviously, term paper mills are still thriving businesses.

I've written here before about how teachers can try to prevent plagiarism in the classroom, but today I'm marvelling over the irony that I am BOTH a teacher who gets papers from students AND a freelance writer who is receiving solicitations for writing them for students. (If I were truly entrepreneurial, I would design a paper so difficult that students would be likely to turn to professionals for "work for hire," then take their job offers under a pseudonym, and write the papers myself -- which would not only net me some easy $ but also make them oh so very easy to grade. Hah!)

But seriously: this reminds me of the importance of teaching ethics when training students in the "business side" of writing. Whereas most college classes only focus on the aesthetics of creative writing, the various formats of business documents, or the effective methods of research, the ethical application of these skills needs to be emphasized just as much. Not just in terms of source citation -- but also distribution and publication of one's work. I have seen a number of advanced courses in creative writing and "how to" articles which emphasize the goal of making money -- and with good reason, because there are a lot of markets for writers out there that pay a pittance or nothing at all, preying on the writer's ego and the desire to see one's name in print. But they tend to go over the top in their advocacy for "guerilla marketing" and trading on your skills in a quest for a buck.

Oh, and what would Foucault say about that job listing at the top of this entry? He'd probably chuckle at the way a commercial worldview has blinded all who are a party to the exchange, and point back to his article on the "Author-Function" (aka "What is an Author?"). I'd like to imagine that the student writer who is soliciting a freelancer's "work-for-hire" is doing so as a sly and canny form of research about Foucault's essay on literature as property -- as proof positive that an author's name is a social construct that is necessary only to make the creator accountable for acts of discursive transgression -- but I somehow doubt it.

Matthew S. Willen's "Reflections on the Cultural Climate of Plagiarism," from the latest issue of Liberal Education, looks at the way that plagiarism -- as a way of working the system in a way to win at any cost -- is endorsed by our culture-at-large. It comes as no news to most of us that we live in what David Callahan terms "the cheating culture." But Willen raises the interesting suggestion that our campus climate itself in many ways unconsciously reproduces the culture that encourages the plagiarist.

Willen suggests a few options for preventing plagiarism by changing the campus ethos -- including incorporating a code of ethics of some kind and enforcing the rules more strictly. But the really difficult task of getting students to value learning, rather than winning, is the key to success. Willen implores that "it may be useful to reflect on the ways that our institutional and pedagogical practices continue to reinforce and reward aggressive competitiveness and an individualistic me-first climate, to the exclusion of recognizing those who have contributed to the integrity of a campus or local community."

Writing classes are an important space for accomplishing this. In addition to evaluating writing as an process of discovery (as opposed to an end-product, inspected by the teacher before kicked off the imaginary assembly line), I think having students peer review their papers and share their research is a good way to make learning communal. I've noted that some students often feel more accountable to each other than to the teacher in peer editing workshops, when the due date is established not to turn papers in to me, but to trade papers with a partner and write some feedback (which I do collect). Students who might otherwise be procrastinators who turn their papers in late will often work harder to meet deadlines for one another's peer editing homework and try to impress one another with their research skills. Some students will risk plagiarism when it comes to the teacher's private evaluation, but few would do so at the risk of being exposed "live" in class by a fellow student. Making the writing process alive and human curtails plagiarism because it resists the "system" of grading, the "mechanics" of paper grading as product evaluation. The more mechanical an educational structure is, the more apt it is to be treated as something to "work" and manipulate, rather than as an (organic?) process of learning.

This year we're moving quickly toward adopting turnitin.com as a way to combat plagiarism on our campus, and this participates in the culture of cheating in an interesting, if problematic, way. While it's true that there are many reasons not to use the software, it acknowledges the ubiquity of plagiarism and denounces it as unethical, while also proclaiming that "we've armed our defenses up against you internet cheaters." Since some of our faculty lack the skills, let alone the time, to hunt down plagiarized writing from online sources -- and since cheating students often count on such weakness as working in their favor -- I think it's probably a good thing that we're adopting turnitin as a solution in our particular campus. But it's not THE solution, and I'm highly aware that we're using a mechanical process -- a technology -- to do the work of plagiarism prevention. Pitting machine against machine is rarely the solution to a social problem. I've written about turnitin on Pedablogue before, but I'm going to start thinking more practically about how to humanize and socialize this technology as much as possible to ensure that it is conceived as part of a learning process, rather than a mechanical operation which itself could be manipulated. For example, in addition to having students write about cheating in a thematic paper, I might also try to figure out how to incorporate turnitin.com into their peer review processes. Or maybe I'll have them write a reflective paper about their first experiences with the software. I could come up with a creative assignment like W. L. Yarroch's "turn it in quest." I'll probably have them print out their own originality reportsand turn those in (in hard copy) with their essays, at the very least, rather than adopting the role of plagiarism cop.

Maybe our culture is too aggressively competitive. If academic life is a sport, I'm not the umpire. I'm the coach. Part of my job is to live up to the values behind that old cliche, "it isn't whether you win or lose but how you (or better yet, we) play the game."

As I watched Primetime Thursday's special on the "Cheating Crisis" last night, I felt the full range of familiar emotions: frustration with students who don't realize that they're only cheating themselves out of learning experiences, anger at the audacity of students who proudly plagiarise, vindication when the students who in the early segments were claiming ethical high ground were confronted with their own cheating by a surprise 'trap' that a teacher sprung on them... I even felt I could identify, in a strange way, with the freelance writer who writes papers for students as a fulltime job, for twenty bucks a page...

I already knew about a lot of these problems, but I kept wondering: so what's the solution? I've read a lot about what teachers can do to better police their classes and prevent cheating in the first place; I've also heard the arguments that the change really needs to come in the students themselves, who need to value ethical behavior. And I realize that this is a cultural issue whose origin lies in multiple cloudy areas, ranging from TV news reportage of big business cheaters (like Enron) to the ease of text manipulation in cyberspace. But Primetime made it clear that the problem is worsening and that it may very well be a "crisis" in the educational system as a whole. If the problem is systemic and out of control, I'm wondering what academic institutions can do to help save us from the "crisis"?

One solution that seemed to leap out at me is instituting smaller student-teacher ratios. The more intimate teachers can become with their students, the less likely they'll try to sneak a peek at a graphics calculator or videophone. Cattle herding students through huge lectures halls generates the anonymity that allows and encourages cheating. This should be obvious, but it's more cost effective to some institutions to have large lectures with grad student recitations/discussion sections than otherwise. A lecture hall reduces the number of faculty necessary, the number of classrooms needed to schedule, and so on. It will take institutions really caring about this problem enough to cap classes at a reasonable level and do what it takes to reduce the student-teacher ratio, even if it means losing money.

Another solution might be to ban some technologies from the classroom...but I don't mean to get rid of them. The trick might be to prohibit student-owned storage and transmittal devices and instead to substitute them with technology that the institution provides. To actually have non-networked computers already at the desks or calculators that are distributed by the teacher for the purposes of working the texts. Technology should be used as a tool, but one that enhances learning. As with many technologies, using it for its own sake seems to become part of the pleasure of cheating with electronic gizmos -- it's "fun" to IM a friend in class...and only one step away from passing quiz answers.

I'm still a proponent of turnitin.com, though I realize that students can subvert it, that there are copyright issues still being debated, and that it is not a magic solution to the problem of plagiarism. Education is what will solve it. But I do still think turnitin.com is a good idea for now. I simply think it arms teachers with technology to fight cheating technology; like giving an anti-aircraft gun to a country without an air force, institutions can arm those teachers who are unsavvy about plagiarism and technology. It can also make some students think twice.

And finally, I think institutions need to have a "zero tolerance policy" for cheating. At one point, the "plagiarist for hire" in the program mentioned that when he writes an A paper, everybody wins: the student gets his A, his parents are pleased that their boy is succeeding, the teacher feels like they've done their job, and the institution doesn't lose a student. The institution needs to be willing to risk losing a student in order to gain a reputation for being academically sound. I think a zero tolerance policy would actually attract good students who want to reap the rewards of doing their own work -- in a classroom where there's an even playing field -- and that parents, too, would prefer to send their children to such a place.

I'm not sure what changes can be done in high schools to help students see the value of working for the sake of learning, rather than cheating for the sake of the grade (or for the sake of time management, or a host of other reasons...). But I do wonder if the emphasis on assessment in the "No Child Left Behind" era is a contributing factor to all of this. I have no basis to make such a claim; just a sense of uncertainty....but as a teacher of Freshman Composition, I will be confronting the products of today's high school head on, and do my best to at least talk about this issue and help my students see the value of learning for its own sake.

TV probably worth watching:

Primetime Thursday (news program) on ABC

Thursday, April 29 at 10 p.m. ET
"Charles Gibson investigates the cheating crisis in America's schools — from plagiarism to high-tech gadgets, students are using old methods and new technology to beat the system. "

== UPDATE: I just learned from a press release my dean passed along that this episode of PrimeTime will also feature a look at turnitin.com anti-plagiarism software, which we've discussed in Pedablogue in entries past.

I read an interesting essay (found and responded to at Jerz' Literacy Weblog) by Russell Hunt that articulates why the problems that plagiarism poses for writing teachers are all good for teaching. I agreed with much of what Hunt says, but I also felt it was too counter-intuitive to buy. Isn't saying plagiarism improves education analogous to saying crime improves society? Even if it does (by increasing security or whatever), it's still crime. Read it for yourself...it's part of a larger work in progress that makes for fascinating study.

• "The sure mark of an A paper is that you will find yourself telling someone else about it." -- Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning

  
  

• "...an A+ is a touchdown that got the crowd to its feet -- a forty-yard pass play or a seventy-yard run from scrimmage. As color commentators like to put it, so and so 'took it to the house.'" -- Sanford Pinsker, Irascible Professor

  
  

• "An A paper is written with verve and clarity. It displays a curiosity, a control of knowledge beyond what was covered in class, an original insight or an extrapolation beyond class work." -- John Lye, Brock Univeristy CPCF Handbook

  
  

• "An "A" essay is excellent work that a student should be proud of." -- Elvira Casal, MTSU

  
  

• "All it takes is a well written introduction, body and conclusion. These steps are a lot easier than most people make them out to be." -- "How to Write an A Essay" reproduced at the following plagiarism sites: NetEssays.com, MegaEssays.com, RadEssays.com, VirtualEssays.com, NeedFreeEssays.com, FindFreeEssays.com, etc.

  
  

"...the fixation on grades so prevalent in our times might have to do with a paradigm shift. Perhaps the ideal of the sage or expert instructing the receptive student/apprentice has been replaced subtly by a new model: the paid coach and his/her trainees. In the latter relationship, the older coach is hired to make sure that the younger competitor brings home "the medals." By analogy, it becomes the job of the professor to make sure that the students bring home the "A's" -- Ronda Chervin, Idol worship of the 'A'

"...in about 30 percent of the papers, more than one-quarter of the text was copied verbatim" -- in "Educators, Cheating Students Rely on Web: More Schools Use Plagiarism-Tracking Software" by Linda Perlstein

Over Thanksgiving break, The Washington Post ran Perlstein's article which discusses turnitin.com -- a web service that our campus is likely to adopt next year to combat the rise in student plagiarism we are seeing (which is happening everywhere, thanks to the internet and teen culture's napster-like approach to all electronic material online). The Post's article is good because it explains the pros and cons of turnitin.com from the perspective of students and teachers who have used it, and it also discusses the rise of plagiarism among high school writers, rather than just college students. I hope faculty at my college get to read this article and think ahead about how they might use turnitin.com to assist them in their courses.

[Thanks to Tim Stahmer at Assorted Stuff for pointing out this WP article. Stahmer rightly suggests that teachers are culpable for this ethos and points out another article on how to combat plagiarism...read his recent blog entry on this topic.]

Moments after I posted the message about plagiarism (below), I discovered a plagiarized response paper from my film course. I wrote in the margins: "Well-written!" because the student was articulate >and< cited dialogue from the film verbatim. But that verbatim citation was waving a red flag at me: did she remember what that character said word-for-word? So I decided to look up a catchphrase on google and lo-and-behold: busted.

Other signs that led me to check on the paper: sophisticated style in a paper that is only three paragraphs long. It felt "excerpted" from something else (and it was). Also: plot summary written in an overly excited manner. Almost as if a reviewer were writing, trying to get me interested in attending the film (which they actually were). Uncanny!

A classic example of plagiarism: a student once began a paper in my World Lit class: "Forget everything you ever knew about Salmon Rushdie!" Would you really say that to your teacher?! I instantly recognized bookreviewese and lo-and-behold: hit #1 at Amazon.com.

I sometimes wish plagiarists would plagiarize a book on how to plagiarize. Then they might know better. Not.

I just found a great resource of online articles about combatting plagiarism, compiled by librarian Sharon Stoerger. This has been on my mind lately as our school investigates plagiarism detection software like turnitin.com. One issue is whether or not such programs are any better than using google or ebsco host to detect plagiarism. I personally have used the metasearch engine Copernic Agent with many good results: I bust at least one student a semester using it (and it helps with my own research, as well).