There's an interesting article in today's New York Times about the widespread phenomenon of plagiarism in higher education. I am amused by how professors featured in the article are struggling to conceptualize what they see as as qualitative change in acceptance of the plagiarism that they are seeing, a paradigm shift of borrowing whatever students see online can be claimed as their own work without attribution, modeling the sampling of pop songs in rap compositions or illegally sharing music. The example of Helene Hegemann, who wrote a best-selling book on German club life including unattributed passages from the work of others, comes with a dismissive, self-serving defense that there is no such thing as originality.
First of all, plagiarism has been an issue with each generation; we could easily use technological innovations with each generation to make the same type argument; when I was a young adult, I could get a cassette recorder to record songs off the radio. But I also bought more than my fair share of LP's (I have several boxes in a storage unit). We did realize asking someone for their homework which we would present as our own work was wrong; we understood that an assignment was not a technical task to see whether we could operate a copy machine. Similarly today a teacher is not trying to test how effectively you can copy-and-paste from Wikipedia.
Second, if there is more plagiarism today, there's a much simpler explanation: there's a lower cost or barrier to entry. I recall that when I was doing a search in a library search for academic articles on user satisfaction before the dawn of Internet search engines, the search could cost in the hundreds of dollars; even then, if your library didn't have the identified articles, you had to go through interlibrary loan. You didn't have OCR software to convert a xeroxed sheet into text.
Third, I've written some past posts on incidents of plagiarism I uncovered during my own teaching career. In most academic institutions, there is a heavy emphasis on student rights including so-called privacy: during 8 years of teaching, I was never briefed on a student whom cheated under previous professors. However, as I mentioned in another post, one group of foreign Asian students at UWM turned in a paper which was literally an interweaving of lifted passages, each of which I could trace back to an original, unattributed source (about a half dozen). During the next semester (the fall), my new colleague asked me to look at a student paper which he thought sounded too professional. I immediately recognized it as being lifted from a classic MIS article by Gerry DeSanctis on group decision support systems. I then happened to catch the name of the student on the paper and was angered to see it was from an unapologetic student from the same group I had busted in the spring; at the time, this guy shrugged it off, saying that plagiarism was an American cultural invention. I then visited the remaining junior member of the faculty, a good friend of mine, and mentioned what I just uncovered and said, "You didn't have this guy in your class, did you?" Bob said that the name was familiar, but he wasn't sure because he had put out the graded papers for student to retrieve before the semester. It turned out that the student hadn't bothered to pick up his paper. Bob had given him a grade of B+. I started looking at the paper, not really expecting that this guy was a serial, compulsive plagiarizer, but then I got very angry, because for my own course, I had used an unconventional sourcebook of IEEE papers, and this was all copy-and-paste of unattributed sources--required in the very class he originally cheated in!
I soon heard from senior MIS professors, not perturbed by the irrefutable evidence but rather my colleagues had erred in letting me see the student's work which allegedly violated his privacy and in fact were accusing me of trying to sabotage their lucrative foreign student program. My two junior faculty colleagues immediately dropped their cases under this political pressure. The point is, it wasn't the first example. I was also told by another faculty member about students whom were changing the responses on returned mark sense forms and then claiming the technology had incorrectly scored their (changed) "right" answers. So the professor made copies of the answer sheets the next time, and the students got caught submitting the changed answers.
There is huge overhead involved with charging students for misconduct; I only had so much time after the grading event to submit charges, I had to follow due process procedures (and in many cases if I did not the evidence, I had to procure it within the time period; the library would refuse to call in the book or even the confirm the identity of the student). I've even seen some procedures (e.g., at UTEP) which did not even include the me in the process to rebut false witnesses to a cheating student whom had absurdly claimed I had authorized the dishonesty.
And we're not even getting into the question of legal issues if parents of a cheating student decide to threaten a professor for "smearing" the reputation of their "innocent" progeny...
But fourth, I'm convinced most professors are lazy and/or unobservant and don't even read their student's papers closely enough to ever detect it. When I would grade, e.g., an essay question, I would literally rank order all the student's responses at the same time so I could be scrupulously fair in grading.
I don't think we have to conceptualize a new ethics to fit the new generation of college students. I have several nephews and nieces whom have been, are, or will be in college, and they understand the difference between right and wrong. It reminds me of those investors in the late 1990's whom claimed that traditional criteria of profits no longer applied in the Internet economy; the Nasdaq is still at less than half its former 2000 peak. It turns out the laws of investing hadn't changed from the days of tulip mania.
What's not surprising is that progressive academics violate Ockham's razor and are exceptionally gullible in believing the rationalizations of students...
Americans Giving Up Their Citizenship Over Taxes?
I've mentioned in a past post how many well-to-do Marylanders, facing Governor O'Malley's tax hike on the upper brackets, decided to migrate to more tax-friendly locales (e.g., Florida and Texas have no state income tax). But well-to-do people wouldn't give up their American citizenship--or would they? The Financial Times has an interesting post today which explains why many well-to-do foreign-based Americans are looking into applying for a European passport from Britain (giving them access to lower-tax European locales) and more favorable tax treatment of investments.
Political Cartoon
Dana Summers points out only one part of a problem the US has with Pakistan. Pakistan's government has been in a politically convenient state of denial, sidestepping a necessary purge of of radical group sympathizers in its powerful intelligence agency and doing little about a key recruitment tool of these groups, relevant madrasas.
Quote of the Day
In spite of warnings, nothing much happens until the status quo becomes more painful than change.
Laurence J. Peter
Musical Interlude: The American Songbook Series
Irene Dunne, "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes"
