The answers to those questions may seem clear enough. At Harvard University, where the former president Claudine Gay was accused of serial plagiarism and subsequently resigned, students are told that, “in academic writing, it is considered plagiarism to draw any idea or any language from someone else without adequately crediting that source in your paper.” They are also warned that “taking credit for anyone else’s work is stealing, and it is unacceptable in all academic situations, whether you do it intentionally or by accident.”
You can find similar academic-integrity language at colleges across the country. Yet when I talked to several experts about how plagiarism — whether by professors or by students — is defined and adjudicated, I found plenty of gray areas. It made me wonder why the issue is so much less cut-and-dried than I, and perhaps others, had thought. You can read my story in full, but here are two key points:
Defining plagiarism can be fraught. We could see that in the Gay case, when Harvard, in its description of her errors, avoided the P-word and instead cited her for “duplicative language without appropriate attribution” and “instances of inadequate citation.”
As I noted in my story, the experts I spoke to said that while virtually every college has an academic-integrity policy, there is a lot of disagreement over what plagiarism looks like in practice. Paraphrasing, for example, is often problematic. Writers may struggle to come up with a new way to describe a historical event or a technical term. As for attribution, if you leave out a few quotation marks or citations in a longer work, are you being deceitful or just sloppy? Also, does intent matter? College students, after all, are supposed to be on a learning curve.
Sarah Elaine Eaton, an associate professor of education at the University of Calgary whose research focuses on academic ethics in higher education, analyzed 20 Canadian universities’ definitions of plagiarism and could not find consistency. “The difference between intentional plagiarism and sloppy scholarship, I think, is one of the greatest debates in the plagiarism world,” she said.
Plagiarism cases are under-investigated. This is perhaps not surprising to instructors, who must navigate the academic-integrity bureaucracy of their campus if they want to pursue a case against a student. But here are some figures. According to the International Center for Academic Integrity, a nonprofit organization, 15 percent of undergraduates surveyed in 2020 admitted to “paraphrasing or copying a few sentences or more from any source without citing it in a paper or assignment” they had submitted.
Yet if you look at the number of formal cheating investigations on any given campus, they typically amount to less than 1 percent of the student body, said Tricia Bertram Gallant, director of the Academic Integrity Office at the University of California at San Diego, whose research focuses on ethics and integrity in education. In short, plagiarism is extremely underreported.
Why is that? As Bertram Gallant, an emeritus board member of the center, noted, text-matching software such as Turnitin has made it far easier for professors to detect plagiarism. But that doesn’t necessarily lead instructors to pursue formal sanctions.
Professors may not want to go that route for many reasons. For one, it’s time-consuming. And if you’re a contingent faculty member, that time may come at a cost. Most adjunct instructors are paid only for their work during the semester, yet many plagiarism cases come up at the end of a term, in an exam or final paper.
“Most faculty decide most of the time not to pursue it with students because it’s a lot of work and a lot of trouble,” said Susan D. Blum, an anthropology professor at the University of Notre Dame and author of My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture. “It’s actually quite miserable to take a case through the process.”
Many faculty members also don’t like the idea of policing their students. As Beckie noted in this 2020 article about how much cheating matters, professors hold varying opinions on the topic. Some believe that teaching should be more about encouraging authentic learning, not hunting down cheaters.
But many others say there’s harm in not reporting cheating. As Bertram Gallant noted, underreporting of plagiarism doesn’t allow institutions to see patterns in their student body and to hold students accountable. If professors try to handle cases on their own, too, others will not know whether an incident brought before an academic-integrity council represents a one-off problem or habitual plagiarism.
And while some professors may fear that they could ruin students’ careers by bringing them before an investigative board, Bertram Gallant noted that sanctions could focus more on using the experience as a teaching moment, rather than punishing the student, particularly if it is a first offense.
I’d like to hear about your experiences in navigating student plagiarism:
- Do you talk to your students about how to avoid plagiarism or simply refer them to your college’s academic-integrity policy?
- Do you run students’ work through detectors? If not, do you check for potential plagiarism in other ways?
- What do you do if you confirm that a student has, in fact, plagiarized material?
- Have you ever made a student face an academic-integrity council? If so, what happened?
Write to me at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com. I’d like to hear your story.
Grades and motivation
In this recent Chronicle advice piece James M. Lang and Kristi Rudenga argue that grades and deadlines, along with other extrinsic motivators, have a valuable role to play in college teaching. While that may not seem to be a provocative argument on its face, the authors note that, amid the current emphasis on creating intrinsic motivation by cultivating students’ desire to learn or sense of belonging, those tools have become, in some circles, the “villains of college teaching.”
The essay is already prompting a lively debate. Beckie is interested in digging into this topic, and wants to hear from you. Do you agree with Lang and Rudenga? How do you balance intrinsic and extrinsic motivation? Have you changed your practices over time? Did you ever feel you had leaned too far in one direction and then pulled back or adjusted?
If you want to share your thought, write to Beckie at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.
Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com or beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.
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— Beth
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