My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture

How can anyone (including students) take seriously strictures about, and penalties for, plagiarism when academics do it themselves?

Because most of us don't, in fact, do it, thanks very much. Many of us are familiar with the notion that 'writing' involves expression in one's own words, and of the belief that 'learning' dos not take place through either rote regurgitation or copying.

The issue of plagiarism highlights a fundamental difference between what academics think they are there for, and what students think they are there for. A bunch of academics I asked recently thought they were there to help the students 'grow', be more competent, better prepared to go out there and find a life which suits their potential. A group of students I asked saw a succession of hurdles that must be jumped - 'passing' is what it's all about - and that having 'passed', they must therefore be suitably 'qualified' but they certainly didn't take the idea of knowledge anywhere near as seriously. Now, to take Judith's point -well, as Dave said, the idea of stealing work and presenting it as your own is abhorrent - it begates the whole idea of being an academic. But the fact that some actually do (and are therefore not what most of us mean by 'academic') should be telling us something. Are they so ambitious that winning is everything, the ends justify the means? - as we've seen in one or two sports-and-drugs cases? - if this were the case, we'd expect these people to be accumulating at higher levels i academia - is this the case? But anyway, there's a huge grey area in between - like fiddling expenses or a bit of tax - the sort of "well, you know, you have to a bit..." - usually followed by a justification: "...half the time you don't get proper credit for what you do, so you have to polish up your reputation just to get the salary/position you deserve". The point of this ramble is this: assessment ends up being 'the tail wagging the dog'. As soon as you start teaching to the exam, tayloring your activity to score well in whatever assessment exercise you're aiming at, then whatever it is you're doing - it's not academia - it's not knowledge for knowledge's sake or any other high-falutin' ideal - it's just straightforward, slightly sordid commerce. That's fine if that's what everyone wants, but it needs to be explicit - then those who want it to be something else know where they stand, and can choose to work towards going off somewhere else, en masse... as tumbleweed blows down the corridors of Liverpool Hope...

The reward for Plagarism is very high, one can get a Nobel prize in return. According to Centenary Issue of the Radio-Transmission of the Proceedings of the Institute of Electronic and Electrical Enginners, Marcony had plagarised the instruments, which is used to do radio-transmission and got the Nebel prize. Marcony, then a very young telegraph salesman in London asked Prof.Flemming of London University to copy the instruments Prof.Sir.J.C.Bose of Calcutta University used in his lecture and demonstration in the Royal Institute, London in 1896 after Marcony had stolen the notes of J.C.Bose. using that instrument Marcony had transmitted radio signals. There is another major example. Recently a scandal is circulating that Sir Michael Atiyah, the President of the Royal Sciety in Edinburgh copied a mathematical theory and published it in the American Mathematical Society Journal, which is just a photo-copy from a book written by another person 13 years ago.

The proliferating literature on plagiarism is amazingly unthinking, wrong and misleading. First, academic plagiarism - when someone submits a paper for obtaining an academic credit - has nothing to do with copyright law. Copyright protects the work against selling it by someone who has no copy right. Obtaining credit is not selling. Now, plagiarism is falsification of the fact of authorship. You get academic credit for authorship, and, when you plagiarise, you are trying to obtain credit by deceit. In addition, you admit your own inability to do the work, and this is why shame associated with plagiarism is incomparably greater when academics plagiarise than when students plagiarise. In this cynical age, shaming and punishing students have almost no effect. The effective means would be: 1) giving enough time to students for doing the work, 2) formulating the assignments in some original manner, so that the answer would not be easily found on the web. Unfortunately, assignments practically always are product of so-called self-plagiarism (or even plagiarism) brewed by professors year after year.

M.Kondratiev - yeah, but you've got to be really clever to plagiarise at that level

Sorry, but what I see here is a disconnect between the survey and the conclusions. You cannot equate Facebook profile quotations with no attribution with student attitudes to academic writing. I think even the dimmest of undergraduates could see a distinction between one and the other. Obviously plagiarism exists, and there are obvious reasons why, alluded to by other commenters (and summarised as pressure to pass coupled with lack of time). But there's no connection with Facebook and other socnet platforms. Secondly -- unless I've misunderstood this -- I don't see the "generational shift in the way they think about themselves." Today's youth are as preoccupied with "identity and finding yourself" as every other generation. It's a stage we all go through. The only difference today is that they do it through the medium of social networks, *in addition* to reading.