When Chemists Attack

There’s a snippet of an article from News of the Weird making the rounds in the department today. It’s about a school in Canada that has supposedly forbidden faculty to use online services to check student-submitted papers for plagiarism.

We use one of these services at our school, and I think it’s a pretty good way to make sure students aren’t turning in someone else’s work and claiming it as their own. I personally son’t use the service at the moment, because my intro chemistry and general chemistry students aren’t given term papers to do.

Rather than believe the “News of the Weird” item as it was forwarded to me, I decided to see if I could find out the truth behind the matter. Surely no college would think that forbidding access to a simple tool to help instructors keep students honest would be a good thing to do, right?

Wrong. Here’s an article from CBC News about Mount Saint Vincent University in Nova Scotia, whose administrators have caved in to pressure from some student groups to keep instructors from using plagiarism-detection tools!

The university is banning all plagiarism detection software as of May, when the summer session begins.

Surely, there must be a good reason for this, right?

“Students go to university for a higher education. They don’t go to be involved in a culture of mistrust, a culture of guilt,” said Chantal Brushett, president of the students union.

Sorry, Chantal, but students have been cheating in school ever since the invention of the grade. You say you don’t want a “culture of mistrust”? Well, you’ve just bought yourself one, by admitting here that you do not want your work to be checked to see if it is your own. These programs basically just check to see if you have lifted blocks of text verbatim from other sources without proper attribution, making it a little easier for the instructor to check to see if sources are properly credited and used appropriately.

What puzzles me, though, is this question … why did this college cave in?

Students at several Canadian universities that use the service have objected to the practice, saying an American company is profiting by fostering an atmosphere of distrust at Canadian campuses.

(Emphasis mine) So, anti-Americanism is helping Canadian students cheat? Hey, at least that’s a more creative excuse than the stuff I get.

They also don’t like the fact that their own work becomes part of the database when it is submitted.

I don’t much like that one, myself – but I’m not certain that every bit of anti-plagiarism software on the planet does this.

Brushett acknowledges that some students do cheat, but she fears someone could be accused of plagiarism before the professor even reads that person’s paper.

Only if the paper contains wholesale cut-and-paste copying, Chantal.

Apparently, this tying of instructors’ hands is part of a long-running campaign by the Canadian Federation of Students. The article quoted above links to this 2003 article describing the effort.

The Canadian Federation of Students plans to start a campaign to convince universities to to stop subscribing to the service. It wants schools to use traditional methods of plagiarizing protection, such as submitting first drafts of essays and more detailed bibliographies.

Well, if this student group wants instructors to rely on ancient methods for detecting plagiarism, then perhaps the students would agree to writing their papers with the same technological limitations?

1. Internet or computer searching for information is not allowed. All references must be photocopied and submitted along with the paper.
2. All papers must be submitted with one inch margins all around and double-spaced. Papers must be typed on a manual typewriter. Word processing programs or typewriters with word processing features are not permitted.
3. Charts and graphs must be drawn in black ink on a sheet of graph paper. Computer-printed charts and graphs will not be accepted.
4. All numerical data will be analyzed manually. In the interests of fostering the use of technology, calculators will be allowed, as long as they do not have spreadsheet functions. The use of spreadsheets for data analysis is forbidden.

Of course, the requirements above are pretty silly. But they’re the student-side equivalent of what these students are asking their instructors to do by lobbying for the prohibition of anti-plagiarism software.

I do have a suggestion for these students who are terrified at the thought that their papers might be run through anti-plagiarism software by their instructors: Stop cutting and pasting stuff off the Internet into your papers! If y’all would stop doing that, we wouldn’t need to pay for anti-plagiarism software!