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?
- Internet or computer searching for information is not allowed. All references must be photocopied and submitted along with the paper.
- 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.
- Charts and graphs must be drawn in black ink on a sheet of graph paper. Computer-printed charts and graphs will not be accepted.
- 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!
Just for grins, I submitted this blog post to http://www.turnitin.com, one of the sites my school has an agreement with. The quote from the 2003 CBC article was red-flagged (as it should have been – it was a direct quote), but none of the other text or quotes were flagged.
Exactly what are these students worrying about, again?
I think there is in fact a point, if one takes their worries at face value: that they are worried about a culture of distrust. I think that’s a very valid concern.
Both my undergraduate university (Virginia Tech) and my graduate university (Stanford) have “honor systems”, which amount to an agreement between the student body and the faculty that the students will behave honorably on tests. Stanford’s agreement is a two-way pledge: The faculty are obligated to behave in ways that show trust for the students, as well.
There is something to this: If you behave as if you expect people to cheat, they are more likely to cheat than if you behave as if you expect them to be honest. People respond to expectations.
There is also the simple point that living in a culture of distrust is obnoxious. A culture of distrust means that those of us who are honest cannot rely on being presumed honest unless we first prove ourselves innocent. It undermines respect.
With all that said, I personally don’t believe that plagiarism-checking software is something that actually leads to this sort of culture of mistrust. But I do think it’s worth asking the question, at least — and worth asking the question of whether there’s something wrong with the system, instead, if it makes it otherwise so easy to cheat by internet cut-and-paste.
(I do think the concerns about false positives are valid, though: For something like this, empty assurances that it only flags things that “contain wholesale cut-and-paste” are not good enough; they are merely an appeal to authority, which is a well-known logical fallacy when the authority in question — the software company — is paid to produce a certain answer. This sort of thing should be defensible with solid data, and actively monitored, preferably by a small committee of half faculty and half students.)
Finally, there is one aspect of Stanford’s honor system that I think is a really important thing in preventing cheating: the faculty are obligated to avoid grading styles that produce excessive temptation, or that make cheating easily rewarded. For an obvious example, closed-book take-home tests are prohibited. I suspect that reusing exam questions from year-to-year is arguably impermissable (and there is an expectation that professors will make old exams available to the class).
Perhaps it’s worth asking the question: Why is it that cheating like this on essays is a problem in school, but not in the workplace or anywhere else in life? Is it possible to change the types of questions so that plagiarism simply doesn’t work?
What I’m really annoyed with the Canadian school for is the banning of plagiarism detection software. It’d be like (as I point out above) me telling my students that they’re not allowed to use a computer to write the paper in the first place. (By the way, I would also be annoyed with a university policy that required the use of anti-plagiarism software. Such decisions ought to be up to faculty members.)
I’m also not conviced that having an honor code is a solution to the problem either, mainly because these days many kids aren’t going to college for knowledge. They’re going to get a slip of paper that says they can be hired for a certain job. The courses are obstacles to get through as quickly as possible, much like dungeons in a Playstation role-playing game. And these kids aren’t ashamed to use their Gamesharks.
Schools like Stanford, after all, still have rising plagiarism:
http://www.paloaltoonline.com/weekly/morgue/2003/2003_04_11.cheating11.html
True. I’m certainly not, as an instructor, going to stand over someone while they are taking their exams and stare at them. Though it would prevent that student from cheating on the exam, it would probably rattle them to the point where they wouldn’t be able to show me what they knew.
Plagiarism, though, seems to be something of a special case. Plagiarizing students often don’t realize what they’re doing is wrong. I had one student recently, when writing an introduction to a lab report, simply copy the handout I gave him and turn that in as his own work. (I was the author of the handout, so I needed no plagiarism detection software to notice the blatant copying.) This student couldn’t seem to figure out why I wouldn’t accept “his” introduction.
That’s certainly true. I think it’d be foolish to simply flunk people who have some red text in their paper. After all, the software that we have a subscription to at this school has no idea how to distinguish between a properly attributed quote and a plagiarized one – it flags stuff that is extremely similar to an article on the web or in a journal. The software does give links/references for what it flags, though, so you can check up on the references yourself.
I think the software would probably best be used by students to check their own work before submitting it, rather than by faculty to check work after-the-fact. Using the software as a learning tool is obviously better than using it as an enforcement tool. (But I still don’t want administrators banning use of a tool by the faculty.)
Is the sort of copying we’re taking about actually okay in the workplace, with our intellectual property laws?