Why do students plagiarize?
Educators say time management, not the Internet, is the culprit
This summer, celebrity journalists Jonah Lehrer and Fareed Zakaria were castigated for their blatant plagiarism. While those high- profile writers may have faked it to advance their careers, most students in British Columbia plagiarize because of intense pressure to get good grades, poor time management or out of ignorance of proper citation, educators say.
“Most kids when they’re faced with it, they can’t really hide,” says Kitsilano secondary principal Ellen Roberts. “They say, ‘ I didn’t know what else to do. I felt desperate. My parents are expecting me to get A’s.’
“It must be terribly tempting when you’re sitting at home trying to write an essay about something you don’t understand, or saying, ‘ I’m not good at this,’ to just Google it,” she added. “Most students do their own work, but there are cases where kids will go through great lengths [ to plagiarize].”
Cheating — peeking at another’s test answers or smuggling in a cheat sheet for an assignment or quiz — often results in a zero on the assignment and a phone call to parents. Plagiarism, generally defined as presenting someone else’s work or ideas as one’s own, is a much more vexing problem for schools.
The Vancouver school board says high school students are given agendas that detail its plagiarism policies at the start of each academic year. The student body is also informed of what constitutes academic misconduct at school assemblies.
Roberts said for many teachers, inclass work is the only way to ensure students don’t plagiarize online sources. It also helps circumvent students soliciting help from dishonest tutors who might complete their assignments.
If students knowingly plagiarize, they will get a zero on the assignment, but can often rewrite it or complete a similar assignment for a passing grade, Roberts said.
“There’s more of a learning opportunity and a teaching opportunity for students who’ve plagiarized than there is for a student who just brings in cheat notes to a test.”
In Roberts’ opinion, most of the students caught copying feel pressure from parents to get excellent grades and gain admission into a good university, on top of the desire to create an interesting piece of original work.
Paul G. Harrison has been meting out student discipline at the University of B. C. since 1999 as the faculty of science’s associate dean. At UBC, many cases of minor plagiarism are solved between students and professors and often involve resubmitting assignments with proper citation, but in potentially deliberate cases, students land in the office of the faculty’s associate dean.
As such, Harrison has the discretion to ask the student to redo the assignment or complete an essay on plagiarism.
If students maintain their innocence, or if their reasons for plagiarizing aren’t acceptable to the associate dean, their cases are forwarded to the President’s Advisory Committee on Student Discipline for a hearing. Last year, about 50 of the faculty’s more than 6,000 students were caught plagiarizing and sent to Harrison’s office. Of those, about half were referred to the committee.
Students found guilty of academic misconduct by the committee are often suspended from the university for at least one semester. Since the committee began keeping a tally of all disciplinary cases passed on from faculties in the 1996- 97 academic year, the number of students suspected of cheating spiked and then levelled off.
The first year of published numbers saw just 23 students referred to the discipline committee, the vast majority for academic misconduct. That number skyrocketed to 113 cases in 2001- 02 and dropped to 39 last year. Although some cases referenced drunken antics, most of the students were accused of cheating or plagiarism.
The 2001- 02 peak in cheating was explained in part by cases in Harrison’s faculty where several students were caught passing on the same plagiarized answers for an assignment, he said. Since he started the job more than a decade ago, Harrison only remembers two repeat offenders.
“Over the last decade I haven’t seen any great explosion ( in plagiarism). Many cases come down to the student not allocating enough time to do the required work and cutting corners,” he said. “When I talk to students, the most common reason for why they cheated is they didn’t have enough time to do their work.”
Time management is an essential skill for academic success and it can take students years before they learn to cut back on time vampires, such as social media or online video games.
A big part of preparing young scholars for university- level work also involves teaching students proper citation, Kitsilano’s Roberts maintains.
Several years ago, while teaching at Churchill secondary, Roberts did exactly that with her Grade 10 English class. After she caught some students plagiarizing she cooked up a mock assignment to teach them about proper citation.
They submitted their completed assignments to turnitin. com, a service that vets a student’s work with its database of millions of essays and then spits out an “originality report” detailing any potentially plagiarized paragraphs. Most Vancouver high schools are paid subscribers ( Kitsilano’s Parent Advisory Council has paid about $ 3,500 annually for the past several years), Roberts said.
When they got their assignments back, many of the students were horrified to see almost 80 per cent of their paper flagged for questionable or plagiarized content. Roberts then worked through the essays to show the students how to properly cite sources and acknowledge ideas from other people.
Sean Zwagerman, a Simon Fraser University writing professor and plagiarism expert, is a vocal critic of turnitin. com. Rather than helping students understand the purpose of an assignment, he said, the service teaches them the most important thing about writing is not to get busted for cheating. He also argued that it may be easier than ever to steal another person’s work, but that doesn’t mean it’s more prevalent.
“There’s this idea that students break down into two types: there’s good students and there’s plagiarists and turnitin weeds out the plagiarists,” he said. “If we accept that kind of reductive story then we don’t have to think about harder questions like, how do we help students with their writing? Are we over- emphasizing grades? Which is presumably why students cheat in the first place, right?”
Regardless of the method, Roberts said teaching students how to avoid plagiarism is something that needs to be revisited every year. “You can’t teach this kind of thing too much.”