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Confronting Plagiarism
By Hans P. Johnson
Faculty members in the humanities are turning increasingly to online antiplagiarism programs to detect student cheating. So adept have Web-based sieves proved at catching unacknowledged borrowing that a few professors report plagiarism rates as high as 40 percent in their courses. For some professors, however, challenging the culprits may be more easily said than done, as a recent exchange over the online humanities discussion list, H-Net, revealed.
"My students must now all turn in a copy of their papers on diskette," reports Jill Craven, a professor of film studies at Millersville University of Pennsylvania. For a small fee, she loads the electronic files into an antiplagiarism program and gets a report on the sources used in the student papers. The program compares the papers to its own database of materials, such as encyclopedia entries or articles, and flags sources for which it finds overlap in the submitted text. In one class, thirteen of thirty-eight students had pilfered at least a few lines from an uncredited text.
But rather than feel shame at detection, some students exposed through such simple exercises express outrage. The trend has sent up red flags for faculty. "What frightens me is that many of these students don’t even recognize their theft of prose as something that is wrong," adds Craven. "They show no remorse, just anger at being caught."
Kathleen Fitzpatrick, a professor of English and media studies at Pomona College, cites the January stabbing of a dean at Louisiana State University by a suspected cheater as having a deterrent effect on would-be ethics police. And in 1998 an adjunct faculty member at Fordham University lost his appointment after challenging a suspected student plagiarist.
For Vivian Sobchack, a professor of critical studies and an associate dean at UCLA, backing off is not the solution. She urges colleagues, whenever possible, to assert their power to punish plagiarism appropriately. "If we trivialize it, why shouldn’t they?" she asks. "Over the years, increasingly ‘client-centered’ and ‘user-friendly’ universities—while becoming more corporate and afraid of litigation—have encouraged plagiarism by softening its seriousness." She likens the common practice of allowing student plagiarists to redo an assignment to using euphemisms that avoid the truth. Such tactics, she concludes, make for a "truly deplorable situation."
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