Spring '08: Third Tips for Teachers Meeting

In our most recent Tips for Teachers meeting, we discussed, based on the piece, "Academic Integrity at Princeton", which can be found at

http://www.princeton.edu/pr/pub/integrity/pages/discipline.html, the challenging concepts of Plagiarism and Academic Integrity. We started our discussion by stating that The Targum had recently published an article that plagiarism was more rampant than known about, as often it went unreported. Additionally, there is a lack of communication between departments, so that if a student is caught plagiarizing in one department, it might be documented, but generally stays within that department itself.

We then went on to talk about instances of plagiarism we have witnessed or known about. One teacher present talked of a student she had who lifted his paper from a model paper displayed on the website, only making minor adjustments to paragraphs. She happened to have recently looked at that very paper on the website, so recognized it immediately, and when she spoke with the student about it, he apologized, explaining that he was frustrated with the course as he had been working hard, yet only received a C+.

Another case known about was a student who had taken the course before with a different teacher, but one who had used the same first sequence. Although the assignment questions were therefore a little different, the authors were the same, and the student simply handed in papers from the previous semester, without even remembering to change the date! We laughed at how students are often not very good at covering up their tracks.

In yet another case, a student self plagiarized, by using half of what he had written in Paper 5 in Paper 6. He had been doing well up until then, and when confronted with what he had done, he said he was tired and could not redo it, which lowered his course grade, but he did not fail the course.

We also discussed students who are friends in the dorm or from the same class, handing in an almost identical paper, perhaps with the order of paragraphs changed.

A fascinating revelation was the increased scope to plagiarise in the Hybrid course, as it is simple to copy and paste, but what was completely unexpected was the fact that a student plagiarized a response in the Discussion Forum, by pasting in comments from Wikipedia as his own, as he did not acknowledge the source. Even though this is not plagiarism in an essay, which is the usual location of plagiarism, we decided that it was still plagiarism, none-the-less, and as such the student should be asked about it, and should confess.

We talked about whether, if students had to sign an oath that their work was their own, plagiarism would decrease, and one teacher present said it would.

We moved then to the question of the narrow dividing line between collaboration and plagiarism, and looked at, whereas it is clearly not acceptable to use someone else’s words without citing the source, whether it is acceptable to use someone else’s ideas without acknowledgment. Here we were quite divided, as some felt that a class is all about the mutual construction of ideas and knowledge-building, and that ideas function as important exemplars for teaching and learning. Furthermore one teacher thought it would be impossible to police and keep track as to who contributed each idea. But there were others who felt ideas and inspirations should be acknowledged as respect to the individual and independent thinker, and one teacher talked about the analogy with patents. We then started to tie this in to not only prestige of being the originator of an idea, but also wealth associated with invention.

But certainly discussions of plagiarism are not always straight forward. What do we do, for example, with “common knowledge”? Does everyone know it, or is it culture and time dependent, in which case should the source be acknowledged? And what should happen in the instances where a professor perhaps plagiarises from his or her graduate students? Furthermore, what if someone feels she is contributing an original thought, only to find that it has been discovered and discussed before? Are there, in fact, a finite number of ideas, and just many variations on the same theme? Or would it be fair to say that two students might, as a starting point, share similar ideas about a connection or topic, but might, in the execution, write what ultimately looks very different?