How do I plagiarize thee?

thy kingdom come

2011-10-14T06:47:00.000-07:00

In this post I'd like to write about a problem that is somewhat larger than plagiarism; plagiarism is a big part of it, but not the only part of it. This term for the first time I had a higher level class of about 14 that was almost entirely made up of students from the kingdom; there were also two Japanese, one Korean, and perhaps an Iraqi who in some ways matched the others but in some ways didn't. The problem was briefly that with such an overwhelming majority from one culture certain cultural traits were pronounced and encouraged, literally run rampant, while the advice we gave more or less fell upon deaf ears. Then, compounding that, was the effect over time; they had come up through the program; they had got where they were based on what they were doing; they had every reason to believe that it would work again, and, to some degree, it did.

First is a kind of slavish obsession with points. These guys will dispute with you one late mark that amounts to maybe .03 of an attendance grade, so that you end up talking about whether they were four minutes late or six minutes late. One element of it is that it just isn't that important to me, so it's entirely possible, I marked them with a 1 when in fact they deserved a 2. Okay. But as I thought this over, I realized that this obsession surely has been carried up from the lower levels, and has not been eased by our tendency, which is to focus on the learning and just give the points as a byproduct. These are very nice students: polite, hard working (in their own kind of way), willing to take our guidance and willing to do whatever we require. So why can't they read yet? Why is their writing so abysmal? Why do they have absolutely NO grammar?

In the writing sphere, we see plagiarism left and right. Sometimes it is from other sources on the web. So, for example, they write about an article concerning Assad, open up another article about Assad, and copy a sentence from that, and call it an opinion about Assad. It IS a sentence. It IS about Assad. But it's copied directly. Why would they NOT want to just write and improve their writing? Here they are, flunking the Writing Assessment, flunking the TOEFL, but getting 85, 90 as their grade. What's missing in this picture?

Now I was a speaking-listening teacher, basically, and when they talked about Assad, for example, they all did well. They understand main ideas. They can state opinions and back them up. They are polite and have perfect listening, so they know when it's a good time to jump in with their own opinions. I'm making vast generalizations, of course; out of ten, one or two are actually a little shy. One or two don't really have opinions or think to put them in sentences. But, overall, we have people who can get the main part of what I want and get a good grade overall. I don't feel bad giving them 85's or 90's.

But in their main Core and Writing classes, I'm sure it's a different story. And what happened below? Down at the intermediate levels, they need to have the pressure ratcheted up a little: be able to read the questions of a listening exercise. Be able to read 14 sentences in a vocabulary exercise in less than 20 minutes. They can't do this kind of thing. Somehow, we need to attach points to skills. How did they get the points, without getting the skills?

My main observation about the points is this: If their obsession will not wane; if we cannot teach them to focus on the skills and not the points, then we have no choice, but to tailor our teaching toward encouraging them to learn through points...no more just giving them points for producing something, or for doing the homework. They "do" the homework, but you don't see them learning skills from it, because they are basically copying the homework, or shortcutting the homework, or whatever they have to do mindlessly to get the points. I think in this case a more effective strategy would be to make all points contingent on having the skills with them, in class, to be produced on demand...

Our job is to engineer what they do in their free time as well as what they do in class. If, in their free time, they can copy each other's work, and get away with it, then obviously, they will, and they won't learn the skills. If, in their free time, they discuss what they have to do in order to succeed, and they do, and this is something we want them to do, then we win. Or rather, they win, because they have the skills.

I basically see it as human nature that they are where they are, at a high level, unable to read (getting 40 on the reading subskill paper-based TOEFL), unable to recognize grammatical errors in spite of perfect listening, unable to write a grammatical sentence. They are polite; they are well-meaning; they are hard-working, in their own way (though they would rather work to copy successfully than work to write successfully) - even in their faults, they are nice people, good students. Perhaps too nice, too good: we tend to try to help them, and say, we think they should move up a level. Then, they are at a spot where they can't read, can't do it any other way. What we get is entirely a product of our own desire to please them, and hope that they will somehow just pick it up. They won't. They are, as a class, pretty much unable to write.

2011-02-18T18:37:00.001-08:00

Some of my students are so determined not to say anything that it far overpowers my will, directed at them, to open their hands, find their voice, and let us know something of their true selves. I feel like the grumpy old guy with a sharp nose and sharp intolerance for leftovers...when, to them, if it's been used before, and it works, it surely must be acceptable again? Anything to duck, so to speak.

I actually have been building up a vent against all kinds of activity that can best be described as lazy, but lazy doesn't always describe it fairly in the end. Sometimes they have to go pretty far afield to find someone else's notes, someone else's ideas on the same subjects, that they can then transfer over to what I've been doing and try to make it look like two-terms-ago's work is actually fresh. It's easy for me, who actually likes making hypotheses, writing, coming up with new ideas, to sneer at that as leftovers, and I sure don't want to read the same ones twice. But something more is going on here, because they've worked so hard to keep and organize, on that end, and then on this end to regenerate, to transplant, to try to claim as their own...

The week is over; I'm tired, and I feel like these various piles of rehashed-whatever have me as tired as I used to feel shoveling out old barns with still-active horses in them. At some point I should just let go of it, I'm sure. But I'm more mad about the total lack of originality, the utter falseness of it....it's an elaborate game to make me believe they actually wrote something...and as I write the word elaborate, I remind myself again that it took a lot of work, on their part. It was in fact much harder for them to copy, and actually get away with it, than it would have, for them to simply write it...

Using the web to fight plagiarism: Links

2011-01-07T17:31:00.000-08:00

Internet Plagiarism (TESOL 06)
Preventing and Detecting Plagiarism, Recommended reading
Plagiarism, Tufts Univ.
Cut-and-paste plagiarism, an article by Lisa Hinchliffe
Resources on Plagiarism, Queen's Libraries, Canada
Morris Library (SIUC) definition of plagiarism

2011-01-07T16:51:00.000-08:00

the post below is a TESOL presentation from 2006; it appeared on the CESL website but was removed in 2010. It is republished here. The site was used for three different purposes; this is its final appearance.

Leverett, T. & Moody, L. (2007, Mar.) Defining, detecting and dealing with online plagiarism. CALL-IS Discussion, TESOL Convention, Seattle, WA. (handout here)(comments here)

___ (2006). Internet Plagiarism. CALL-IS Discussion. TESOL Convention, Tampa, FL,
Mar. Originally appeared at http://www.siu.edu/~cesl/teachers/pd/ip.html.(script below).

Leverett, T. (2006). Internet plagiarism: an esl/efl learning experience. For the presentation above.

Internet Plagiarism - What is it?

2011-01-07T16:48:00.000-08:00

Trying to decide how to handle plagiarism is a recurring theme of writing teachers in teachers' lounges, web rants, and various publications. Particularly difficult is unintentional plagiarism; for example, where the student actually cites the author, even correctly, in the text or near it, yet fails to put the phrase or sentence in quotes, thus implying that it is in his/her own words. What does a teacher do? It was driven home to me how high the stakes were in this particular scenerio when an MA student in sociology was found to have plagiarized a lit review and almost lost everything: his MA thesis, his PhD program, his carefully planned future, etc. So I'm not inclined to just let it go, as if it were a minor offense worthy of little less than a slap on the hand.

On the contrary, I've always made a big deal about it, and have come to make a bigger and bigger deal about it as time goes on. Rather than dock a student a letter grade (or a few points), as has been suggested, I refuse to accept the paper, and hand it back with large letters all over it. I treat any plagiarism that could possibly be unintentional as unintentional, maintain that perhaps the student did not hear me correctly in class (though I go over the rules many times, the possibility that they did not understand, understood but were not able to put it into practice, or simply did not attend on those days is a recurring theme). Thus the student's only real penalty is lateness on the paper in question, but by the time the research paper is due, that lateness can be a fairly big deal (not so much in points as in how much it crowds the student's busy schedule), and the student's inability to learn this basic rule thus interferes with his/her progress in other far more technical areas.

The unintentional plagiarist thus is someone who has not been able to integrate a new system, a system of representing an author's work into one's own paper, into his/her own writing successfully. I explain carefully that I am not comfortable sending someone on to academic classes until they can prove to me that they can do that without my explicit guidance, on their own, in a testing situation or under pressure with a paper. Academic teachers may be more sympathetic than I am, but they won't have more understanding of what the student is going through in terms of the considerable differences in the ways academic cultures deal with the representation of others' work. On the contrary, they are probably more inclined to consider any plagiarism to be due to laziness, moral corruption, or deliberate trickery, as if they are trying to pull one over on the teacher.

Suggestions:

Don't let students go on with only a hazy idea of what plagiarism actually is

It's so easy to let go, especially when you're pretty sure it's unintentional. But think about it: what kind of favor is this to the student? If there's anything you want them to carry with them (and forget about the perfect grammar), it should be a clear conception of how serious this problem is treated in places where they're going. Don't undersell it. Don't even dock them a letter grade. Draw the line in the sand.

Present it carefully, thoroughly, and non-judgementally

I say, non-judgementally - because really, for the most part, it is unintentional. And even when it's not - do you think a student would bother doing this if it were possible or easy to do it another way? I agree with one writer who said it almost always comes from a weakness of some kind...from being a poor time-manager, having low confidence in one's ability as a writer, simply not learning the proper method of citation and attribution, or even not bothering to focus on the importance of getting it right.

Use Turnitin (or some similar service) and tell students about it

I haven't tried this, though my campus provides Turnitin to teachers (Zimmermann 2006). The point is to make it clear how serious it is in the academic environment. The entire discussion: how the university pays the big money for Turnitin; how the teachers pay attention to rooting out the plagiarism, is enlightening to students. Many of my students couldn't believe that it was this serious. Another advantage of this is that it puts students on an equal footing:

... I use turnitin.com (my department pays for it), and I fully involve students in its use. Most students are grateful that there are routine checks for plagiarism. Students who don't plagiarize sometimes feel at a disadvantage--rightly or wrongly--and fear that their classmates who plagiarize are getting better grades. The open use of checking for plagiarism (and I check ALL papers, not just questionable ones) levels the playing field for all. Telling students about the services also opens the discussion about the internet and how it can be both a help and a hindrance to writers.(M. Sokolik, from Stanley 2002)

Assume it's unintentional whenever possible; Give a student a way out

How am I supposed to know or distinguish the surprise of finding out that one plagiarized unintentionally, vs. the surprise of finding out that a teacher would read one's paper so carefully as to catch some plagiarism? Both are surprise, and the second turns easily into the first.

If it helps any, I find that assuming lack of intention helps to keep the judgement down, on my own part. It's always a question, really, of whether the student should be able to pass (make up the work) or just be forced to fail a term or a class. And what really matters is that they learn both the seriousness of the issue and the proper way to proceed in the future. To that end my method is: raise the price of unacceptable copying, but be on their side (understanding, sympathetic, helpful) to make sure they can finish the work properly in what remains of the time. Having a paper come back in their face is usually an eye-opener, but it doesn't guarantee that they'll actually learn the proper method.

Put yourself on the student's side - against a hostile and unforgiving world

This is really the gist of the issue. We aren't police, looking for excuses to hold students back and prevent them from getting what they want. A better way of looking at it is that we are trying to provide for them something that American students had an entire high school career to master - and we're trying to provide it for them quickly, before they are damaged by not having mastered it. A couple of well-placed stories, about the PhD student who was almost kicked out of his program for plagiarizing a lit-review, etc. works wonders.

Raise the stakes: make students publish everything

We have found an unusual consequence of extensive use of weblogs: in publishing everything, students become more serious about wanting to follow the law.

Organize assignments so that it is harder to plagiarize:

Base them on things that just happened yesterday

I'm quite serious about this; I've done units on the California power crisis, Wal-Mart as a social issue, and other issues that, upon reading the morning news, occurred to me days before the class started. The idea is to have plenty of news articles to work from, but no real body of papers already written about the subject. By putting current news in front of the students and requiring them to use it, you diminish the possibility that they can find anyone who has done similar work.

Base them on situations that are class-specific

It was always my fantasy that I would have my students invent a country, and then base a paper on what would be the best alternative for that country, in facing, for example, a power crisis. I would have students invent both the names and the conditions existing in the country at that time; they could take their facts from a variety of real countries or make it up entirely.

But one doesn't have to go to such great lengths, or take as much time in preparation.

Don't use assignments that are easily found on the web

In an article on plagiarism I wrote for a Berkeley publication, I said (rather provocatively, I admit): "If an assignment can be downloaded from the internet, maybe it ought to be." An assignment that asks a question that has been answered a million times before, or that doesn't guide the student through the *thinking* process, begs to be plagiarized. -M. Sokolik, from Stanley 2002

Require specific components on the paper and change these regularly

One specific component is an article that you gave them a week ago: you can say, for example, that they must use this (recent) article first- and show you how they will use it- before they start the rest of the paper. If you do this before they even leave class...that doesn't leave them much room to play "choose the topic" (a variant on "choose the topic that would make it most easy for me to use my brother's paper), does it? Other specific components: Connect to a certain place (we have done this for years with an environmental topic that has moved - from Florida, to Las Vegas, to Minnesota, etc.).

Require process steps

This one is pretty well explained in Harris 2004, though we've used this strategy for years, making students read articles and write about them before they even start their term paper. We have a pretty good idea of their thinking, their writing skills, and their organization before we ever see work on the term paper itself. To see the progression of a process writing course, take a personal web portfolio from our highest level class and start at the beginning of a student's work in a given class: summary responses on individual articles, then an argument essay, then the research paper.

Make students talk about their paper regularly

By having frequent conferences, you know what they are thinking and how much work they've done themselves. If you suspect plagiarism, let the student explain his/her thesis and main arguments without being able to read them as he/she explains. If it was a brother's paper, this won't be possible. But if speaking skills are bad, it might not be possible either.

Require metalearning essay

This one also comes from Harris 2004. I have never done this.

Require up-to-date references

Harris 2004 recommends this, though it's a pretty standard device. A variation is to require students to explain recent articles that they have read; we make them write about them first. We ensure that whatever they're using, it's absolutely current; if they then integrate this into someone else's work, it's apparent in that you can line up the papers and see change in direction.

Change the subject every term

Even when we did environment every term in our highest levels, we changed the location of the problems we focussed on, so that, if we did problems of the Sonora Desert one term, we'd be in the Caribbean the next. There were enough locations to keep students from being able to find old papers; or, if they did, they would find the sources in it to be outdated. It's sometimes a combination of prevention techniques that keeps them off balance.

Bibliography and Resources:

Ehrlich, H. (1998-2000). Plagiarism and anti-plagiarism. Resources and discussion.
http://newark.rutgers.edu/%7Eehrlich/plagiarism598.html. Accessed 3-06.

Harris, R. (2004). Anti-plagiarism strategies for research papers. Virtual Salt.
http://www.virtualsalt.com/antiplag.htm. Accessed 3-06.

Hinchliffe, L. (1998, May). Cut-and-paste plagiarism: Preventing, detecting and tracking online plagiarism. Ohio University.
http://people.lis.uiuc.edu/~janicke/plagiary.htm. Accessed 3-06.

Leverett, T. (2006). Survey on blogs and chat. From tom leverett weblog.
http://tomleveretts.blogspot.com/2006/03/survey-on-blogs-chat_09.html. Accessed 3-06.

Ohio ESL (2004). Avoiding plagiarism (links and resources).
http://www.ohiou.edu/esl/help/plagiarism.html. Accessed 3-06.

Stanley, K. (ed.). (2002). Perspectives on Plagiarism in the ESL/EFL Classroom. TESL-EJ 6, 3 Forum. F-1, December.
http://tesl-ej.org/ej23/f1.html. Accessed 3-06.

Zimmermann, A. (2005, Mar. 8). Turnitin.com now on campus. Daily Egyptian, Carbondale IL.
http://newshound.de.siu.edu/spring05/stories/storyReader$332. Accessed 3-06.

Discussion Questions

1. How does a teacher find a balance between the seriousness of plagiarism and the need to sustain and support students?

2. What strategies can teachers use to combat the kinds of plagiarism we are seeing with increasing use of the internet?

3. Does familiarity with the web and with search engines like Google actually make it easier for students to plagiarize?

4. Is it worth it for a teacher to subscribe to a detecting agency like TurnItIn?

ethix test 2010

2010-11-23T20:02:00.001-08:00

I'm in favor of the ethics test, and I'll tell you why. The people of Illinois have consistently been voting against politicians who cheat, steal, lie, etc., and I think it's partly because a general campaign against cheating, stealing, and lying has been working.

Now of course it galls me, and I've said so repeatedly, that a state which has two ex-governors in jail, a state for which I teach twenty hours a week, and for whom plenty of administrators have plenty of time to sit around, noticing who hasn't taken their ethics test, and even how long it took those who took it, to take their ethics test, well, anyway, here's this state telling me what to do, when I not only don't really have time to do it, but also, some people have all the time in the world, and don't have any ethical qualms about that whatsoever. So we sit down by the computer and take this test, and it's all I can do, as I say, not to steal a picture of the Illinois state capitol onto my desktop where I can photoshop it or doctor it in some way just out of principle. But I don't, and the main reason is, I don't have time anymore. If they want me to take this test, I'll just take it, print out the certificate, and let everyone know they can cross me off their list.

Now this is a state where the present Senator was caught trying to buy his seat; he bought it, successfully, and, what was truly amazing was that after he got caught he went on acting like it was business as usual. Like, this is how we always decided who was senator. Like, you might as well spell it I-L-L-I-C-O-R-R-U-P-T-I-O-N-O-I-S. A guy finally comes forward and says he's written hundreds of thousands of term papers for college students all over the country, and says that education students are the worst...it's like, if you're going to be a teacher, you definitely want to buy that degree, because that's how it's done. Why should teachers know how to write?

Ah, but this is a national problem; back when I was looking for a job, and this was maybe twenty years ago or more, some school district was looking for a "principle" and I wondered if I would qualify. Actually, I decided that I had a few I could lend them, but I wasn't sure I myself wanted to work for them, if the person who wrote the ads had that much trouble spelling. Nevertheless I now find myself curious about some subjects which, when I enter them into Google, the competition is so fierce that I could pick from dozens of free term papers written on these topics, all of which have a reasonable degree of accuracy and are written with a standard, cookie-cutter kind of phraseology which might trip up a student if his/her teacher uses Google at all, but otherwise might not be suspected, because literally anyone could have written it. My own students of course could not produce a grammatical sentence themselves any other way besides googling it, thus I know for certainty, when something has the smoothness and confidence of perfect grammar, it was either bought or googled or both. And I consider it my job to know this, to know what they will do to avoid writing, and what it looks like when they avoid it successfully. But alas the system is stacked against me: their teachers are avoiding it; so are university presidents, and vice presidents of the U.S.A. Almost nobody writes unless they have to, so why am I even writing this? Not sure. It's kind of a private rant, I guess, meant to move some stuff off the bottom of the blog there so you won't see it every time you open it up. In fact, you'll never even know that, unless you've actually read this far, and that's highly unlikely, isn't it? Nobody actually reads this stuff, do they?

best stuff is in the comments

2010-11-21T15:12:00.000-08:00

Downey, M. (2010, Nov. 18). Can't write your paper? This pen's for hire. Atlanta Constitution. http://blogs.ajc.com/get-schooled-blog/2010/11/18/cant-write-your-paper-this-pens-for-hire/?cxntfid=blogs_get_schooled_blog. Accessed 11-10.

Freakanomics. (2010, Nov. 18). The Ghostwriter. http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/19/the-ghostwriter/. Accessed 11-10.

Dante, E. (2010, Nov. 12). The Shadow Scholar. Chronicle of Higher Education. http://chronicle.com/article/The-Shadow-Scholar/125329/. Accessed 11-10.

update

2010-10-21T17:30:00.000-07:00

So it's been almost a year since I've posted here; I fight a daily battle against plagiarism, yet I leave it all at work when I come home, and choose to fill up my
main blog with other routine business, like what it's like to constantly drive around the same small town. Thus slowly but surely I've driven most of the traffic away from my main blog, which is ok, because I don't really want everyone lurking around there anyway, with its connections to all my private universe. I did however receive an offer to advertise there which I am considering.

So there is obviously a fork in the road: I could make that one a little livelier, better pictures, etc., and move my mindless rambling somewhere like here (since, in fact, the mindless, mundaneness of it is probably due to the quantity and quality of writing I deal with on a daily basis)...I could basically stay in practice (which is what I'm doing with my mindless writing: treading water, so to speak, so my arms don't fall off)...or I could stick with the status quo.

This blog is a fairly simple collection of my work on plagiarism, but much of that was eliminated when CESL chose to destroy its own website a little while back, and I've done very little to preserve what I wrote or what I did. But another thing happened that more or less also took the wind out of my sails. This blog was the documentation of a plagiarism case at this very university, but the president not only survived it, but went on to create several more generations of administrators and teachers, many of whom have no memory or active knowledge of what went on. I'm not especially on a campaign about this guy one way or the other; actually, I've met him, and kind of like him, but in principle am against plagiarism and all it entails; still, teaching twenty hours a week and doing at least thirty or forty more hours of prep and administrative stuff, I've had no time, even in these three years or so, to even look into the charges against him. So what use do I have to keep this open sore up in a place where the whole world can still see it and ruminate about it? None. It's kind of like the travel stories on my blog: I don't really need all the people in my present world to keep experiencing and reexperiencing my wilder years.

It's in that spirit, that I put some "content" (or "roughage" as I could call it) to ram that other junk down into the past a little, and rekindle an examination of the frustrations of teaching and simultaneously living in such a small town.

So think about this convergence of events as we go reeling into November. The state pressures me to do another ethics test (stay tuned for a report). Two of its former governors are in jail; scores more deserve to be. The president of a university, accused a few years back of copying large chunks of a dissertation on the education of the gifted in the public schools, orders an internal committee to tell him what to rewrite and clear him of the charges; meanwhile, my own children, and every other child educated in the public schools in Illinois, are subject to a system of early classification and labeling that, presumably, affects their lives in some way (labeled an achiever, or non-achiever, they soon begin to fulfill our expectations). If anybody does real, current research on the effects of this tracking, I'd genuinely like to know. In any case, soon after nineteen Saudi boys blow up our trade center, Bush signs a deal with the king of a certain kingdom, sending hundreds of students over here who culturally share a weakness in writing, a propensity for copying and remembering, a disinclination toward critical thinking, you get the picture; fortunately, the best I can tell, they are quite polite, and they are not making bombs. My life becomes a story of either wading through grammar as thick as pea soup, or experiencing the finery of somebody else's grammar masquerading much as the students get wound up for halloween. In any case, some young folks in the English department, now these would be American young folks, same age as my own son, just entering the university, find nanowrimo and start encouraging everyone anonymously to write a novel. I am one who could actually do it, as I've been filling my blog with drivel for months, and merely need direction, spirit, and purpose, and a deadline; as far as I'm concerned, those signs are speaking to me. But finally, the other forces in life also get wound up and get involved; the holidays are coming; I want to put what I've already written in tangible form; I teach twenty hours, remember; I'd like to reacquaint myself with the technology that people are integrating into the classroom these days, or at least become better at the moodle, which more and more, people are using.mTiime is in short supply. Leaving old laundry out on the line is unnecessary, impractical, even wasteful.

The other day, however, at an orientation, I got to tell one of my favorite plagiarism stories. I got an audience of new students to our university and got to remind them of how American ideas of plagiarism differ so much from those of other countries. I got to relate a story of a guy who almost lost his PhD program because his master's thesis had copied parts of the lit review; this story came from my wife. But the next one is even better; I'm not sure where it came from. A guy was at his own PhD thesis defense, and the people he had invited, at the top of their field, were somewhat unprepared and leaving through the thesis right as he was defending it. One professor saw his own writing plagiarized in the thesis and got steadily angrier and angrier as the defense went on. You can imagine how it happened; there are only so many people in a field that you can invite; one gets sick and calls another; the writer loses track of who exactly he copied from; etc. etc. In any case the plagiaree (victim) eventually renounces the PhD student, blows his whole plan. PhD shot. Years of education wasted.

As you can tell, my own writing is entirely original. Deadly dull, sometimes, tending toward drivel and the mundane, yes, but always entirely my own. I can't tell you how to fight plagiarism in academia. The more I hear about the countries my students come from, where entire masters' theses are copied, and where teachers expect copy/paste as a modus operandi, well, it makes me not really know what to tell the students these systems create. Some experience the joy of being able to think for themselves, being expected to do so; others shrink in terror (so to speak) at the prospect, being thoroughly convinced (perhaps by experience?) that they have nothing to say. In the same way a corrupt state oils its bureaucratic machinery to try to get its academics to run through an ethics test, warning them that if they read to fast, they'll get caught up in the system (chewed up, spit out), and it will be assumed that they cheated or that somehow it's not right that they learned how to read so fast. And how are these two related? Not sure. Today's philosophy of public education is tomorrow's philosphy of government, though, so if our educational system is based on bogus research, or if, womewhere down the line, there were a few too many goldbrickers trying to justify their own existence, making up tests for people to pass, then, the entire system will have the same metallic glow, through and through. And I suppose we have no one to blame but ourselves.

ethics test 2009

2009-12-03T21:02:00.000-08:00

I can't get through this thing without something that trips me up. It's really the thought that the state of Illinois is telling me anything at all about ethics. The state of Illinois? Where the senator pretty clearly bought his seat, Obama's seat?

So anyway, sometimes I get halfway through the test, and I idly take a picture and put it on my desktop. I'm an employee of the state; this is just barely a crime, and in fact I do nothing with it, so, maybe I'm just filling up a state computer, idly, with junk. Nevertheless, like I said, I can't get through the test without at least dangling my foot in the water.

So they have this rule; it infuriates the academics. You're not allowed to finish the test too fast. If you do, they assume you're cheating. B-S, say the academics, if we couldn't speed-read, we wouldn't be where we are today. Actually there's no punishment for missing all the questions on the test. They assume, correctly, that if you actually read the test, you'll try your best, and you'll be mad enough when you miss, to go back and read the right answer. I say, correctly, because I always do, just out of curiosity, and just because, as an academic, I hate missing questions. Actually, I'm not a fast reader, so it's not that much of an issue for me. But I try to be leisurely anyway. I don't want to be accused of reading too fast.

So this year, twenty minutes to twelve (when I swim), and I start the test, which is supposed to take about fifteen minutes. Should be plenty of time. But it's not. A student walks in and needs about twelve minutes of my time. Which means, it's time to swim, and I'm not done with the ethics test.

So I go swimming, leaving the thing on, on my computer. But now I know: if it takes me more than an hour to complete the test, this will be a red flag to them, won't it? They'll say, he deliberately walked away for an hour, so that he could take long enough to finish the test. Maybe they'll accuse me of trying to beat the system.

But they didn't. Apparently it's all computerized. If it's less than ten, you lose. If it's more than ten, you win. Or something like that; if it takes you forever, how is their computer to know? It doesn't flag anyone. At least, not yet.

the role of morality

2009-12-03T20:40:00.000-08:00

I've begun to look at plagiarism more and more like the sociologists do. I don't really know sociology that well, though I'm married to a sociologist, and read quite a bit of it due to teaching about such things as crime. So I'm venturing a guess here.

It's not that sociologists aren't interested in morality, but they can't really measure it, so they stick to the things they can measure. In figuring out why people commit any crime, they have to consider the circumstances: what kind of opportunity that person has; what the perceived price of getting caught is; what the perceived likelihood of getting caught is, what the price of not committing the crime is, etc.

Now our students, of course, often have very little awareness that plagiarism is a crime. We do tell them, of course, at the beginning of the term. We emphasize it, even; I stomp around, and try to convey how it's a moral crime here, regardless of what they've been taught in their home countries. Nevertheless, their listening is bad. Their memory is short too: they may not believe me. After all, it happens all the time in their countries, regardless of what their teacher might say. So, they plagiarize.

Let's assume they have some awareness of the seriousness of the crime. They still are weighing the costs and benefits; they know what might happen. They somehow believe everything will be ok. Somehow, in the total balance, it's easier to copy than not to.

So what about morality itself? I'll be the first to say, just because you go to church, doesn't mean you have it. It does mean, though, that if you get caught stealing you'll be that much more humiliated, in front of a community that may matter to you. So in that sense, I think a sociologist would agree- going to church makes it less likely that you'll steal.

What if, all your life, something was ok, then, you move to a new country, and some big fat hairy dude tells you it's not ok? Wouldn't you rather believe your father? Of course. So, deep in your heart, it's hard to get used to a new morality. Morality is not playing much of a role here.

However, if it's plain and clear to you that you'll get a 0 if you get caught, that matters. It's part of the calculation. Let's assume that everyone knows what they're doing. Let's assume, perhaps incorrectly, that they heard me on the first two or three days, saying it over and over: it's not a crime to steal, it's just a crime to put your name on the paper.

Finally, I want to say a word about these weblogs. These posts have a way of staying around forever. I'm pretty bold; I've said some stuff you might not agree with. I'd carve it in stone, but it's a new day; I don't have to. In the old days, if you put something on paper, people tended to read it, and it was very important. That's because they didn't have that much to do, after a long day of hard farming, and they were grateful to read something, anything, to give their minds something to chew on. Today, we're bombarded by information. The smartest of us learn to skim and scan. The vast majority of us will never get this far down on anything anyone has written.

Which is just as well.

update

2009-12-03T08:09:00.001-08:00

I have nothing to update. My students still plagiarize; it's more common than ever. One of the most common instances is when they simply use last term's material as this term's homework. This is not plagiarism, really, until they use the exact same writing, and even then, it's theirs, though it may have been worked over by another teacher at some point. I am absolutely unequivocally unbending no matter what. If it's an assignment where you can use last term's material, it's a bad assignment.

One student took a native language article about an interesting topic, crunched it through a babelfish translator, and then wrote a review of it as if he were reading English. Perhaps all English looked like that to him; perhaps he crunches everything through babelfish. Which brings up an interesting question....what if the vast majority of English a person reads is crunched native language? Does this affect their minds? their view of grammar?

This blog is about copying, by whim or copy-paste, little chunks of material, or big, for any reason. Copying is not illegal, but putting your name on the paper after you did it presents some problems. My focus is to get to the bottom of it. How do you make sure people don't want or need to do it? There must be a better way.

Further down in this blog, you'll find a grisly story that, fortunately, nobody cares about much anymore. People don't really read these blogs very carefully anyway, and that is probably good for me, since I'm an uncompromising fanatic in some ways, as I'm sure you've discerned from the above. But it's possible that, to put this positively, the small community of people who actually write their own material is the very same community as those who actually read the stuff. That's certainly true for poetry. I have my poetry blog virtually to myself. But I soldier on; there may be someone checking in, eventually.

Move the other stuff on down, quick, before someone reads it.

ethics test - quick- don't answer!

2008-12-10T20:20:00.000-08:00

We're living in a state whose governor just got thrown in jail for allegedly selling Obama's senate seat. Twenty steps down or so, the president of the university is still defending himself against plagiarism charges, and then there's yokels like myself, holed up at my desk, reading reams and reams of final exams, all with bad grammar, by people with ready access to all kinds of technology.

Now actually plagiarism at my level is a pretty small-time thing. Because their grammar is so bad, I can tell within minutes that something is plagiarized, just because of its flawless grammar and its academic attitude. So lately I've gotten pretty good at finding it and rooting it out at its source, very early. But at a price: I have to accept their bad grammar, at whatever level they are. If I tell them their grammar is simply too low, I up the pressure; I make it so they have to cheat in order to pass. And then I have to catch them in order to prevent it.

That's no fun. So, I accept their grammar. I work with them on it. I do as much as I can about it in one term. But, I don't see any more plagiarism. Amazingly enough, they figure it out: they're here to learn to write, not to copy.

Eventually they'll all be in positions of power. Then watch out.

more on siuc

2008-12-10T19:38:00.000-08:00

Let me see if I can document the events of the last few weeks. When one is as busy as I am, one gets the impression that they do this in the last week of class because it will fade away more quickly, in the rising dust of the ending semester. But in reality everything comes to a climax when there is just a week to go. So, here's the trail of stuff I found:

1. Poshard and Plagiarism again, Carbondale Bytelife, calls it "the gift that keeps on giving" but gives links to the following:

2. DE article in which Nelms discusses plagiarism policy, just drafted

3. Nelms' own defense; he's under the gun both for having cleared Poshard of wrongdoing earlier, and approving this policy; his is the second comment

4. Lawrence Ebert's comment, same page, probably the harshest words against Poshard

machine interlanguage

2008-06-04T21:39:00.000-07:00

this weblog has an odd schizophrenia: on the one hand, it's an official blog, used for my presentations on plagiarism, which have now numbered two discussions and perhaps one other, now I've almost forgotten. Why is this? And there were none last year; I didn't try. Why not?

Well, that's one side of it- a professional interest, gently petering out into oblivion. Here's the other. Sometimes I use it for deeply personal rambles about the personal nature of grading students' writing. It is intensely personal. Sure, I leave it professional: I don't name names; I make sure that any of my students could read it (it is, after all, published, even advertised on my own professional blog)- and not get steamed. They are, after all, trying their best. And paying big money. And not, necessarily, even aware of the cheating nature of plagiarism.

Before I go into this second one, which I consider very interesting, I will mention a third, which is a passing desire to record and ruminate on a public scandal here at this institution, which, I would hope, is over, or at least, best forgotten. And better forgotten if I move it on down with this ramble.

OK so here's what I'm thinking. As a writing teacher who sees volumes and volumes of words- last term stacks of 38 passed across my desk; I read each one; I even read the articles they were attached to- I think I know pure plagiarism when I see it, and I see plenty. But I also see a lot of hybrid plagiarism. This is how it works. In the old days, students learned words one at a time; they wrote their native languages next to them, and, as they used the new ones, they used them in the fashion that they would have used their native-language counterpart. It was called "interference" as their native language was the single most salient factor in what we teachers saw as an "error"- a misused word, a wrong order, a something or other.

Nowadays there's another player- technology. The article that they were to have read and responded to, in writing, can be presumed to have been run through a translator- that systematically changed every word, even the ones they knew in English. This translator put a kind of soup on their plate- native words, English word order- changed by whatever else their technology provided. This is the actual article their understanding is based upon.

Then, as they began to write, some of them presumably chose to write in native language, and shove that through a translator. Now, they were fully aware that the word order would be wrong- the grammar would be wrong- that they would have to then apply English rules to the English words that landed on their paper, in whatever order. So, they did. To the best of their ability.

And we wonder why the product looks different than it used to. The words- very similar to the ones in the article. The word order- so garbled we can hardly imagine it even came from their native language- though it did. It just took a different path than it used to.

I think deep studying needs to be done on this process- it's not plagiarism, per se. It's machine interlanguage- maybe I'll come up with a snappy name. I'll keep working on it. Promise.

2008-01-27T20:52:00.000-08:00

In my class I presented an article about Dr. McCabe's visit to SIUC in February. My international students confirmed for me several assumptions. In our countries, they said, scholarship is defined as copying. Remembering and copying the experts. It's slightly more than that, of course. You must figure out your teacher's opinion, then find the right scholar to copy; then, remember and copy the right passage. Then, you've made it.

turnitin the gatekeeper

2007-10-26T23:56:00.000-07:00

I heard a bizarre story which I'll just pass along with no comment. This actually comes from another universiy, but could have just as easily come from ours. A professor says he'll put all the exams through Turnitin and if any come out positive, they'll fail. A student writes the exam question on top of the exam; writes the exam and hands it in; the exam trips on Turnitin because the question is copied at the top of it. The teacher flunks the student. The student complains, saying, hey, I was just copying the question before I wrote the exam; that's different from copying on the exam. The teacher says, hey, you just flunked the exam, you didn't flunk the whole course. In other words, the teacher stood by the rule; gave her zero credit for the exam, and went on with life.

There's usually more to these stories than the blatant tyranny and stupidity that appear at first glance. But maybe not. As I said, no comment.

the beat goes on

2007-10-17T22:20:00.000-07:00

the world is so full of comments, pro and con, i can barely contain myself. a slight break from dealing with my usual piles of lifted material from sources with connections to the kingdom, and the people thereof, but, two new writing classes started today, so i will certainly be inundated, shortly, with more.

in the meantime, much has happened on the SIUC front, and I will make an effort to keep up the documentation. First, the committee's report, which is linked to from here:

Plagerism report (sic), S. Thorne, Bytelife blog. Contains link to report on plagiarism.

Cohen, J. (2007, Oct. 12). Panel urges Poshard to fix thesis. Chicago Tribune.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-poshard_siu_12oct12,1,4220980.story. Accessed 10-07.

The controversy shows no sign of dying, though the latest news cycle is due to the committee's report and the ensuing decisions to stay the course. I would like to take a tape recorder around with me, just to pick up the comments I hear, but they are clearly on both sides of the issue, clearly getting stronger. For example:

Students on the DE (newspaper) are irresponsible- trying to ruin the university...should quit & go home (from a letter this morning)...

An informal style? Plagiarism is plagiarism...it's like Clinton denying he had 'sex'....(from another letter)

There you have it. It goes both ways. I'm sitting so firmly on the fence, I'm getting bobbed wire in my pants.

2007-09-26T01:07:00.000-07:00

I have students from the Kingdom for whom "writing" is synonymous with "finding"...they keep track of which teacher has seen which paper, and pass them around in such a way that no teacher sees the same one twice, and they don't have to actually write any. Their only weakness is that they have so little concept of what the papers say, that they often hand in one with a topic that is really inappropriate to the assignment, or a shallow mismatch.

Such it was with a reading reaction journal, meant to be about the student's field, but instead being about last term's topic. It had been grammatically corrected and was almost perfect; I recognized that teacher input also, though it wasn't mine. But here was the kicker. On top, in a different font, was the date: Spat, 11 .2007 (sic). This date alone gave a clearer picture of the student's true writing weaknesses- no command of vowels, bad punctuation, no spacing, etc. Of course the whole paper would have been like this, had he written it at that time.

I mention this, because it's a kind of late 9/11 post. Here I have these young guys- all men, all caught between worlds- all desperate, and, at this time of year, all fasting in the day, eating and staying up at night...and I feel like I know them well, to some degree. I know how much easier it is for them to "find" than to "write." It's also easier, by the way, to "see" the right answers on a reading test than to "read" them...to the point that, somehow they've gotten to the top of our program with almost no real reading or mastery of the visual aspect of the language. Which, you have to admit, is a skill in itself. Believe it or not, they feel some sense of pride and entitlement, for "working their way up," which, to some degree, they have.

And there are a few, a distinct minority, who actually do read and write. For them, it's painful. But their actual language progress eventually converges with that of every other learner...until they become fluent, which, in fact, believe it or not, virtually any of them could do...

This is where I was on that day. And, no, I did not forget those people in those towers.

last word- stepdaughter's letter

2007-09-18T23:28:00.000-07:00

Metz Zeman, N. (2007, Sept. 18). Letter: Plagiarism Research. Daily Egyptian, Carbondale, Letter to the Editor.

the original story

2007-09-13T21:04:00.000-07:00

Bartlett, T. (2006, Feb. 10). The Rumor: What really cost Chris Dussold his dream job? The Faculty. Chronicle of Higher Education. Accessed 9-07 from:
http://chronicle.com/free/v52/i23/23a00801.htm.

plagiarism by Americans

2007-09-12T23:08:00.000-07:00

Let me preface these remarks by saying: I'm out of my field. Yes, I teach plagiarism every day- but that's to people who don't have a clue what it is, or even why it's wrong. They have seen clearly, lately, at least that it has profound consequences. The ongoing controversy here has several results, but the best of them, for me anyway, is probably that my own students now believe me when I say it can come back and bite them, years later, and it will probably be just as illegal then as it is now.

But, having now read more about this case, and having heard people talking about it for over a week, I'm left with more questions.

1. "Nobody on my committee told me I had to go and put quotes up there," he said, or something like that- one could get through the American school system and not know that? Are we talking about the same thing? A friend of mine at the pool said: "It's plagiarism...there's nothing to discuss." I've always started from the assumption that my students didn't know that they had to quote AND attribute...but I'm not sure I can use that assumption here. Is that possible? Is it possible to not know that you have to do either??? What were those little names doing in those parentheses, anyway?

2. 29 out of 30 of the cases were in the 41-page lit review? (I hope I'm getting my facts right)...this alone has many profound consequences, many of which I haven't quite worked out. The most important being, maybe he didn't read the lit.

3. The dissertation was about education of the "gifted child"...Having children who have been beneficiaries, victims and survivors of the "gifted education program" I'd like to say that singling out children from the k-12 pack and labelling them one way or the other is no small deal, with no small consequences....and I count on our education system, and the body of research that supports it- to be doing the right thing. So here are a few questions: did the main dissertation contribute to the field? If so, in what way? If he copied old lit reviews, or copied old material, does that mean he was counting on someone else, basically, to do the background research? Because he was in a hurry?

4. Assuming that they circle the wagons, and he stays, what happens? Can they argue that they treated C. Dussold fairly? In court? Can SIUC be led with strength and integrity? It seems to me that with time this can only get worse, mostly for SIUC. If we're going to be in the vanguard, let's not be in the vanguard of places where everything, right down to our vision, is second-hand goods...

plagiarism at SIUC, cont'd

2007-09-08T20:45:00.000-07:00

Here are some sources on the events of the last week or so, most recent first, blog style. We here at SIUC are still in shock, or maybe denial, but you can see the story play out here in the local Illinois media- I hope the links last. Being one who writes and speaks on the issue of plagiairism (albeit that of international students, many of whom did not bring with them to this country the cultural tendency to scorn it as stealing and cheating) I cannot remain silent on this issue forever. But for now, I'm saying nothing, for two reasons: One, I still haven't read the parts of the dissertation that are in question, and, two, I know many of the people involved, though I am also not totally familiar with the story of Chris Dussold, SIUE professor, which apparently started the whole thing or at least had a strong part in its development. I will also mention a local guy, Scott Thorne, who has been filling up the Carbondale Bytelife weblog, of which I'm a member, with a fairly balanced running commentary complete with links. Having a local business background (I believe), he has no dog in the fight, so he just gives some useful links (including the ones I provide below) and a neutral perspective. But, oddly enough, I consider myself somewhat neutral also. And I'll stay that way, at least until I've read the stuff, and know what I'm talking about.

Chicago Tribune (2007, Sept. 7). The accidental plagiarist. Editorial. Accessed 9-7-07 from:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-0907edit1sep07,0,2218998.story

Crawford, J. (2007, Sept. 6). Department declines to review Poshard's dissertation. Daily Egyptian. Accessed 9-7-2007 from:
http://media.www.siude.com/media/storage/paper1096/news/2007/09/06/Campus/Department.Declines.To.Review.Poshards.Dissertation-2952105.shtml.

Wilson, J. and Crawford, C. (2007, August 20). Poshard defends dissertation against plagiarism charges. Daily Egyptian. Accessed 9-7-2007 from:
http://media.www.siude.com/media/storage/paper1096/news/2007/08/30/Campus/Poshard.Defends.Dissertation.Against.Plagiarism.Charges-2943746.shtml

joogling

2007-07-24T23:13:00.001-07:00

This is a word I'm using to describe what appears to the viewer to be similar to juggling sticks that are on fire: using phrases from Google (or wherever) without knowing what they mean; putting pieces of text together without understanding them. It is similar to juggling burning sticks in several ways. First, the phrases could be unrelated to each other, and the joogler might not even know it. This is like a juggler touching the sticks, throwing the sticks, yet not actually feeling the sticks or letting the essence of the burning sticks get anywhere near him/her. Second, since he/she is playing with fire, he/she has the possibility of being burned, or being hurt by the appearance of writing jargon without meaning, being a faker, being a person who has used words without understanding them. Third, after the reader tries to make sense out of these discordant pieces of lifted material, the reader gets angry, heated up, as one would if someone were trying to pass off tripe under one's nose, as a genuine piece of writing.

One of the characteristics of this kind of writing is that serious revision of any kind is very difficult. If the writer lifted it without understanding, or with very flimsy understanding, substantial changing of it very likely will only make the situation worse, and does. I'm finding lots more sentences that are complete, grammatical, jargonish, and absolutely inappropriate for the paragraph that they're in. Sometimes I can find them verbatim by using Google; sometimes I can't. But I get angry either way. How could they make such a perfect yet jargonish sentence, and put it in entirely the wrong place? This isn't writing, it's joogling...

trench warfare

2007-07-20T23:05:00.000-07:00

I have students who get the best idea they can about a subject, and then fire away: garbled, somewhat difficult to understand, but genuinely from them, a genuine representation of their thoughts and their grammar. Then, I have students who don't have any idea about the subject, but know how to use Google very well. They know I'll catch them if it's too slick, so they don't steal whole paragraphs at once. They don't even want to steal whole sentences at once (risky), but sometimes they do. Toward the end of the night, they're facing their third body paragraph, or maybe their conclusion, and they copy and paste. Why? They had nothing to say. They had no idea. If it seemed like it held together, would look ok to the teacher, they pasted, printed and ultimately posted.

In many cases I never caught them; I'm still looking (you'll find their papers under their names, in the templates of our highest class weblog)...if I didn't see this so much, I wouldn't be here writing about it. I call it "piecemeal Googling"- the assumption that whole sentences get caught easily, but phrases sometimes fit together well enough for the teacher to assume it was homemade, and that you meant something.

A good question comes up of how I can be sure that this is actually piecemeal copying, as opposed to having ideas, reaching out, finding whole phrases in a dictionary or translator somewhere, and putting them together in accordance with one's ideas. Usually I am able to find the biggest chunk, and match it verbatim with something through Google. Then I know it can't be. But also, occasionally they slip in whole sentences that make no sense at all...and then I realize, they don't even understand, themselves, what they themselves have "written"...

Since I see lack of confidence as the root cause of the problem, I've begun attacking it as such. I have my own system for knowing how much vocabulary they command, how they put together sentences when they literally have no Google to rely on. Working from that end I build their confidence and teach them that they can always have something to say, and that that's always better than copying.

But, they've been copying all their lives. Language learning is copying; they've been copying all their language learning careers. Unlearning something that is so permanently embedded is an interesting process. Kind of like pulling teeth.

slogging

2007-07-18T23:54:00.000-07:00

When one grades too many papers, one's mind threatens to turn to mush, but generally, in ESL, plagiarism stands out like a sore thumb, for having an attitude, being smooth, being whole sentences of verbose prose that may or may not fit into the essay in question.

But lately I've encountered some interesting examples. I have students who seem to copy and paste words, and put them together without quite understanding them. They're pretty good at using Google with key words to get to some pretty decent sites. Often the sites say something related or relevant to the issue at hand. Often they copy pieces that are miniscule enough that it slips through the cracks; maybe they've changed a word or two (this is trying, ineffectively, to paraphrase). But sometimes they don't really understand the words, and then the effect is deadly- they are putting together things that make no sense, when combined as a whole.

Sometimes they run their native language through a computer translator. I'm not sure if I would know this kind of mush from another. I'm not even sure this is plagiarism. If they wrote it, and jammed it through a mush-making translator, that's actually quite original.

Sometimes they look through their stock of old papers, that they've written for me or someone else, looking for a sentence that they've gotten away with before. Just say anything that works, and hope the teacher makes the meaning connections and considers it English. But, being poor readers, they are not necessarily even able to read their own old papers. They sometimes give sentences that make no sense (see post below). The mismatch between the sentence and the essay it's in is not only a grammatical mismatch (the plagiarized sentence is far more grammatical) but also a meaning mismatch - how could they put a sentence like this in a paragraph like that?

At this point, it's already too late. They should have learned how to read, when they had the chance. But that's easier said than done, and goes against all their training, in some cases. To unravel their system, one might have to start at the beginning.

I'd like to give specific examples of what happens. Maybe another time. Right now my mind is mush.

TESOL report

2007-04-13T14:13:00.000-07:00

The following is my honest impression of the discussion that took place at TESOL in Seattle, March 21, 2007. Laurie Moody and I showed up, gave out our handouts, and put chairs in such a way that we could all see each other speak. I can't remember exactly how many attended; it seems it was about twenty, but could have been more.

I started by saying that Discussions were a way for TESOL to open up to its members and find out what they needed, and that the better we could verbalize those requests, the better TESOL could serve us in future conventions. People seemed to jump on this suggestion. We had a brief discussion of how universities could establish a policy against plagiarism- about what Turnitin is, and how it can be used; about reasons people plagiarize (not having the language skill, not really having the mindset that it is wrong). Somewhere in here I got an alarming picture of a place where people do Google searches in internet cafes and copy out entire articles to hand in as assignments (for a Master's program, no less), or pay someone to finish it; these assignments are never actually read very carefully, so in effect people get an entire education without actually writing anything. Rather than pounce on the speaker for distorting reality, other members of the audience verified the account and said that it wasn't even cultural, it was more universal- a tendency to do what's easiest, and get away with what one can. This in turn, however, made students of such systems utterly unprepared for higher education programs where original thinking and writing was expected, required, assumed. Speakers described the horror and shame of having to start at virtual ground zero with their own writing when, in fact, they were sincere and hardworking students in every other way.

So then, the problem, according to an EFL practitioner, is that we are trying to change their ideologies, since, if we do not allow plagiarism, we are up against an entire system. And how are we to do that? We need help from TESOL to say loudly and clearly what plagiarism is, and how we are to fight it. We need practical exercises that orient students toward doing their own work and help us teachers with the process of teaching how NOT to plagiarize and how to make it impossible for students to do it.

Discussants represented a diversity of situations- a boarding school where students did their writing (cutting and pasting) at night (in desperation), a place where a writing center was opened at night, a log kept so that teachers could learn more about students' struggles to produce good writing.

One teacher said that her problem was in defending her ESL students against a school that was stubborn and rigid in its policies, unable to adjust to the fact that her students simply hadn't been trained to know what plagiarism was or how serious its consequences were. She needed help in explaining to administrators why they should be more tolerant of people who simply had not learned what was expected of them.

Here are some comments that I heard:

"I remember being a language learner, lifting phrases because I liked them...it was a stage of language acquisition..."
"Let's be realistic- writing is not their most-loved thing to do..."
"Writing for them is punishment..."
"If students are terrified they'll do what they have to..."
"We should establish a better dialogue with English departments...we need to end the blame game"
"A lot of people are not aware of what they are doing..."

There was some discussion about the integration of skills, so that writing skills, which go along with thinking skills, are developed together with other skills and not isolated to the point where students' writing cannot match their other skills. Not all discrete skills classes are isolated skills classes, it was pointed out. One could integrate the skills on one's own. I pointed out that I was putting writing fluency work into my own classes (see my other TESOL presentation) and made a blatant plug for myself. We also discussed discrete-skills program curricula (and their prevalence compared to content-based curricula) and the ability of programs to adjust to varying skill levels by placing students across levels. In general, they can't. I'm not sure if content-based curricula are going down in number, or holding their own. With such a variety of programs represented in the room- high schools, graduate programs, etc., I'm not sure it was worth pursuing.

One speaker lamented the theoretical bent of preparatory classes, and said that, frankly, the field needed more practical training. As masters and PhD students in the field of TESOL, we come out of these classes with theory but without knowing how to make a test, for example. With plagiarism, stop giving us the theory and show us, walk us through the process. This is what TESOL can do for us. Set up a resource center, give us some tools.

tesol 2007

2007-03-15T21:10:00.000-07:00

Below is the handout for the TESOL 2007 discussion, minus the URL on the top line.

#3120 Defining, detecting and dealing with online plagiarism
CALL-IS Discussion, TESOL 2007, Seattle WA USA
Wed., Mar. 21st, 2007, 7:00-7:45pm, CC211
Thomas Leverett, So. Illinois Univ.-Carbondale
Carbondale IL USA leverett@siu.edu

Increasing use of online environments has changed the nature of the battle against plagiarism in several ways:

1. For most students, writing a paper at night, at home, on their pc, plagiarism is a highlight and a click away, and they are quite used to these activities. Many come from social networks & web environments that are similar to ours but perhaps with more copying, less ethical qualms about doing so. “Students are merely leveraging the same tools that elsewhere are being lauded as the foundations of citzen journalism, collaborative writing and Web 2.0…The online world favors cooperation and collaboration…this is a real community” (Wagstaff, 2007)

2. As the world gets smaller, rigid sanctions against plagiarism appear to be more extreme, and the pressure from continuous contact with other cultures pulls us into understanding if not allowing other value systems. Teachers’ values, and those of the academic establishment, are not changing significantly, however; if anything, the conflict over how seriously plagiarism is taken appears to be widening, becoming more frequent, and expanding to other fronts.

3. Plagiarism has become easier to find and track down, when electronic search engines can find any string of words anywhere on the open free web; free and cheap software is available to help teachers find it.

4. On the other hand, since entire term papers can be delivered electronically nationwide or worldwide, without necessarily being stored on the web, it is easier for a paper mill to do a flourishing business, and easier to spread papers geographically so that no teacher sees the same one twice. A presentation at SIUC found 72 Free term paper sites; 195 term paper mills, and 80 more devoted to specific topics (Nelms 2006).

Defining plagiarism:

This has not changed significantly, but is still a complex issue. Nelms classifies plagiarism into three kinds: intentional, unintentional and “patchwriting” (also known as “cut-and-paste”; the latter is a kind of unintentional, he says. For international students, it is very common simply to not know the rules, or to assume, for example, that mentioning the author makes using quotes optional. It is also increasingly common to come from situations where exchange of phrases and sentences is virtually habit, as expected as, for example, sharing an eraser.

Detecting plagiarism

One approach is: when you see it, you’ve already lost. This tends to put the pressure on you, the teacher, to set the scene with appropriate remarks, and assignment patterns, that will make plagiarizing the more difficult option for the student (see below). Here are some guidelines, however, once you've noticed it:
1. If it doesn’t sound like the student talking, it probably isn’t
2. If the student is getting “help,” where & when was he/she told not to?
Was it clear from the start that he/she was to do it alone?
3. Ask questions: can you talk about what you wrote? Are you sure you understood the rules? Do you understand the consequences?

Dealing with plagiarism:

The following suggestions are adapted from Leverett (2006).
1. Don’t let it pass; don’t let students go on without knowing exactly what it is.
2. Present it early, carefully, thoroughly, non-judgmentally
3. Use Turnitin (or some similar service) & tell everyone about it; better yet, teach students to use it themselves before handing the paper in.
4. Assume it’s unintentional whenever possible; give students an out
5. Put yourself on the students’ side- against a hostile and unforgiving world
6. Raise the stakes- make students publish everything, and let them know: “the foul taste of copied material lingers long after the sweet taste of a passing grade is gone”
7. Organize all assignments so that they are harder to plagiarize:
a. Base them on things that just happened, or happen only in class
b. don’t use assignments that can be completed from the web
c. require specific components on the paper and change those regularly
d. require process steps, ensuring teacher involvement at each step
e. make students talk about their papers regularly
f. require metalearning essay
g. require up-to-date sources
h. change subject every term

Bibliography:

Branagan, C. (2001, June). Rutgers study: Web makes student cheating easier. Eschool News. http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showstory.cfm?ArticleID=2638. Accessed 3-07.

Nelms, G. (2006). Review of “Plagiarism as Education Opportunity” Workshop, presentation at SIUC, December.

Leverett, T. (2006). Internet Plagiarism. CALL-IS Discussion, TESOL 2006, Tampa FL.
http://www.siu.edu/~cesl/teachers/pd/ip.html.

McCabe, D. and G. Pavela. New honor codes for a new generation. Inside Higher Ed.
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/03/14/pavela1. Accessed 3-07.

Standler, R. (2000). Plagiarism in Colleges in USA. http://www.rbs2.com/plag.htm. Accessed 3-07.

Wagstaff, J. (2007, Mar. 8). Plagiarising students, or wiki-style collaboration? Loosewire blog. http://www.loosewireblog.com/2007/03/plagiarising_st.html. Accessed 3-07.

Plagiarism Resource site: http://www.plagiarism.phys.virginia.edu/.

TESOL 2007 presentation

2007-03-15T20:34:00.000-07:00

The TESOL handout, in its corrected entirety, is above, so I am using this space for notes that I have taken, and resources that I have found, in the year since we did our first discussion (that site, with its sources, is here).

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Poser, B. (2006, Apr. 25). In defense of Kaavya Viswanathan. Language Log. http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003068.html. Accessed 3-07.

An interesting post, about a plagiarism case in which a well-known novelist was found to have lifted a fair amount of material, whether consciously or unconsciously. His defense lies on the premise that many elements of culture and literature are imprinted in our brains- and therefore one could argue for unintentional plagiarism in this case?

And what about the language learner? Does this person also not try to imprint linguistic forms and statements into the brain, and thus have them there, intentionally or not, when it comes time to say something?

I'm not taking a stand, just asking. The post has some interesting links, for the entire story of one of the year's biggest plagiarism cases.

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HSC: All my own work. http://amow.boardofstudies.nsw.edu.au/guide.html.

An Australian tutorial to help teachers and/or students deal with plagiarism; it appears to be good. My only criticism of this at this moment is that I cannot determine what "HSC" refers to; it is not stated directly anywhere that I can find. But I have not read it completely either.

Whitfield, N. (2007, Mar. 1). All your own work. Neil Whitfield's English and ESL site. http://neilwhitfield.wordpress.com/2007/03/01/all-your-own-work/. Accessed 3-07. An ESL teacher's use of the HSC site, informative partly for his comments to a student.

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SIUC story (in reverse order)

Hale, C. (2007, Jan. 12). Professor threatens suit against Poshard. Southern Illinoisan. http://www.southernillinoisan.com/articles/2007/01/12/top/18843884.txt. Accessed 3-07.

Weisenberger, B. (2006, Oct.). Plagiarism group gets more possible cases. Daily Egyptian, So. Illinois Univ. http://media.www.siude.com/media/storage/paper1096/news/2006/10/02/Campus/Plagiarism.Group.Gets.More.Possible.Cases-2318405.shtml?norewrite200610030035&sourcedomain=www.siude.com. Accessed 3-07.

Chronicle Online (2006, Sept. 8). Alleged plagiarism at Southern Illinois Univ. to be investigated by new commission. http://chronicle.com/news/article/956/alleged-plagiarism-at-southern-illinois-u-to-be-investigated-by-new-commission. Accessed 3-07.

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My comments on plagiarism (also in reverse order):

Plagiarism revisited, 1-13-2007
Big weekend for plagiarism, 10-02-2006.
Plagiarism at SIUC, 9-10-2006

introduction

2007-03-15T20:30:00.000-07:00

I've collected information about plagiarism for a couple of years:

here- a TESOL 2006 discussion-

and here, my original site.

Neither are working for the newer stuff. It's gotten big- too big to hold. And I need to comment on it a little...so I've started this one. I hope it is useful!