Violation
I
had two students plagiarise the other day. There they sat, The First and The
Second, before me. “I see you two here, having taken this course without a
grain of seriousness for the whole semester, having sat together during the
whole of our time together, neither contributing half the effort necessary for
both of you to succeed, and then these arrive on my desk.” Two sharply graded
papers are placed before them. In each appears the same argument structure, the
same examples (granted, taken straight from my own words) and unfortunately
also the same definition of a given term, nearly word for word. (An entire term
defined by such similar words.) I had not yet convicted them, I was open to
having my mind changed on the issue, though I certainly leaned heavily to one
side on the issue.
“So
what really happened?” The First had missed a class, and had naturally spoken
to his good friend, The Second, about what he had missed. The Second passed his
notes to The First, and The First copied a sentence directly from those notes
into an essay. Plagiarism. Naturally, this landed The First and The Second in
my office. After all, good friends always sit together, move together and think
together. They also hand in papers together, so The First’s paper ended up on
top of The Second’s, and so when it comes time to grade, the paper of The First
followed swiftly on the heels and the words of that of The Second. It was
copied, of that there is not doubt (even the notes are produced to demonstrate
the provenance of the words), but the question of violation is still
unanswered. Ought they to have known that this was a violation? How reasonable
is it to assume that this kind of behaviour is acceptable?
Two
pictures of plagiarism; 1: plagiarism is using the words found on pages (of the
Internet, of course, never a book) without a citation. In order to combat this
issue, all high school students learn to use quotation marks according to the
rules, they learn the form of a parenthetical reference, and they learn to make
bibliographies according to the standards of the Modern Languages Association.
These are all useful tools, but for what are they to be used? Definition 2:
plagiarism is using someone else’s ideas and passing them off as one’s own.
Whose ideas are worthy of citation? Anyone’s but one’s own. Of course, there is
the relevant issue of context here. Citation is context-dependent because there
is always a reader, an audience. If I assign a chapter of Plato as the basis
for an essay, I am the grader, I am the audience, and therefore it is
reasonable to assume that just referring to “the ideas of Plato” is oftentimes
sufficient to direct my attention to the assigned chapter without explicit citation. Referring to the notes of a friend does
not pass the test; it is not evident merely from context.
With
these two definitions of plagiarism in hand, allow us to return to the question
of The Violation: ought The First and The Second to have known that this was
plagiarism? Yes, they ought. But the issue of responsibility is a far deeper
matter. They sail through the doors of university with the first definition of
plagiarism in hand, and (allegedly) all the technical tools they need to avoid these
kinds of Violations. Such is the product of their high school education. The
second definition, however, is far beyond anything they have ever encountered
before. They have no concept of intellectual property, no concept of
intellectualism.
For
these two, and sadly they are not alone, jobs are about money, and jobs require
a degree, and a degree requires grades, and so there they sit in my classroom
waiting for the grades to be doled out so they can get on with it. This is a
completely infected notion of education, and a viral epidemic. Education is
about wisdom, knowledge and skills, and grades are merely a way to evaluate a
student’s progress in achieving these things.
The
student who focuses on taking in what is put before them rather than on their
grades knows that they must make these ideas their own, knows that their own
comprehension and subsequent ability to express these ideas to others is what’s
really going on in education. These students also don’t plagiarise. It would
never cross their minds to do so, and they have an acute ability to recognise
when an idea is their own and when it is an idea taken from someone else. (Not
always clear is when the idea falls within the implicit context of the
assignment, and this obscurity sometimes leads to unfortunate consequences for
those who truly don’t deserve them. Furthermore, those honest students are the
ones who have the most trouble with accusations of plagiarism because at stake
is not their grade but their integrity, their moral fibre, and often their
passion.)
So
what is the story at the end of the day? How do we avoid plagiarism in future?
Obviously students of the second kind, those who don’t have a merely
instrumental view of education, are better able to avoid plagiarism. So clearly
our education system has to start churning out serious intellectuals if we want
the majority of these Violations to go away, but the virus begins far before
the education system gets at these kids, and thus it falls beyond their sole
responsibility to eradicate the problem. The ever-increasing prevalence of the
instrumental attitude towards school (eruditio
instrumentalis) is a subspecies of a greater virus (tutto instrumentalis), and we need to root out the bigger problem.
Actually, if we started collectively shifting our focus away from personal
fortunes towards more intrinsic goods (such as universal human rights, dignity
and freedom) we might find that the disappearance of plagiarism went
undetected, drowned out by the march towards something far greater.
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