Plagiarism Cases

Last week, I discovered that four students in my class of 60-odd people had plagiarized their coursework essay.  The essay was based on the careful reading of two texts that students selected from a list, and engaged in a compare and contrast of different theories of corporate governance.  I discovered these cases through one of the usual plagiarism software packages.  Interestingly, all of the cases seem to involve cutting and pasting passages from the very documents that the students were supposed to discuss in their essay.  Some of these students were exchanage students on the Erasmus program, but some were regular students studying in my program.  One gentleman was in his 7th semester of studies. 

 I wrote on the students feedback form: "The main problem with your essay is that much of its content has been inappropriately copied from other sources.  Please see me during my office hours."

The final lecture of the course today was on the topic of "corruption."  Do people behave corruptly because of their individual moral failings, or does the social structure that they inhabit create pressures and temptations that systemically produce corrupt behavior?  These questions apply equally to the small bribes of petty businesspeople or the acquisence to moral wrongs of totalitarian regimes. In the university, we see this from the 2,000 words of cut-and-paste lies from students to the systematic deception of Guttenberg's PhD.  Understanding the answer to our corruption question requires us to take account of both the "agency" and the "structure," whereby agency can include the self-deception of both the individual or group.  I didn't know that this was dishonest because everybody is doing it!  Or it was imperative to achieve the result, so I just did it!  Or I knew it was wrong, but I did it for the good of someone else!

Following the corruption lecture, I held office hours: two of the four students that plagiarized their coursework indeed came to see me. One guy claimed that this was his first time doing academic writing, and did not understand how to use citations and quotations. The other guy said that he had never written in English before, and wanted the quality of academic language to be just as high as the original text that he was summarizing (most of his term paper was cut and pasted from the article that he was "summarizing").  An interesting perspective!  This student seemed to be aware that copying the passages was "wrong."  But he rationalized taking the words in an inappropriate fashion and pretending these were his own as a means to the end of a "better" paper.  Is it the results that count, isn't it?  While the aspect of human agency is clear, what is the structure around us that brings this student into the moral dilemma in the first place?  I find it interesting how changing the rules of the game from the dominant more of testing students on factual knowledge (often which can be memorized) toward critical thinking (and showing one's line of reasoning in relation to different sets of values) exposes the very fragile foundation of learning. 

On another front, I also discovered that one Chinese PhD student with top marks from a top university has plagiarized her English language published paper based on a CSR article from Caroll.  The entire literature discussion was cut and pasted in from Caroll, whereby the direct quotations and citations are also pasted in (minus the quotation marks).  The whole section is a kind of abridged version of the original.  Her PhD application was also plagiarized by cutting and pasting large sections from an article from Hambrick and co-authors.

Already back around 1994, an undergraduate student under my supervision at Columbia University wrote a fantastic BSc honors thesis on  "cheating." She interviewed fellow students and found that cheating was rampant at that time.  I was most impressed by her evidence that certain "fraternities" had computers with a database of all term papers written from past alumni that were regularly re-used, recycled, and combined into ever new term papers from the next cohort of students.