[Air-L] Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age

Alex Halavais alex at halavais.net
Mon Aug 2 15:34:11 PDT 2010


> ps. I write this as someone who hasn't had a problem with students sourcing
> facts from Wikipedia.

This turn of phrase could be interpreted in at least two ways:

1. Your students regularly use Wikipedia to discover facts, and cite
Wikipedia in the process, and you don't consider this a bad thing.

2. Your students have not cited Wikipedia. (Though I would be shocked
if they were not *using* it.)

Generally, none of us are expected to cite "common knowledge" as it is
represented in dictionaries and encyclopedias. Of course, if this were
truly knowledge held in common, we would have need of neither.

The question is whether text that you re-use verbatim should always be
attributed. I have always considered this to be the case, but was in a
discussion with colleagues about IRB applications and some of the
proforma text that frequently goes into creating them. Those who would
never find cutting-and-pasting acceptable in an article are fine with
cutting and pasting "boilerplate" in the form of consent forms or
other materials that are common across similar protocols, and would
never think to cite it.

At first I was surprised by this, but at some level, we consider that
kind of writing to be "technology." Much in the same way as we might
copy computer code from a cookbook without attributing it, we take
something that "works" for a human subjects protocol. Often, the
boilerplate language is provided to us by our IRBs so that we can do
just that. My partner indicates that this kind of copy-and-pasting
from boilerplate is not at all unusual in the legal profession, and I
suspect it happens in other places where the sort of "ultimate
wording" already has been reached.

I am far from an apologist for plagiarism (despite what I may have
suggested elsewhere: http://alex.halavais.net/how-to-cheat-good) but
it seems that given the common undergraduate experience, finding the
words that work within a formal--almost legalistic--structure is not
exactly an unexpected response. I'm not saying we should blame
ourselves, as faculty, for student plagiarism--and I have little
patience for those who claim that their questions are so original that
they never have to worry about plagiarism--but I can at least see a
corner there of why students think this is acceptable. For too many of
them, school is not about communicating unique ideas, but rather
crossing off a very clearly defined objective in order to achieve an
acceptable grade.

Best,

Alex




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