October 2006 — Features
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Fighting Plagiarism :: Taking the Work Out of Homework
With the rise of the internet, schools are seeing an epidemic of cut-and-paste plagiarism. But the same technology that’s making plagiarism easy is being used by teachers to catch copycats in the act.
IT WAS ONE of those assignments that Advanced Placement English
students at Oak Park High School in Ventura, CA, love to get. The
students had just finished reading Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World,
and their teacher, Roland Herberg, asked them to pair up and create
brochures about the book. Herberg’s instructions were simple: Each
brochure had to contain an essay about totalitarian tendencies in
modern society, and all of the work had to be original. The rest of the
design elements were up to the students; Herberg told the kids they
could be as creative as they wanted to be.
One pair of students, however, clearly wasn’t creative enough. Their brochure, titled “Religion Is Terrorism,” presented a fully integrated argument about the negative consequences of religion. Herberg, no stranger to the capabilities of 17-year-olds, was suspicious immediately. It’s not that the argument wasn’t strong; on the contrary, it was so sophisticated that Herberg felt it had to belong to someone else. Sure enough, when the teacher plugged the title phrase into Google, he discovered that the first half of the four-page brochure was almost completely taken from a book on the same subject.
Herberg gave the students a C-minus on their project and confronted them. It became evident that one student was far more culpable than the other. The student became indignant when Herberg accused her of plagiarism, denying ever visiting some of the websites Herberg said he had found. Days later, when the confrontation had escalated to the counseling office, the student admitted she had plagiarized, but insisted the act was neither immoral nor unethical. To add insult to injury, the student then wrote Herberg a nasty letter, accusing him of “stifling her creativity.” Herberg, understandably, was astounded.
“She understood it was plagiarism, but didn’t feel she had done anything wrong,” he says, still looking back on the experience with disbelief. “She had put a lot of time and effort into getting the sources from the internet. By putting all of it into a different medium, she honestly thought it would be okay.”
Unfortunately, what happened at Oak Park is happening on campuses nationwide—plagiarism is on the rise. With veritable libraries at their fingertips, students see nothing wrong with borrowing a sentence or paragraph or page from something they find online. What’s more, the prevalence of e-mail and instant messaging makes sharing derivative material easier than ever before. On the flipside, teachers are far too busy to track down original sources unless the offense is obvious. The result is education’s own Wild West, in which ideas are stolen and repurposed without retribution, hurting those students who actually produce original work.
