Computers and the Internet have been touted as the ushers of the Information Age, aiding learning and making knowledge more accessible. But some Loyola teachers say that accessibility has helped lead to an increase in plagiarism and cheating.
Robert Gnuse, professor of religious studies, and English instructor Paulette Swartzfager say plagiarism has changed the way they teach their courses and the assignments they give. Gnuse said he stopped assigning term papers because he “can catch some but not all,” and that he does not believe it’s fair to punish the ones he can catch and not the ones he can’t catch.
Swartzfager now gives in-class essays because she says plagiarism is “affecting the way I teach and my style. It’s bothersome because the credibility of the course goes down.”
Swartzfager and Robert Thomas, environmental communications chair, said they compare these in-class assignments to out-of-class assignments to judge if their students’ work is their own.
According to plagiarism.org, a recent Center for Academic Integrity study reports that 80 percent of college students admit to cheating at least once.
“When teachers spend a lot of time reading papers, it is a real affront to them when students short them on that,” Thomas said. He said that teachers don’t give term papers because they want to torture students and make their lives hard, but so students can “learn things to function in the world.” Teachers do understand the pressures students face, such as doing well in school, maintaining a job as well as being a full time student and just running out of time, he said.
Gnuse and Swartzfager both said they think some students plagiarize because they feel they need to be on the same playing field as their peers, some of whom are plagiarizing.
One reason plagiarism has become more common is easily accessability from “digital term paper mills,” such as schoolsucks.com and A1ltermpaper.com. According to Plagiarism.org, digital term paper mills exist on the Internet that provide pre-written term papers for use by students looking for a way to avoid doing the assignments themselves.
“More than your generation can ever handle is in front of you. People see it as a domain of learning. Some students don’t see the creative side of putting it all together, i.e. using ‘cut’ and ‘paste’ functions, as cheating,” Thomas said about the digital paper mills.
According to Loyola’s Undergraduate Bulletin, plagiarism is “the false assumption of authorship: the wrongful act of taking the product of another person’s mind, and presenting it as one’s own.” The Modern Language Association Handbook says it “may take the form of repeating another’s sentences as your own, adopting a particularly apt phrase as your own, paraphrasing someone else’s argument as your own, or even presenting someone else’s line of thinking in the development of a thesis as though it were your own.”
According to studies done by Plagiarism.org, many of the documents available from the term paper outlets are poorly written and are easily recognizable by teachers. Swartzfager says this ability is “really hard to explain. Most of us [teachers] have experience. We can detect style, but we can’t always prove [plagiarism].”
Teachers also can use plagiarism detection services such as Turnitin.com to find out whether or not a student plagiarized a paper. The teachers can also send in papers for $1 each to these services, or simply type in a sentence or phrase into Google.com and see if the search engine returns a full term paper or a paper mill.
As one solution to plagiarism, communications professor Larry Lorenz said, “Faculty can devise projects that pose questions that can only be answered by the students alone rather than handing out term paper topics that have been written about by others or which for-hire term paper writers that can bat out with little difficulty.”
But how common do students think plagiarism is on campus?
Justin Moore, drama/communications sophomore, said it’s “everywhere I look.”
But Beth Robinson, French and English writing junior, said “I think it depends on the class you’re taking because some classes are easier to cheat in than others.”
Alicia Labat, general studies freshman, said, “As a freshman, I don’t see it, but being that it’s a college campus, I’m sure it is [common].”
From a teacher’s standpoint, Thomas said that “plagiarism has become pandemic throughout academia.”
Thomas Smith, associate dean of Arts and Sciences, says the Dean’s Student Advisory Committee recently formed a subcommittee to work on creating an honor code. Smith said he hopes that the development will be one of the accomplishments this year.
The Undergraduate Bulletin says that if a teacher catches a student plagiarizing or cheating, the teacher has the right to decide on the punishment, whether it is an “F” on the paper, test or for the course. For second offenses, a student may be expelled from the university.
According to the Undergraduate Bulletin, “Faculty members are to report to the dean of the student’s college any instance of plagiarism and the manner in which it was resolved.”
If there is a case in which the accused student says that he didn’t understand the assignment, and the teacher still penalizes him for plagiarism, Smith said, “It’s not a judgment call. A student should be aware of what constitutes plagiarism when they are admitted to the university. Ignorance is not an excuse.”
“Integrity consists of the kind of choices you make when no one’s looking,” Smith said.
“And those are the kinds of choices that make us the people we become.”
