Is Plagiarism Dead?

Being a member of the older generation has some perks. First of all having lived for a while you actually experienced historical events, be it the Vietnam War, Woodstock, the Summer of  Love or using the Readers Guide to Periodic Literature.  You remember that, the big red book that let you find things that were published in magazines.

Growing up in the olden days you were cautioned by your teachers not plagiarize. You were never supposed to copy word for word from a resource without appropriate notation and you were cautioned against using other peoples’ ideas as your own. But what about now? As you peruse from one website to another you see the exact same words published without any proper citations. Website after website has the same information, word for word, being presented as their own thoughts.  If all of these websites, some of which that have hundreds of thousands of users, can do it, why can’t a student.

As a school administrator I deal with this problem frequently. Those teachers that are competent often find information that has been plagiarized. They highlight it on the student’s paper and provide copies of the resource where it came from.  There is a whole industry built around preventing plagiarism using sites such as Turnitin.com.  The less then competent teacher rarely finds an incidence of plagiarism and students joyfully accept this as an opportunity to cut and paste entire reports. The question we need to ask is; where is the problem? Is this a student problem? A teacher problem? A technology problem? Or is it a change in how the educational world should do business?

As an educator I often turn to the internet to find ideas for speeches and the like. If I find something that represents what I want to say I take it, adjust and use it. I don’t always give credit to the source as it was a basis for the start of what I wanted to say. Is this right? Is this wrong? Who is to say? Why should I work extra hard to do something that is easily available? If someone else has built a house that I like do I knock it down to rebuild the same thing? Not too likely.

Often time’s students are doing the same thing. Yes, of course there are lazy students who simply cut and paste and submit work without giving it a thought of their own. But what of the ones who look for items that reflect their thinking, combine them and present them as their own? Are they plagiarizing or are they simply using the current modern day tools that are available? Should a teacher accept a well-crafted essay that a student put together using the ideas of others to reflect their own ideas? Where does plagiarism start and end?

I don’t really have an answer to this. But as technology expands and it becomes easier and easier to get information, shouldn’t we adjust our methods of evaluation? Don’t we all use technology to our benefit? How is this different from our students? If they can clearly organize and understand the information that they collected, shouldn’t we just accept it? Does it truly make a difference how much of the writing is in a student’s own words?  If commercial websites plagiarize with impunity, why should it be any different for our students? Just as the Readers Guide to Periodic Literature has been relegated to the dust bin, should we do the same with our plagiarism rules?