NYT on Online Plagiarism

Submitted by mre on August 22, 2004 - 23:45.

The New York Times has posted an interesting article on online plagiarism and paper sellers. Writing as someone who's taken several spins through the online mills myself, wondering how much my students might find in such places, I think Jenny Edbauer's recent blog post offers an interesting perspective on how rhet/comp practitioners spin their assignments to students. Margaret Price's CCC article offers another smart perspective. According to the New York Times article, "While 10 percent of college students admitted to Internet plagiarism in 1999, that number rose to around 40 percent in 2003," and "2 percent of students purchase papers online". So what are you doing about online plagiarism -- other than perhaps unethically ceding ownership of your students' writing to turnitin.com's database?

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platypus matt's picture

Plagiarism

Submitted by platypus matt on August 23, 2004 - 14:32.

I tell students that plagiarism is not a matter of stealing, since I don't believe in the myth of spontaneous creation of ideas. However, I do tell them that copying/pasting from another source without citing it is dishonest, but more because they are lying to me about the nature of the work they have performed; it's one thing to paraphrase, another to summarize, another to muse without recourse to books and texts lying around.

Where, after all, does plagiarism end? Must I consult a giant database of used expressions to ensure that even this sentence isn't plagiarized from some source I'm not consciously aware of?

I'm sure the RIAA and MPAA just loves our emphasis on rooting and punishing plagiarism. I think about that whenever I choose to phrase it differently, and take time to explain that ideas and expressions are "ownable" only with recourse to a very arbitrary and unfair set of tyrannical laws generated by the ruling class.