Rising incidences of plagiarism in undergraduate work and how it's facilitated by internet paper mills is getting a lot of attention these days. One thing that frequently escapes these observations, however, is what effect this focus on policing is having on teaching.

The following are themes extracted from various conferences, workshops, and seminars hosted by the CBB Plagiarism project. I may not be able to properly attribute each meme, so I would like to first acknowledge Chris Anson (NC State), Russell Hunt (St. Thomas University), Rebecca Howard (Syracuse), Tracy Hamler Carrick (Colby), Tom Tietenberg (Colby), Judy Montgomery (Bowdoin), and the grant project lead Michael Hanrahan (Bates).

This synthesis is primarily reportage on my part. Credit for the ideas mentioned here belongs to the various presenters and participants of the CBB sponsored events. I will gladly add attribution by comment for any folks I might not have mentioned.

CBB Plagiarism website

video streams of speakers

Many of the participants in this year's events have remarked that in most cases plagiarism is inadvertent rather than malicious. Consequently we should be looking at occurrences of this type of plagiarism as teaching opportunities instead of disciplinary matters. At what point are we failing our students by focusing so heavily on policing and detection? Many of the faculty involved in this discourse have stressed the importance of using occurrences of plagiarism as "teaching moments" rather than immediately seeking disciplinary action.

Is it fair to treat inadvertent and malicious plagiarism in the same way in terms of disciplinary action? (Howard, Tietenberg)

Rebecca Howard provides the following guidelines for understanding the different types of academic transgression that currently all bear the same label ("plagiarism"):

• insufficient citation
• patchwriting [1]
• fraud

These categories allow us to specifically identify problems in students work, and act on them, each in an appropriate manner. An instance of insufficient citation or patchwriting might elicit a returned paper, with guidelines for improvement, while rarer cases of outright fraud would still merit disciplinary measures from the institution.

A general consensus emerged among faculty attending a talk with Becky Howard (at Colby march 4th) and again at the Bowdoin event regarding causes: plagiarism arises from a lack of critical reading ability. if students cannot comprehend the material in a way that allows them to critique it, to make it their own, they will inevitably be forced to rephrase the content in a manner that is prone to fall into what is commonly regarded as plagiarism. Thus, engaging the issue of plagairism must in the first instance deal with developing students' critical reading ability.

[1] Patchwriting, referred to by other sources as "mosaic plagiarism," is the instance of the student lacking the ability to reconfigure a concept and linguistic construction to their own work, thereby conspicuous chunks of text eappear verbatim, or altered slightly.)