With term paper season upon us, it seems that the media is awash in stories about educational institutions battling the plague of plagiarism made possible by the rise of the internet, including the use of anti-cheating services. The Washington Post includes an op-ed on the subject suggesting that plagiarism isn’t necessarily all that bad:
The proliferation of sites like these leaves teachers with an even more vexing problem: how to test what students really know. The time-honored paper now teaches students a very different skill set, one that appears to be unintentional and largely unrecognized — but one that’s much closer to what I do at work these days. One university professor, writing anonymously on his “concernedprofessor” blog, notes that students today create “hyper-plagiarism which becomes harder and harder to catch. While these chimera-esque papers can, most of the time, be easily spotted through the mixing of language styles, clever students can pass these off throughout their academic careers with little worry.”
My transfer from education to the world of business has reminded me just how important it is to be able to synthesize content from multiple sources, put structure around it and edit it into a coherent, single-voiced whole. Students who are able to create convincing amalgamations have gained a valuable business skill. Unfortunately, most schools fail to recognize that any skills have been used at all, and an entire paper can be discarded because of a few lines repeated from another source without quotation marks.
The author has a point - the ability to compile, distill, and organize information is an extremely handy one to have in the business world. Within my team at work, we regularly plagiarize each other’s work in the name of efficiently communicating useful information. Because it’s understood that we’ll do this, and it’s a sign of mutual respect, it’s not a problem, and we’re better for the experience.
However, I thought the term paper traditionally sought to teach not only the ability to accumulate, organize, and distill information.but also to think logically and critically, and to express those thoughts.
Plagiarism sucks in part because it’s tantamount to theft of intellectual property. True, in this information age, the line between plagiarism and sharing interesting information encountered online can be extremely fuzzy.but if you’re capable of communicating original thought and/or creativity, you at least deserve to be credited for that.
However, where plagiarism is particularly insidious in an educational environment is, I think, that it circumvents the goal of students learning for themselves how to think and to communicate, two skills that are woefully lacking in American society today.
There’s nothing wrong with referencing the ideas and thoughts of others. However, claiming their concepts as your own in lieu of actual critical thought on your part when the task is to learn how to engage in such thought is unfortunate enough that I’m not completely intolerant of schools’ measured use of anti-cheating technology.