Twitter and the right-wing and academic press are abuzz with accusations of plagiarism directed at a Princeton professor who allegedly plagiarized and plagiarized parts of his dissertation and a 2015 book. The accusations have prompted their side counterclaims: that a flawed or missing citation or even confusion is record-keeping should not be confused with systematic fraud.
To this, the professor’s critics respond, plagiarism is not simply a matter of copying and pasting. It also involves, as economic historian Phillip W. Magness points out, rearranging words and rearranging quotations. Magness goes on to cite the professional standards presented on the American Historical Association website.
Subtle forms of plagiarism include ‘an inadequate paraphrase that makes only superficial changes to a text’ resulting in ‘a patchwork of original and plagiarized texts that echo the original sources in distinct ways’ such as ‘cosmetic changes’ in the wording or order of the original text.”
I am not here to judge this particular issue. Instead, I want to ask why students cheat—why they copy and paste from websites or rely on term paper writing sites or pay another student to write a paper.
Is it because these particular students are fundamentally dishonest or academically unmotivated? Is it because many students are lazy and procrastinators and lack proper time management skills? Is it because the culture of cheating is rampant on many campuses, often supported by fraternities? Is it because cheaters are ignorant of the rules of academic honesty in higher education? Or is it because some students are desperate to meet their own (or their parents’) expectations of their abilities?
Dave Tomar has recently been released The Complete Guide to Contract Fraud in Higher Education offers another explanation: that cheating is, to a large extent, motivated by structural factors:
- Students who are overwhelmed by their academic and extracurricular workload.
- Pressure to get into high-demand and highly competitive degrees.
- Institutional and non-institutional scholarships that require students to maintain a minimum grade point average.
- The willingness of many colleges and universities to enroll students with substandard English or math skills.
In his gloss on the book’s arguments, the former college president and Forbes contributor Michael T. Nietzel succinctly summarizes some of the institutional factors that contribute to cheating: “The failure of colleges to train students how to write effectively, writing assignments that are boring and repetitive, lack of support, and adequate services for struggling students, overworked notaries, disengaged professors” and pressure on institutions to increase retention and graduation rates, rigor be damned.
I couldn’t agree more. If a single student cheats, that’s the student’s problem. But when many plagiarize, the problem lies less with campus culture (though that can certainly make the situation worse) but with structural variables that we have the power to address.
Tomar is himself a former academic ghostwriter who appeared in a widely read article before publishing a 294-page account of the paper mill industry. Not surprisingly, his claim to have written custom papers for everything from introductory college courses to Ph.D. dissertations caused a sensation, producing outbursts of outrage and denials that anything like what he described could happen at scale.
But his work also generated some accolades. The Wall Street Journal called Tomar’s revelations a “chilling indictment of the current shortcomings of the modern American university as a meritocratic, credentialing institution, much less a home for mental and moral growth.” Similarly, Washington Post called his exposé a “stunning tale of academic fraud … shocking and compelling.”
wrote Washington MonthlyTomar’s findings were “ultimately an indictment not only of the paper mill industry, but of the modern system of higher education which allows the industry to flourish.”
As an insider, Tomar is well placed to speak truth to power: our institutions create conditions where plagiarism, in particular, can flourish relatively unchecked.
No one knows how common plagiarism is or whether its incidence is increasing. Our measures, such as self-reporting or the number of cases handled by campus academic integrity committees, are highly unreliable. Any statistics we have from campus reporting almost certainly pale in comparison to the number of cases handled by faculty “informally” or that go undetected.
But I can personally attest to the fact that in my large sections of 3,200 to 400 students studying US history, plagiarism occurs with some frequency, even though the students know that every written assignment goes through a detector. plagiarism.
So what should we do? Some steps are obvious:
- Look for frequent writing with little action, including writing in class.
- Encourage every faculty member to devote time to teaching writing.
- Work with instructors to teach them how to design plagiarism-proof writing assignments.
- Encourage instructors to break longer writing assignments into separate components (eg, a proposal, a bibliography, a draft thesis statement, an outline, a first draft, and revisions) with specific due dates to ensure for students to stay on track.
But if plagiarism is a structural or systemic problem, we need to do more:
- Colleges and universities need to rethink the academic workload of students. This will likely require institutions to recalibrate the number of credit hours assigned to particular classes and consider introducing credit courses (such as internships, studio courses, and for-credit, supervised internships) with different expectations. of workload.
- Writing across the curriculum must become more than a catchphrase. Instead of relegating writing to a limited number of rhetoric and composition courses or a handful of writing-intensive courses, we really need to include writing throughout the curriculum.
- Writing instruction should become a larger part of instructors’ responsibilities. This will require campuses to do much more to prepare instructors to formulate writing assignments, instruct students in discipline-based writing conventions, and provide regular and substantive feedback.
My own teaching assistants worked hard to provide their students with concise and actionable written advice on how to:
- Distinguish between opinion and analysis.
- Understand that much academic writing is not descriptive, but argumentative, persuasive, and analytical, and requires students to formulate an original, provocative, and persuasive thesis.
- Focus a letter around a core topic.
- Avoid vague generalities.
- Paraphrase effectively and don’t just engage in lifting the text.
- Don’t just cite evidence, but interpret and evaluate those sources.
Teaching students to write effectively seems to me to be the single most important task of higher education. The inability to write clearly and persuasively will inevitably impose a glass ceiling on our graduates. Even worse, those who cannot write clearly cannot communicate or debate effectively.
Not only is fluency in speaking no substitute for clarity in writing, but students who cannot express their thoughts in logical, coherent, and comprehensible language have not truly mastered a given topic.
Teaching writing is an art, but it is one that we are all capable of mastering.
Steven Mintz is a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.
