Nick Carbone sent a note to
techrhet
subscribers last night that the news about Canadian student Jesse Rosenfeld’s
refusal to submit his work to turnitin.com surfaced in the mainstream via
CNN and Court TV. I’d been following this issue with interest since I
first read about it over at
Jerz’s
Literacy Weblog and
Kairosnews.
As I see it, turnitin.org is challenged by an image problem; its name (more importantly than its utility) implicates guilt among students mandated to use it. I guess that’s the root objection felt by Rosenfeld. In a sense, the system is subjecting him to a damaging, a priori criminalization. Guilty until proven innocent. And plagiarism sifters generally work that way. But
plagiarized essays don’t merit serious consideration for the fulfillment of
academic calls. Plagiarism is rather like a sucker punch to the integrity
of higher education, and the Internet is enabling rapidly recurrent, heavy
blows. We should be able to agree that cheats should be given the old
heave-ho before any instructor pours carefully, but unwittingly, over the
text. Right? But there’s always more to it. Turnitin.com could start
by trying on a new name, such as surveillanceworks.net.
One-draft submissions have necessarily given way to processes with proposals, exploratory
drafts, brief annotated bibliographies and so on. In other words, many of
the essay mills don’t market comprehensive process packages (such as we might
find in an all-included, end-of-term portfolio with untidy pieces and so on). The market, however, is smartening to composition’s deeper processes (http://www.essayrelief.com/,
for example, advertises “research work” included with the order, but I haven’t
tried it, so I don’t have any sense of how messy it is. Convincingly
messy?). Devisers of assignments, then, must stay one step ahead of the
services available for circumventing the rules of decorum (articulated wherever
they may be!). And, yet, plagiarism will continue to leak into the
academy, will linger as a vile, troubling matter.
At places with little or no WAC initiative, I’d wager that much of the
proliferation of plagiarism comes about from oft-used, timeless prompts or
single-submission assignments (oh, right, and the plagiarist-student is to
blame, as well). I wasn’t trying to parade a holier-than platitude, but I
made the mistake of saying this aloud recently and got in return: “I
agree with your point in principle. However, when one teaches a 300 level class,
one just does not expect to deal with issues like draft and rewrite.” More
discussion followed, healthy discussion about new understandings of the
information and services from which students can take unattributed work, greater urgency about making writing processes visible (which can be tough since our best habits are considerably varied), and institution-wide dissonance on how best to address the issue.
I’m still learning where all of this fits into my teaching. I don’t
prefer to wear the plagairism-police badge, and I see a greater need to treat
some instances of plagiarism as an opportunity for working toward an understanding of intellectual
property. Lately, I’ve taken to using
EveII for sifting offenders,
usually after I read a suspicious essay, but sometimes before I read any essay
in a set that has arrived in my inbox. Google’s exact match search is also widely used and effective for cuing exact strings. It seems more and more to be an inevitable part of teaching writing, and, as such, seems like something we
should continue conversations about (along with lots of other stuff), especially
as long as the latest technologies reconfigure the scene.
One way to reduce the problem is to require students to write about cutting-edge issues and use recent sources. The banks of plagiarized essays will date very rapidly, though the flip side is that you give the students less freedom to choose their own essay topics. And admittedly, this tactic will work better in a new media journalism class than in, say, classical poetry in translation.
I think we agree that plagiarism is largely avoidable provided assignments are fresh, varied, and designed carefully. In the distance learning courses I teach, I worry that the systematizing of the courses and all their content (across mutliple sections) lend to undetectable plagiarism. I’ve made a pitch for internal search-n-match algorithms (a simple rule that could run during off-peak hours) from section to section and term to term, which is possible because all of the coursework is stored on like servers. No word on that yet.
When the subject of plagiarism comes up, I hear a lot of snarls that it’s inevitable, unavoidable, etc., and those sentiments lead me to suppose that the institution where I teach would benefit from a WAC initiative centered on _teaching_ writing across the curriculum more than merely _assigning more_ writing across the curriculum. But, then again, _assigning more_ is a start.