A Few Thoughts On... Rethinking Plagiarism
What Dr. Claudine Gay's situation and the way I sometimes felt I was doing old fashioned vice principal cosplay have in common - and the monthly digest of all the January TOOS posts in one place.
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A Few Thoughts on… Rethinking Plagiarism
Last year, I wrote about how enrollment worries had consumed a large part of my time during my career because as an academic dean, an assistant head or head of school, the number and makeup of the student body is central to how we do the rest of our work.
Last December, when the world seemed to weigh in as to whether Dr. Claudine Gay was or was not academically dishonest, I reflected on how as academic dean, I spent a lot of time thinking about plagiarism. TurnItIn was just coming on the scene later in admin tenure, so it generally wasn’t part of the landscape. But plagiarism was by far the most common type of academic dishonesty I dealt with and for many reasons, it is trickier than the cheat sheet smuggled into the chem lab during a quiz.
Most often, the plagiarism that surfaced was a symptom of a student being overwhelmed in some way and desperately trying to just get the work in, done and off her plate. And in the case of students from Asian countries I worked with earlier in my career, they often didn’t see it as a serious problem - the facts were the important thing and if they were encased in the language of another author, they had a hard time understanding the problem. What better words could there be? They found the relevant facts that addressed the requirements of the assignment. Or if another author had produced an analysis that completely met the requirements of the assignment, how could a student improve on this and why exactly was it a problem to present “the right answer.”
Many times, plagiarism was the result of a response to a poorly designed assignment. While we can say that we want to see an individual mind at work grappling with the central question of an assignment, if the assignment doesn’t scaffold this and is in effect is only concerned with “the right answer,” what is the root cause of the plagiarism - the student or the assignment?
This question exposes the inadequacy of traditional forms of assessment and I would more often than not be slightly embarrassed trying to find a principled way to explain to the student what was wrong about their actions when in fact, their actions were a reasonable way to respond to a poorly designed assignment. They identified the relevant facts or analysis. They agreed with the analysis. Their brain was not going to improve upon it. And plus, they had hours of other work to do.
This was years ago and before we all used the word performative, but there was something that felt disingenuous and performative about these academic dishonesty hearings - it was getting the student to understand they had done something wrong when they were still a bit confused about what was actually so wrong. They could kind of see why passing off words that were not their own was deceptive but there was often the unasked question - what was the real problem here? Of course this professional article had the best analysis! What do you expect from me, a tenth grader? I can’t even manage to fold my laundry.
And at these hearings, we would often conclude with the strong warning that when in doubt, ask the teacher. And always, ALWAYS, a warning that once in college, there would not be an hour academic therapy session with a kindly academic dean, a kindly department head and a kindly advisor trying to detect what had led us to the circumstances of this meeting in the first place. In college, it would be a zero for the assignment at best, likely a zero for the class, and a strong likelihood of being unceremoniously given the boot from the college altogether.
It never felt great. The only part that did feel OK was sitting with a kid and parsing out exactly why they were so overwhelmed, how to manage their time better, why their own thoughts and interpretations actually did matter. That part felt useful and like a learning moment. But the rest of it felt like I was engaging in “old fashioned vice principal” cosplay.