Policing plagiarism has always been something of a whack-a-mole game. Knock it down in one spot, and it only shows up somewhere else. What we call plagiarism in higher ed today has been around as long as there has been writing. But it hasn’t always been considered plagiarism. All serious readers of the Christian scriptures agree that the New Testament authors freely quoted from or alluded to Old Testament passages (actually, well over a thousand times). Yet only in the rarest of cases did New Testament authors cite the source of their information. Usually, all the reader gets is a cryptic “It is written. . .” if anything at all (see Luke 7:27; Romans 9:33; James 2:23). Yet no one accuses New Testament authors of plagiarizing the Old Testament. Instead, scholars refer to this phenomenon as “intertextuality.”
My, how things have changed since ancient times. Imagine receiving a term paper from a student who cited an important source by saying, “I read somewhere that. . . .” Today many faculty would assign such a paper a failing grade. Some institutions, including one for which I recently worked, could send the student up before a disciplinary committee for even more severe penalties.
The Prevalence of Plagiarism
The phenomenon of plagiarism today is more prevalent than ever. I read somewhere 😉 that as many as “60.8% of polled college students admitted to cheating.” Other studies show a much lower percentage of 36%. Either way, this situation is awful. For our entire teaching careers, we have struggled with preventing, recognizing, and remediating plagiarism. Today’s technology has vastly complicated these tasks.
Plagiarism and Technology
The relentless advance of technology in the information age has in some ways made the job of policing plagiarism easier. Rather than poring through pages and pages of resource material in the library to find a student’s likely plagiarized source, a simple Google search will uncover the least skillful attempts by students to hoodwink us. Conversely, technological advances have led to the term paper mills, paraphrasing apps, and AI resources that make it virtually impossible to distinguish our students’ work from a ghost writer or a computer trained to sound like our students. In response, we consult plagiarism detection services that try to find possible sources students may have used, including AI tools.
And so it goes. Is that the best response? There must be ways of addressing plagiarism in its current forms that go beyond tit-for-tat uses of technology. Here are a few ideas that will help us teach students effectively despite the prevalence of AI-assisted plagiarism.
Defining Plagiarism More Effectively
The recent resignation of a high-profile Ivy League university president for alleged plagiarism raises many questions that I don’t have space to comment on here. But among many other issues, that event reminds us that while everyone agrees plagiarism is wrong, there is no consensus on what actually qualifies as plagiarism.
A Definition
My own definition has been “the attempt to pass off as one’s own the words or work of another.” My definition attempts to encompass both the copying of unattributed facts in a term paper with other forms of cheating, such as cheating on an exam. In both cases, students are presenting other people’s work as their own. My definition does not address intent. I will address that concept below. Instead, my point is that the effect of plagiarism is deception, even when its intent is not.
Ill Effects of Plagiarism
Plagiarism is immoral because it produces two ill effects. First, plagiarism results in the deception that the submitted work was produced by the student, when in fact it was not. Second, plagiarism is wrong because it undercuts reproducibility. Particularly in the sciences, accurate and complete attribution of ideas is vital for the results of a study or experiment to be reproducible by others. And it is that reproducibility that helps grant scientific claims the aura of truth. But even in the arts and letters, the concept of reproducibility is important in helping the reader understand how a writer reached his or her conclusions. The concept of reproducibility creates a series of “bread crumbs” that the reader can follow to reach the same conclusions as the writer.
Intentional vs. “Unintentional” Plagiarism
Students usually understand the concepts of reproducibility and bread crumbs. But there is less agreement around the concept of intent. While many students understand that plagiarism is wrong regardless of the intent, many others believe that consideration of intent is critical in adjudicating plagiarism.
The high prevalence of plagiarism among students and the perception that plagiarizers are so seldom caught mean that even students who are prone to be honest feel the pressure to plagiarize simply to keep up academically. Further, these honest students are afraid that mere procedural mistakes in source attribution will result in their being accused of plagiarism. These students believe it is patently unfair for students who simply make mistakes in formatting sources or who accidentally skip over attributing a source should be lumped into the same category as students who buy their academic work online.
Further, many faculty agree with this distinction, even on campuses where the distinction between intentional and unintentional plagiarism is not formally recognized. Generally, faculty should be allowed the freedom to discriminate between those instances of academic infidelity that should be remediated in the teaching setting and those that should be punished formally through some sort of penalty.
While unintentional plagiarism may fall short of the intent to deceive, it can nonetheless have the same effect, especially when the reader needs to be able to follow and/or reproduce the research findings of the author. Still, punishing both kinds of plagiarism identically seems terribly disproportionate.
Faculty can do a great deal to discourage and disincentivize plagiarism. Below are five suggestions for how we can address the growing problem of plagiarism, particularly the AI-assisted kind.
Strong Pedagogy
The most effective deterrent to all forms of plagiarism is strong pedagogy. I recognize that many of the reasons for plagiarism have nothing to do with the degree of creativity of the teacher and have to do instead with factors that are inherent to the students and their individual situations. These personal student factors include fear of failure, poor work habits, peer pressure, academic competition, financial concerns, and a host of other motivations for cheating.
Faculty need to double down on more engaged forms of pedagogy such as multi-submission assignments, individualized assignments that are unique to each student, and in-class work that includes some individualized coaching. Simply assigning a five page paper on Alexander the Great is an invitation for cheating.
By contrast, there are numerous ways we can adjust our pedagogy to make the use of AI-generated plagiarism less tenable for students. Using AI tools as research assistants can help students find sources and evaluate their quality. AI tools can help students break down assignments and other problems into logical chunks, giving them the chance to see the trees that make up the forest of an assignment. For additional explanation of these ideas, see a recent article on Dani Babb’s website by Mary Strehl.
Engagement with Technology
Faculty with whom I have spoken recently are deeply flummoxed by AI and the various ways it threatens academic integrity. As usual, our technology has outraced our ethics. At present, we are still struggling to develop ethical norms for the moral use of AI in education (as well as in most other fields). But this technology is not going away. Academia must pivot toward the ethical, responsible, and productive use of AI quickly to make it into an ally rather than an adversary. Faculty should embrace the responsible use of AI in the development of curricula and develop ways for students to use it to enhance the achievement of learning objectives rather than undermine them.
Attention to Multicultural Issues
In today’s world, we cannot ignore the multicultural issues that surround the plagiarism problem. Students hailing from other parts of the globe come from societies with far different notions of idea ownership than ours. In these cultures, the assiduous citing of sources in research may not be a high priority in formal writing. Some of our international students therefore may not pay as close attention to source citation their professors would prefer. In other cases, mimicking the work of authorities in a field is viewed as a form of honoring that authority rather than an attempt to deceive. See the interesting blog post on the TurnItIn website that unpacks these multicultural dimensions of the problem.
Research and Resource Education
Our colleges and universities need to pay more careful attention to resource training for freshmen. Of course, I’m not simply raining on our international students here. We must expose all of our students to thorough training on the proper use of source materials. All students need to be told very clearly what the limits and expectations are regarding plagiarism-related issues such as source citation, out-of-class collaboration, and use of electronic resources for academic work. T
his training should be introduced in the first semester of college and be integrated into a credit-bearing course like English Composition or something similar. It should also be reinforced later in the curriculum by faculty within the various disciplines in a research methods course. And these precepts should be reviewed once again by faculty in specific courses. Faculty within individual departments will need to collaborate and coordinate regarding the content of these principles and the need to apply them uniformly across all classes.
Faculty need not think they are on their own in developing these materials. Our campus librarians are vital resources in this endeavor. Librarians and other faculty should collaborate in developing these systems of research methods training. And this training should address the proper use of AI as well as of more traditional research aids.
Promotion of a Strong Ethical Foundation
Finally and most importantly, IHEs should work across the board to promote a strong ethical foundation among students that will apply to all aspects of life, including the responsible use of academic resources.
We need to get real with ourselves as teachers and admit that students–even our best students–are asking themselves, “Why shouldn’t I cheat?” After all, the majority of students do it. Students and teachers know that most students get away with it. And a widely cited poll taken at Fordham University showed that students who cheat tend to have higher GPAs. (I know; correlation doesn’t equal causation. But the correlation is thought-provoking nonetheless.) Students often believe that cheaters get ahead. So with all of these benefits in view, why not plagiarize?
The only way to demonstrate that students should not plagiarize is to set this concept within a moral framework that a campus is prepared to support uniformly. We can establish such a moral framework using any of the three major systems of ethical theory.
Deontology
For example, we might claim that cheating is wrong by appealing to an authoritative moral guide like the Bible. The Bible denounces lying and stealing; therefore, we should renounce those practices.
Utilitarianism
Alternatively, we might pursue a utilitarian approach to the immorality of plagiarism. While it might seem helpful and useful for a student to cheat, such shortcuts ultimately undermine the student’s personal development and contribute to the decadence of the social order. Hence, plagiarism does not promote the greatest good for the greatest number, but academic integrity does.
Virtue Ethics
Finally, we might denounce plagiarism from the standpoint of virtue ethics. Plagiarism violates the virtues of justice and prudence. Those virtues dictate that we do our own academic work and not pass others’ work off as our own.
We all understand these approaches. But are we training students to understand and respect the values that promote a healthy society and trustworthy relationships? If we aren’t doing that consistently, then we as academics will reap what we sow. We shouldn’t be surprised that our students are behaving unjustly if we aren’t willing to model an ethical framework consistently ourselves.
Conclusion
Plagiarism, like death and taxes, will always be with us. But as faculty mentors to our students, we can do much to disincentivize and remediate it. The process begins with strong pedagogy. We should embrace new technologies as teaching tools and not only as defense mechanisms. Understanding the cultural differences between our students is a vital component in controlling plagiarism. We need to rededicate ourselves to training students in the responsible use of academic resources, including AI. And we need to establish and consistently model a strong moral foundation that undermines the motivations for plagiarism. With such dedication, AI can become a strong ally in the educational process. Without that dedication, it will become a frustrating and ever-present adversary in a tit-for-tat arms race.