Their Cheating Hearts

Somewhere between two thirds and three quarters of college undergraduates cheat, according to studies on academic dishonesty. So statistically, it's all but certain I teach some of these chiselers. Until recently though, I didn't think dishonesty--which, since as I teach writing courses would take the form of plagiarism--was a chronic problem in my classes. Maybe it wasn't but this semester I've encountered more plagiarism than I have in the past three or four years. Never mind that on day one of class I define what plagiarism is and outline the consequences it can bring--they do it anyway, and in shameless fashion.

These days, at least as far as I can tell, plagiarism usually takes the form of cutting and pasting information from websites. Sometimes students act surprised to find that this constitutes dishonesty, and in a few of these cases I think they genuinely don't know it does. In other cases, students know damn well what they're doing, but can't believe it when I catch them. It apparently doesn't occur to them that if they know how do use Google, I probably do too. The internet may have made cheating easier, but it also makes catching it easier.

I'm not sure how to explain this. The abundance of information free for the taking on the web, with the attendant blurring of intellectual property lines, likely is part of the problem. Maybe students take their cue from the seemingly endless parade of stories about cheating in the worlds of finance, government, sports, or journalism (or, for that matter, the high reaches of academia), reasoning that if the big shots do it, why shouldn't they?

I write my plagiarism policy in my syllabi, and refer student's to the university's statement on academic dishonesty. Maybe I could give the message more impact with a few lines from The Smiths:

If you must write prose and poems
the words you use should be your own,
don't plagiarize or take "on loan."
'Cause there's always someone, somewhere
with big nose who knows,
and he'll trip you up and laugh when you fall,
he'll trip you up and laugh when you fall.

Or, for this multimediated generation of undergrads, forget the syllabus. I'll just show the clip (giving due credit, of course).