Some Thoughts on Plagiarism . . . and how to avoid the problem in the first place

We live in an age of instant information accessibility. “Answers”—that is, facts, data, information—are only a Google search away. Almost inevitably, most commonly-used search terms lead directly to Wikipedia which, for all its democratic possibilities, is still only an encyclopedia. And encyclopedias are for high school, not for college.

The consequences of instant accessibility include impatience when it comes to refining searches, developing meaningful search strategies, and varying resource use. We’ve imbedded short attention spans into our children, and they are becoming increasingly impatient with research that takes “too long.”

I’m pretty sure that further consequences to the instant access phenomenon include a diminishing of wonder; many of our student lack the basic curiosity that leads to truly creative thinking, and because their reading is restricted primarily to popular culture, they lack the breadth of knowledge that used to lead to innovative connections. Couple this with impatience, and the result is a reduction in critical thinking and the acceptance of the “easy way out.”

Imagine this scenario: A student is given a standard paper topic, such as “Discuss the use of irony in Huckleberry Finn.” The student’s first impulse is to plug “irony” and “Huckleberry Finn” into a search engine and the results appear within nanoseconds. What happens next is the root cause of plagiarism. Not fundamental dishonesty, or profound laziness (although these certainly can be factors), but the sheer ease of cutting and pasting, and the perception that recombining the material from the internet magically makes it somehow original and acceptable.

For reasons that are much more complex than I want to go into, our students have been brought up to believe that learning should be fun—or, worse, entertaining. If they’re not having fun, and the task is taking too long, it’s just annoying. “This is boring,” I hear my students say, more often than I care to.

What these kids don’t understand is that, in the words of the American Arts & Crafts designer Dard Hunter, “Boredom is a matter of choice, not circumstance.” In fact, the choices that students are allowed to make often engender boredom, and initiate a cascade of problems that all too frequently lead to plagiarism.

So much for theory. How about solutions?

I would like to propose the possibility that the more innovative the assignment, the less likely plagiarism is to occur. For example, instead of assigning a hackneyed writing topic like “Discuss the use of irony in Huckleberry Finn,” how about asking students to pose questions that arise from their reading of the story? Why did something happen the way it did? Why were certain conditions present in the story? What makes Huck such an interesting character in the first place? Or instead of assigning a research paper on a general topic like “decorative glass” or “the history of the A-line dress,” find out if students are at all curious about anything related to the range of topics under discussion in the course. If they aren’t curious, perhaps the instructor could suggest questions that he or she has always wondered about.

A general rule to consider is that if the instructor finds grading the paper boring, the student certainly didn’t have much fun writing it—and probably didn’t learn much in the process. I have made it a commandment never to assign a topic that my students have not generated themselves, or that I’m not interested in enough to guide them toward looking for meaningful answers.


Another strategy involves asking students to evaluate all sources included in their bibliographies. I usually ask for general bibliographies (which students annotate to show me how they used each source) rather than works cited pages because they give me a better idea of the range of sources the student has consulted in the process of conducting research. In writing classes, for final research papers, I ask for both. I restrict the number of web sources in most cases, and usually require that they use a variety of media: films, print articles, books, interactive media (CD ROMs and DVDs). I hold research workshops where we discuss strategies for locating information and using the results. For material located on the internet, I require website evaluations to determine the quality of information presented: who wrote the article? What are his or her credentials? What is the source of the webpage—Personal? Educational? Business? Commercial? The annotations provide this information for other media—who wrote the book or directed the film? How is this material relevant to the research problem?

Ours is an institution that fosters creativity. We should therefore make a concerted effort to avoid assigning work that encourages students to think in clichés. Meaningful research, and original projects and writing, can only arise from engagement with the material. Our challenge as educators, therefore, is to provide good examples for our students. Initiate more creative projects that call for non-standard solutions; pose challenging questions that require students to break out of their “comfort zones” and into the real world of uncomfortable questions. A great deal of what I learned about teaching came from being an Olympics of the Mind coach, and having to guide seventh-graders through a series of problems without suggesting what they should do. They had to solve the problems themselves; all I could do was ask questions. My team members didn’t ever win the competition, but they did get creativity awards because their ideas were often both strange and beautiful.

One of the most useful assignments I ever undertook as a college student in philosophy was to argue a statement from a viewpoint opposite to that I held. Doing so forced me to see the other side of the question, and made me aware of the perils of faulty reasoning. But it was also extremely difficult because I wasn’t at all comfortable looking through someone else’s eyes (or thinking through someone else’s brain). If we want our students to understand the use of irony in Huckleberry Finn, we need to get them to think about what’s ironic in their world first, but then to wonder what Huck would do in a situation similar to ours. Or, the student might wonder how he or she would react given technological limitations of Huck’s historical moment. The idea is to get them to think about irony not just as an important literary trope used in this one work, but also as a source of humor, drama, and satire in the world as a whole.

The main reason I’m seldom confronted with plagiarism is that my students have to write about how they solved the problems I pose. Occasionally I get someone who tries to turn the assignment into a research paper by cutting and pasting information out of Wikipedia or a website, but that’s not the assignment, so the student fails that segment of it. But if they follow the guidelines and write about what they did and why, I generally get a higher level of writing, and the results are frequently rewarding, both for them and for me.

If, as I suspect, students tend to plagiarize out of laziness rather than larceny, we can go a long way toward nipping it in the bud by simply making it unlikely. Truly original assignments and questions that tap into our students’ innate curiosity might very well minimize the problem. If our students have to account for their thinking process, by always showing thumbnails, storyboards, process drawings, outlines, notes, and other preliminary efforts, they won’t copy other people’s material because it won’t fit into the process. This approach requires more grading, because instructors have to be involved throughout the process, but it’s a lot better than having to take the time to hunt down the sources of suspected plagiarism. It’s also a more positive approach, because it doesn’t ask us to view every student as a potential thief!

However we go about it, the challenge is not to make the effort punitive. Students need to understand why plagiarism is a bad idea; they need to be shown how it hurts creativity; they need to respect the work of others in the same way they expect other designers to respect theirs. We’re faced with a generation that’s grown up sharing information and networking in numerous ways. The democratization of communication will continue to open up challenges to our notions of intellectual property. But students need to know that it’s beneficial for all concerned to acknowledge the role of other people’s creativity. Nobody says they shouldn’t make connections; but they need to understand that by giving credit where it’s due, they’re contributing to the transformation of information into true knowledge.

Photo credit: Old books from the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, by Gnosus; The Bookworm, by Carl Spitzweg, 1850. Both via Wikimedia Commons.