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TELLING STORIES OF ACADEMIC MISCONDUCT:
PLAGIARISM, CHEATIN G, AND THE LANGUAGE OF VIRTUE

By

Steven R. Chalk

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University

in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of English

2004

 

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ABSTRACT

TELLING STORIES OF ACADEMIC MISCONDUCT:
PLAGIARISM, CHEATING, AND THE LANGUAGE OF VIRTUE

By

Steven R. Chalk

This dissertation analyzes a large body of professional articles, published between
1995 and 2000, related to cheating or plagiarism in American undergraduate
education. This analysis aims to uncover the various “voices” with which writers
address the ethics of academic misconduct. It also uses a sample of recent student
writings about plagiarism to help assess where existing voices work effectively, and
where they need to be supplemented. At the end, this dissertation offers a new voice,
or perspective on encouraging academic integrity — one designed to blend respect for
ethics with recognition of the many contextual pressures and conflicting messages

faced by students.

Copyright by
STEVEN R. CHALK
2004

 

lwould like i
and professional t
board almost best
those whose wort

- whose complic;

 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my dissertation chair, Kathleen Geissler, for her patience
and professional commitment. I am grateful to my wife, who has acted as a sounding
board almost beyond the limits of human endurance. And finally, I thank my students,
those whose words form part of this dissertation and those — past, present, and future

— whose complicated lives have shaped the heart of this document.

iv

 

l
CHAPT ER ONE:

CHAPTER TWO
THE FIRST STO

CHAPTER THRl
A“SECOND STt

CHART ER FOL'l
CHAPTER FIVE

CHARTER SIX:
0N CHEATING

APPENDICES

Appendix A:
Appendix B:
Appendix 0
Appendix D:
Appendices
E-X:

fiflWPQPQZZFF5759FW

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER TWO

THE FIRST STORY: ANALYZING PLAGIARISM AND CHEATING

CHAPTER THREE:
A “SECOND STORY” OF PLAGIARISM AND CHEATING

CHAPTER FOUR: TELLING A STORY WITH CLASS(ES)

CHAPTER FIVE: INSIGHTS FROM THE FIRST THREE STORIES

CHAPTER SIX: A NEW “FOURTH VOICE”
ON CHEATING AND WILLFUL PLAGIARISM

APPENDICES

Appendix A:
Appendix B:
Appendix C:
Appendix D:

Appendices
E-X:

gfleacmozzrawwgomw

Relevant Works by Donald McCabe

Relevant Works by Rebecca Moore Howard
Timed writing prompt from Ball State University
Informed consent letter for soliciting student essays

Ball State University student essays on plagiarism

Edward
Zena
Yvonne
Victor
Uma
Thomas
Stacy
Sam
Regina
Peter
Pam
Neil
Michelle
Iris
Grant
Fiona
Darla

17

45

69

88

103

130
132
133
134

136
138
140
142
144
146
148
150
152
154
156
158
160
162
164
166
168

 

V:
W:
X:

WORKS CITED

 

V:
W:
X:

WORKS CITED

Carl
Aaron
Annie

vi

170
173
175

177

Chapter One: Introduction

Background

Throughout my doctoral studies, I have been interested in the commonly
perceived gap between the scholarly community — those who “do theory” — and the
general public, which encounters the scholarly community primarily when enrolled as
undergraduate students. This interest, I should admit, has autobiographical roots. In
my own right, I have a kind of academic split personality. I am not a theorist; I am a
college teacher who chose the Ph.D. path as a further teaching credential. My
original training, in law, left me unsatisfied about the frequently antagonistic
“culture” in which I had to practice my craft. It is fair to say, then, that I am also a
communitarian. And yet, my studies have shown how frail and contingent
community can be. When possible in my teaching, I try to stress the obligations
people owe to others. But my readings in composition and rhetoric have shown me
that communities of allegiance overlap and conflict, constituting and reconstituting
themselves as circumstances change.

These autobiographical “splits” have made my struggles with academic theory
both exhilarating and frustrating, sometimes simultaneously. I am often left puzzled
trying to apply what I have learned to my teaching. As a teacher, I must work both
sides of the divide I have been exploring. I must be one who “does,” not just one who
“does theory.” This tension, unfortunately, has been exacerbated in the public
consciousness by stereotypes about the monolith known as postmodernism. It is, by

now, virtually a truism to claim - as James E. Porter does in RhetoricalfiEthics ELIE

Intemetworked Writing - that “postmodernism is difficult to define” (49). Such an
effort is problematic for at least two reasons: the term “postmodernism” encompasses
such a diverse group of theoretical orientations; and the very act of defining implies a
stable foundation that any good postmodernist might pierce with evidence of
contingency.

Perhaps in part because of this elusiveness, we have all witnessed vehement
arguments suggesting that postmodern scholars no longer care about truth, standards,
or morality. As a result, the story goes, those qualities have suffered greatly, and
people have cheated more often.

In 1997, the poet and English professor Neal Bowers published Words for the
Mg, the story of his experience tracking down a professional plagiarist who had
misappropriated two of Bowers’ published works. Frustrated by his teaching
colleagues’ general lack of support for his quest, Bowers puts some (although
certainly not all) blame at the feet of “the contemporary intellectual climate” (123).
Some of his “theory-minded colleagues,” he suggests, might argue that

my insistence on ownership is a denial of the communal nature of art. They
say each reader creates his own text in the act of reading. So [a plagiarist] is
just one more person laying claim to the text. That he sometimes republishes
what he reads is perhaps only an extension of the process. If his reception of
the poem is unique, as they reason, then the intent that drives him to offer it as
his own must be similarly original, and what he publishes is just as much his

as what he reads. (123)

Bowers goes on to claim that had his plagiarist “underpinned his activities with
theory, he might have found vigorous defenders among literary theorists. At the very
least, one of them would surely have written a paper characterizing Jones [the
plagiarizer] as the epitome of the postmodern reader/poet. One may do it yet” (123).

What Bowers envisions is a set of battle lines between those with a postmodern
consciousness about reality and language and those who still respect values like truth,
honesty, and integrity. To many of us, of course, Bowers’ description of
postmodernist attitudes about language is a caricature. There are many other, more
sophisticated stories that could be told about postmodernism, stories that do not draw
such clearly defined lines. Here is a short version of one such response.

A willful plagiarist as the epitome of the postmodern poet? Hardly. Recognizing
intertextuality does not excuse plagiarism. Postmodernist teachers — and I include
myself in this number - still expect students to make an effort, to “play by the rules,”
to offer perspectives and syntheses of their own. Although language activities are by
their nature communal, communities require contributions by individual members to

create a rich common tapestry.

One community - in a broad sense — that values its common identity is the higher
education academy. And during my doctoral studies, I have encountered another
story about coping with academic misconduct. Like Bowers’ narrative, this one was
concerned with cheaters: plagiarizers, yes, but also those who copy test answers,

those who bring “cheat sheets” to an examination.

For three summers (1998-2000), I organized a campus-wide orientation for new
graduate teaching assistants at Michigan State University. At the behest of the lead
administrators from the Provost’s Office, each year’s inaugural event was a lecture on
“policies and professionalism.” The lecture’s working definition of “professionalism”
focused listeners in part on this fact: your students will try to cheat, so your task is to
monitor them closely and catch them if you can. (And here are a few “tricks of the
trade” that should help you do so.) Integrity demands no less.

Conspicuously absent from this approach was any sense in which teaching and
learning are richly complicated activities — both situationally and ethically. The new
teachers could have learned first about the myriad ways in which instructional
environments “create” new knowledge and understanding. Instead, they learned to
guard against intrusions on what was already known, fixed, predictable: the teacher’s
superiority and the student’s (moral and epistemological) inadequacy.

As I listened to each annual lecture, I realized that such a vision doesn’t animate
my own teaching, nor do I believe it inspires many prospective teachers to enter the
classroom. That inspiration comes from a desire, however utopian, to make things
better — from the possibility that each encounter among teachers, students, texts, and
conversations might produce an insight that could spark a new light or illuminate
some previously unforeseen argument. To me, this is a kind of postmodern justice —
relying upon each very particular set of circumstances to produce something that is
new, unexpected, vulnerable, but potentially very important. As teachers, we know
that we cannot simply “fix” every problem we encounter with a magic sweep of

discussion or insight. But academic discourse at its best maximizes the number of

 

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perspectives on any given topic, and through that effort, it does more “justice” to that
topic and to human potential than any authoritative claims for Truth could ever

achieve.

I have just narrated two stories — one previously written and one from personal
experience. Onto each, I have also inscribed my own “slant,” with the amendments,
additions, and nuances I prefer to emphasize. This dissertation will follow a similar
methodology, allowing a variety of storytellers to provide their perspectives on
cheating and plagiarism. And once those storytellers have spoken, as fully and richly
as this medium permits, I will again add my perspective as a voice in the discussion.

My goal, then, is to use narrative as a persuasive tool in addressing the ethical
problems of cheating and plagiarism. In his 1998 book, Living Without Philosophy:
On Narrative Rhetoric. and Mom, Peter Levine draws on the methodology of
“thick description” Clifford Geertz originally developed for anthropological research,
to describe how stories can help adjudicate ethical difficulties. According to Levine,
a persuasive storyteller employs this methodology by presenting a wide variety of
details relevant to a situation in question.i Levine’s object lesson comes from a court
case, but the reasoning applies to any instance in which people must make difficult
judgments.ii

Thick descriptions support value-judgments, and they are not arbitrary,
subjective, or indefensible. In order to know that a particular instance of
squeezing a metal object is also a case of murder, we have to describe the

event in a broader context, explaining what happened in the light of other

events, the participants’ psychological states, their other options, the cultural
background, and so on. (5)

Good “thick description,” according to Levine, is the raw material of humanists:
“novelists, historians, visual artists, filmmakers, literary critics, and preachers” (6).
And humanists are the prototypical postmodemists, in the best sense of the term.
They “draw moral conclusions from stories by considering all of their relevant
details, describing and redescribing events and characters until they settle on a fitting
moral characterization” (6).

The description that follows, then, will be as “thick” as possible. I will defer
settling on a moral characterization of the problems until I have given voice to as
many speakers, and as many relevant details and characters, as is practical. In this
way, I hope to struggle successfully with the personal paradox that animates this
opening section. How can I be both a thoughtful postmodernist and an ethical
teacher? Can I address concerns about cheating and plagiarism in ways that are both
complicated and ethical, that acknowledge both the contingency of knowledge and

the solid importance of obligation to others?

The Study and Selection of Literature:

Employing the thick-description approach described above, this work narrates,
then offers a focused analysis of, a recent body of literature: professional articles,
published between 1995 and 2000, which discuss ethical aspects of plagiarism and/or
cheating in American undergraduate education. In addition, to further enrich the

discussion, this dissertation looks at a recent sample of student writings about

plagiarism. Below, I describe and justify the parameters for selecting the published

works.

A. The use of professional articles

Not surprisingly, there are a staggering number of recently published articles on
cheating and plagiarism. Academic Search Premier is an electronic database that
catalogs a wide variety of reputable periodicals. A search of this database finds 1,840

9’

documents, published in 1995 or later, that mention “cheating, “plagiarism,” or
both.iii This number, moreover, does not even include professional articles published
as part of broader collections. One such collection is directly relevant to my study.
Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellecttgl Propertv in aflistmodern World (1999) is
discussed at greater length below under “The Relevance and Importance of this
Study.”

From among this abundance of works, I have chosen to focus on professional
articles from academic journals, and not on works from the popular press, for the
following reasons. Most practically, journals provide the forum in which teachers
and scholars struggle with the problems of cheating and plagiarism. Cheating and
plagiarism concerns are literally “in the faces” of academic professionals -- when they
teach, administer, or advise. Therefore, they must confront such problems, and they
are charged — more than anyone — with finding solutions.

In addition, we might hope to find a more sober, careful, nuanced exploration of

these issues in academic journals. Admittedly, not everyone sees this sobriety as a

good thing. Bowers, for example, applauds the coverage of plagiarism in the popular

 

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press. For journalists, he suggests, plagiarism is “not an occasion for philosophical
maundering but for indignation and action” (127-28). But if I hope to negotiate the
theory/practice balance I outlined in the previous section, I must take the different
theoretical approaches to academic misconduct as seriously as possible.

Finally, although my field of exploration is narrower than it might have been, the
articles explicated and analyzed still reveal a tremendous diversity of journal titles,
departmental backgrounds, and theoretical approaches. This diversity will emerge

more fully in chapters two and three of my study.

B. The time frame: 1995-2000

Any chosen time frame is necessarily somewhat arbitrary; most stories and ideas
do not abruptly acquire or lose currency in a particular year or on a particular date. I
modestly hope that a six-year period provides sufficient “room” for the stories about
cheating and willful plagiarism to emerge and to enrich the overall thick description
on this topic. My choice of 1995 as a starting point for analysis, however, can be
more specifically justified. 1995 marks a pivotal point in recent scholarly treatment
of plagiarism, in particular. In the November 1995 edition of College English.
Rebecca Moore Howard published two widely debated articles, “The Law of Texts:
Copyright in the Academy” and “Plagiarisms, Authorships, and the Academic Death
Penalty.” The second of those is directly relevant to my study. Later, in the
November 1996 edition, College English contributors Peter Schroeder and Barbara
Welch commented on Moore Howard’s ideas, and the latter responded to that

commentary.

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Moore Howard’s basic assertion in “Plagiarisms, Authorships, and the Death
Penalty” is that students plagiarize for a variety of general reasons, only one of which
is unethical. Those reasons include: 1. they are ignorant of citation conventions; 2.
they are patchwriting,” and should be lauded for doing so; and 3. they are willfully
cheating. Teachers and scholars adhering to Moore Howard’s three-part scheme may
logically remove the two pedagogical situations (numbers 1 and 2 above) from
conversations about ethics. In that fashion, they are free to focus their ethical
attention and possible disapproval on cheaters and willful plagiarists. The conduct of
cheaters and willful plagiarists most clearly provokes the ire of teachers,
administrators, and other authority figures. And thus, such behavior most
conspicuously invokes questions about ethics, about what students owe to others, and

why.

C. The relevant issues: cheating and plagiarism

But why focus on both plagiarism and cheating? Given my discussion in the
previous section, one might easily argue that cheating is a more clear-cut ethical
situation. From an early age, students know not to copy off each other’s tests, for
example. They should not be confused about the “discourse conventions” of stealing
quiz answers from the teacher’s desk. And, unlike with the plagiarism nuances, there
is apparently no scholarly disagreement about how whether the term “cheater” has
been fairly or coherently applied to students.

In light of my special concern with intentional misconduct, however, I can

advance the following claim: cheaters and willful plagiarists carry the same ethical

posture, despite the differences between plagiarism and other forms of cheating. In
other words, both behaviors bother most authority figures for the same reasons.
Therefore, they fit together here - just as they often do in the arena of public concern
about student cheating.” I will explore this justification more fully later in this

introduction, under the heading “The Relevance and Importance of this Study.”

D. Narrowing the field: the particular articles chosen

Because I am interested specifically in the educational ramifications of cheating
and plagiarism, I focused my initial research on the ERIC electronic database. That
search reveals that 111 journal articles, published between 1995 and 2000, and geared
toward an audience in higher education, mention either “plagiarism” or “cheating.”

From that original field of 111, I have screened out the following:

0 Articles that do not focus primarily on American undergraduate education.
Late in this dissertation, I will argue that understanding rhetorical context is vital to
addressing cheating and willful plagiarism successfully. Several of the contextual
pressures faced by our students are strongly “American” in quality — including, most
notably, the tremendous pressure to compete and succeed in the economic
marketplace.

0 Articles that do not seek to answer, either directly or indirectly, some
version of the following question. “In the context of cheating and/or plagiarism, what

do students owe to others, and why?” This limiting question has helped me to focus

10

on ethical narratives more than others, and to work toward a more effective ethical
resolution of problems this dissertation identifies.

From this final two-part screening, thirty (30) articles emerge to form the core of
my research sample. This selection procedure, of course, cannot be fully
comprehensive. In particular, I have of necessity used my editorial judgment in
applying the second screening device noted above. Moreover, there is always another
story or perspective waiting to be told. I can, however, state the following with
confidence. My selection criteria and choice of articles for analysis provide a rich,
diverse, and representative range of materials. In conjunction with the student

writings, these materials honor Levine’s use of “thick description.”

The Relevance and Importance of this Study:

Some key steps toward understanding the complicated ethics of plagiarism have
already been taken. David Leight undertook an examination of “nearly seventy
writing instruction textbooks, almost all from the 1980s and 19908 and from major
publishers” (221). In this study, which culminated in a 1999 essay, Leight detects
what he terms four key metaphors, or ways of thinking about, why plagiarism is an
ethical problem. These include

Plagiarism constitutes stealing and is therefore morally wrong; plagiarism is
an ethical problem in which the plagiarist violates an unwritten code of
conduct for students; plagiarism is a “borrowing” in which “credit” is left
undelivered; and plagiarism is a failure to intellectualize like a member of the

academy. (221)

ll

Late in his study, Leight acknowledges the work left undone. “Whether or not
these metaphors [of plagiarism] tie directly to specific composition theories is the
subject of another study, perhaps correlating authors of textbooks to their positions in
articles” (229). I prefer, however, to shift Leight’s methodology, beginning not with
the front-line textbook “results” of our theoretical assumptions, but with our
professional discourse about plagiarism and cheating. Without a clear sense of what
assumptions underlie our existing talk about cheating-related issues, we cannot hope
to constructively bridge the gap between postmodern ideas about language use and
classroom (or institutional, or even societal) practices. And this approach allows me
to test another important hypothesis: that scholars — writing for other scholars - will
reveal more theoretical sophistication than we find in textbooks written for
undergraduate students.

My study differs from Leight’s in two other important ways. I have examined the
writings of scholars from a variety of fields who have published about American
college or university-level plagiarism or cheating in professional journals between
1995 and 2000. Thus, rather than focusing on narrow disciplinary materials - for
example, textbooks designed for use in English composition courses - I can analyze
cross-disciplinary trends, similarities, and conflicts, and thereby more effectively
gauge the situational complexity we confront in addressing our students.

Leight’s essay appears as part of the larger collection mentioned earlier: the 1999
anthology, Pegspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual Property in a Postmodern
M, edited by Lise Buranen and Alice M. Roy. Several essays from this anthology

appear in the stories of my dissertation. In their introduction to the anthology,

l2

Buranen and Roy point out that, despite considerable academic discussion about

postmodern views of plagiarism, such conversations have not filtered down to

classroom practice.
In textbooks and in university publications about academic integrity,
plagiarism is often treated as a monolithic, uncomplicated concept or event,
whose meaning is simply taken for granted. The assumption seems to be that
we all know what we mean when we talk about it: it just is. In academia, in
the sciences, and in writing handbooks and classroom instruction, the main
emphasis is on prevention and punishment. (xvii)

As noted earlier in this chapter, no scholars have expressed a similar concern
about cases of cheating that do not involve plagiarism. Part of my contribution to the
literature is this final divergence from Leight’s methodology: we do need to think
more about implications of cheating that are both ethical and postmodern. Therefore,
my dissertation analyzes cheating as well as plagiarism literature. My literature
sample, as a result, is richer and more diverse. And because it covers a broader
scope, I have a greater opportunity to explore the situational complexity I describe
below. I also have a chance to look at the ways in which issues of cheating and
plagiarism diverge, blend, and sometimes get conflated.

Most of the metaphors Leight uncovered presuppose either an essentialized
“integrity” that plagiarism clearly violates, or the need for allegiance to a narrowly
defined academic community. When beginning my own research, I hypothesized that
such ethical appeals would generally fail to persuade both thoughtful college teachers

and their students. The same reasoning applies to cases of cheating. “Don’t cheat

l3

because it’s wrong” and “Don’t cheat because it hurts your school” are inadequate
responses to potential cheaters.

Why is that the case? Students’ values are shaped by the concrete situations they
encounter —- by their interactions with different people in different environments with
differing expectations. Given the persistence of cheating, it seems fair to surmise that
at least some of these contexts send conflicting ideas about ethical behavior. After

all, the following messages are also culturally resonant in this country: “be the best,”

9’ ‘6

“get ahea , winning is everything,” and “you have to compete to survive.” Our
hopes for academic integrity, therefore, require that we view cheating and willful
plagiarism as ethical and multi-contextual problems. By doing just that in the final

two chapters, my dissertation will offer an additional new feature to the literature.

A Chapter-by-Chapter Synopsis

Following this introduction, Chapters Two and Three offer two important stories
about cheating and plagiarism in college education. I term these “stories” or
“narratives” because those labels seem most fitting within the broader quest for thick
description. Each of these stories is partial, incomplete. It is necessarily selective,
featuring only the details authors choose to emphasize - in order to stake their claims
as strongly as possible. On the other hand, these stories are not literary narratives in
any conventional sense. That is, they have none of the classical unities. They feature
multiple authors writing about related, but often distinct, materials in related, but
often different ways. With those complexities in mind, Chapters Two and Three

examine these broader narratives about cheating and plagiarism, spelling out the key

14

features of each one: who writes, what issues do they address, and how do they
approach ethical problems. As part of each story, I will offer an expanded “telling”
of a recent article I deem paradigmatic — that is, representative of key features and
nuances particular to that brand of storyteller.

Chapter Two provides the first story, what I term the “analytical” narrative. It
consists largely of careful, detailed, empirical articles. This story describes the
phenomena of college cheating and plagiarism, investigates the scope of the
problems, and in some cases offers targeted solutions to improve academic integrity
(implementing honor codes, for example).

In Chapter Three, the meta-analytical and more postmodern story emerges. This
discourse focuses mainly on critiquing traditional criticisms of plagiarism. In its
critique, the second story reveals fissures in the earlier narrative: places where the
first story fails to properly distinguish among linguistic conventions, developmental
struggles, and moral failings.

Chapter Four presents an important “third story” about plagiarism; it belongs to
twenty of my former students from Ball State University. Since their texts remain
formally unpublished, I have attached copies of all subject responses as appendices to
this document. Even more than the first and second stories, this one defies neat
categorization, since the students offer a broad diversity of theoretical and practical
concerns.

Finally, Chapters Five and Six give me the opportunity to enrich this thick
description with my own re-telling and emphasis upon important details. Chapter

Five offers a synthesis of patterns from Chapters Two through Four. What do the

15

first three stories, when taken together, reveal about our plagiarism and cheating talk?
From those narratives, which suggestions for action or change seem to work well, and
which ones seem not to? What unique features can I offer to the broader dialogue?
With that final question, we reach Chapter Six. There, I argue for a new ethical
discourse, one that will accomplish two things. It will focus explicitly on the ethics
of cheating and willful plagiarism, but it will also respect the fact that students face a
diverse range of pressures and expectations about academic misconduct, both within
and outside the academy. This amounts to a “fourth story,” both a compromise

among and an extension of lessons offered by the earlier narratives.

 

i Levine’s citation to Geertz illustrates the fine line between ethical attribution and common
knowledge. Only in an endnote to Chapter One - a note it takes the reader a while to locate — does
Levine acknowledge that “thick description” is a concept that “has been made famous by Clifford
Geertz” in his 1973 work, The Interpretation of Cultures (253, n. 49).

“ The specific case noted by Levine featured a female rental manager for a Nashville, Tennessee
company called Forklift Systems, Inc. The employee alleged that the company’s owner had sexually
harassed her.

“‘ The figure of 1,840 comes from a search last completed on August 22, 2003. Obviously, that
number will continue to grow.

"' Patchwriting refers to the inevitable and unintentional use of another’s language as part of the long
process of assirnilating that discourse — of making it one’s own. This behavior occurs most often when
writers are asked to write about unfamiliar texts.

" See, for example, the illustrative title of Ann Lathrop and Kathleen Foss’s 2000 book, Student
Cheating and Plagiarism in the Internet Era. Both the title and the book’s contents group cheating and
plagiarism together in order to explore an ethical crisis. ”It is also worth noting that Lathrop and Foss
seem to accept the pedagogical distinctions that Moore Howard applies to plagiarism. The book’s
authors devote two pages to “Unintentional Plagiarism” (162-63).

 

l6

Chapter Two
The First Story: Analyzing Plagiarism and Cheating

Section One: Defining the Scope of the “First Story”:

As noted in Chapter One, this study will highlight four “stories,” or
comprehensive narratives, about cheating and plagiarism in American undergraduate
higher education. Based on the selection methodology described earlier, eighteen
articles published between 1995 and 2000 comprise this “first story.”

The first story, while sharing features discussed later in this chapter, is not
monolithic. Its authors demonstrate a variety of goals in their articles. Two of the
most common are ascertaining why students cheat and/or plagiarize, and - in a related
point -- what memberships, allegiances, or attributes make them more likely to do so.
Some of this tracing is quite painstaking.’

In order to explore such issues thoroughly, twelve of the eighteen authors
distributed written surveys to undergraduates at American colleges and universities.”
From the survey information returned, these authors identified patterns. Particular
patterns emphasized who tends to cheat more often, and why. An illustrative finding
comes from “Academic Integrity in Honor Code and Non-Honor Code
Environments,” a 1999 article treated at length later in this chapter. In that work,
authors McCabe, Trevino, and Butterfield suggest the following tendencies among
cheaters: underclassmen cheat more than upperclassmen, males more than females,
lower-achieving students more than higher, and fraternity and sorority members more
than non-members (211). In a similar vein, McCabe and Trevino find in a 1997 study

that fraternity and sorority membership, peer behavior, and peer pressures are strong

17

contextual influences in promoting academic dishonesty (“Individual and Contextual
Influences” 392). And in a 1996 article, George M. Diekhoff and fellow authors note
the following trends: “Students who cheat tend to be younger, less mature, less
committed to the goals and values of higher education . . . ” (“College Cheating”
489)

In addition to highlighting these tendencies, many of the first-story authors offer
targeted solutions - ways to deter and/or punish cheaters, and ways to prevent future
cheating. Four of the eighteen authors (or authorial teams) explore the possibilities of
campus-wide honor codes or honor systems (McCabe, Trevino, and Butterfield;
Paldy; Alschuler and Blimling; Mathews). Two of them suggest practical strategies
that teachers can use within their classrooms (Belleza, et. al.; Kloss). One
recommends using — by analogy — a particular employee motivation theory to
discourage cheating (Malouf and Sims).iii Another author sees the issue as one of
personal moral development, requiring schools to promote a better “internalized”
code of ethics among their students (Davis and Ludvigson). One writer advocates
better communication of institutional expectations for students (Roth and McCabe).
Another recommends using a “model” institutional policy (Risacher and Slonaker),
and a final one explores the value and efficacy of disciplinary ethics courses (Sims).

Just as these authors’ goals and proposed remedies differ, so do their disciplinary
backgrounds — and thus the contexts from which they. work and draw conclusions.
Among the eighteen authors (or authorial teams) noted, at least five academic clusters

are represented: organizational management, psychology, economics, science

18

education, and business. Among that range, psychology has the strongest
representation, with practitioners from that field authoring six of the 18 articles.

A final demographic feature bears noting here. Of the eighteen articles, eleven
were published in journals that seek broad, multidisciplinary audiences: the Journal of
College Student Development (one article), Research in Higher Educm (five),
Journal of Higher Education (two), and College Teaching (three). The Journal of
College Stuglent Development caters to college guidance counselors and other student
support personnel. Research in Higher Education offers quantitative research articles
geared toward all those interested in postsecondary educational institutions.
According to its publisher’s web site, The Journal of Higher Education combines
disciplinary research methods with issues of broad importance to faculty,
administrators, and college/university program managers.iv And finally, QM
Teaching appeals to a slightly narrower set of readers, but shows a similar range of
disciplinary approaches.

The remaining seven articles were published in the following, more narrowly
tailored disciplinary journals: Teaching of Psychology (two articles), Journal of
College Science Teaching (one), NASPA Journg (for higher education
administrators; one article), Psychology in the Schools (one), Journal of Educational

Psychology (one), and Jouraal of Education for Business (one).

 

l9

Section Two: What Holds this Story Together?

My discussion thus far has focused on the diverse features of this “first story.” If,
however, I seek to deem this a “narrative” at all, it must have some coherence as well.
The section that follows will discuss some features (largely) held in common by
articles in this grouping.

Part of this common ground stems from the leadership of a particular thread —
what might almost be considered a “master narrative” from which other participating
authors draw and in which they share. Donald L. McCabe, a professor of
organization management at Rutgers University, probably qualifies as the leading
researcher on cheating in academe today. Since 1992, McCabe has authored or co-
authored at least eighteen professional articles related to academic dishonesty.v His
studies of cheating have more public prominence — by a large margin - than those of
any other scholar noted in this study. Thus, it seems fair to attribute leadership of the
first story to McCabe. Moreover, McCabe authors or co-authors three of the articles
among the eighteen in this “first story” as a whole. No other author has such
visibility in this story. The three articles are “Communication Strategies for
Addressing Academic Dishonesty” (1995), “Individual and Contextual Influences on
Academic Dishonesty: A Multicampus Investigation” (1997), and “Academic
Integrity in Honor Code and Non-Honor Code Environments: A Qualitative
Investigation” (1999).

Perhaps the most important reality for the McCabe-led narrative is, as the authors

note in “Communication Strategies,” the understanding “that academic dishonesty is

20

a chronic problem” in higher education (531). The narrative, moreover, bolsters this
assertion with a large volume of quantitative research. For example, Nancy Roth, et
a1. chart evidence of cheating that spans 30 years of research (“Communication
Strategies” 531). In a study conducted with Linda Trevino, McCabe — also noting the
30-year time span - reports that the estimated percentage of college students who
cheat has ranged broadly: from 13% to 95% (“Individual and Contextual” 379). With
Trevino, McCabe also articulates the ethical (in addition to the empirical) dilemma.
“With the growing concern about eroding values in American society in general, and
within our educational system in partiCular, the problem of academic dishonesty in
higher education continues to receive considerable attention (“Individual and
Contextual Influences” 379).

The McCabe-led narrative, then, furthers an ongoing story of chronic deceit. To
address such a difficulty, researchers dissect very specific sets of data about students,
pinpointing the role(s) of factors like “personality or psychological characteristics of
cheaters, demographic profiles of cheaters, and situational/organizational factors
associated with cheating” (“Communication Strategies” 531).

Having identified key categories into which cheaters fit, researchers can better
offer readers focused strategies for combating academic dishonesty. For instance,
McCabe suggests that “interventions aimed at controlling cheating can be aimed at
groups who cheat more (such as underclassmen) or contexts where cheating is
supported (such as fraternities or sororities)” (“Academic Integrity” 211).

In addition, among the particular solutions offered by this “first story,” greater

cohesiveness within a given academic community plays a big role. Students must

21

understand the importance of integrity and honesty within their institution, and
communicating this expectation should deter cheating (“Communication Strategies”
531). Honor codes represent an especially focused version of such communication.

While examining professional articles, I have looked primarily for references to
the ethical (or moral) aspects of college cheating and plagiarism. Given that
approach, another key feature of the “first story” becomes visible: its common
assumption that cheating and plagiarism are self-evidently, unproblematically wrong
and need to be corrected. At first glance, that assumption seems quite reasonable; we
all agree that cheating and willful plagiarism are wrong, after all. But different
writers employ different ethical vocabularies to describe cheating and plagiarism;
that’s a key finding of this dissertation. In this first story — for the most part — that
vocabulary focuses explicitly on describing problems and practical solutions, and (at
most) implicitly on the ethical questions raised.

This trend is not shared by all articles within this story. One notable exception
comes from Barbara Welch’s response to Rebecca Moore Howard’s call for
rethinking “plagiarism.” Welch argues that to combat plagiarism, we must focus on
results, and worry less about the ethical process each student is following. Motives,
Welch believes, “while certainly decisive in ‘ultimate justice,’ are far too subjective,
too hard to prove, to be a legitimate concern in most plagiarism cases” (2). For
Welch, moreover, “it’s arguable who is the greater culprit,” the “painstaking
patchwriter” -- who has not adequately learned scholarly conventions -- or the

“carefree copyist,” who knows his or her behavior is wrong, but persists in it (2).

22

From this brief explication, we can see that Welch shares her first-story
colleagues’ goal of eliminating misconduct. And yet, by responding directly to
Moore Howard’s division between ethical and pedagogical kinds of “plagiarism,”
Welch takes -— perhaps of necessity - a step that those colleagues do not. In the
quotation just noted, she judges the ethical quality of students’ behavior — how they
should behave, and why - rather than taking for granted that everyone agrees on the
confines of academic misconduct. Those who plagiarize without understanding what
they do still hear ethical responsibility, in Welch’s view, since she believes that
ignorance of discourse conventions is no excuse.

Without additional first-story comments of this nature, however, my ability to
investigate the ethical rhetoric of this first narrative requires, in many cases, that I
“read between the lines.” Indeed, this need has led me to focus on the ethical
metaphors used by scholars to describe plagiarism and cheating. By definition, to
treat a subject metaphorically is to treat it indirectly, through richly textured
comparisons, as I will show later in this chapter. Those who share in, and value, a
particular broader narrative eventually take those comparisons for granted.

Let me close this section with a final staple of the first story. While this narrative
generally takes the ethical impropriety of cheating and plagiarism for granted, it does
occasionally acknowledge the situational complexity inherent in cheating behaviors.
In one study, McCabe, Trevino, et al. describe one approach to seeking the locus of
responsibility for academic dishonesty on college campuses. “Studies have generally
used survey techniques to test theories about the individual and contextual

characteristics that are thought to influence cheating in college” (“Academic

23

Integrity” 211). Further, in “Individual and Contextual Influences,” McCabe and his
co—author quote approvingly the long-established conclusion that “cheating behavior
is a complex psychological, social, and situational phenomenon” (380). Some of these
complexities emerge more clearly in the detailed article analysis below.

To better capture the nuances of this first story, the section that follows provides a
detailed explication from one of the eighteen relevant “storytellers.” Since I have
identified the McCabe-authored (or co-authored) texts as exerting leadership over this
narrative as a whole, one of those three articles receives this detailed treatment. The
chosen article merits special attention for the following reasons. In this article, the
authors describe their methodology and present their findings in extensive detail, thus
enabling more careful and thorough analysis from readers. Moreover, the authors
spend time on both the causes and a possible solution for academic dishonesty. Since
both of those aspects are important components of this first story, they each deserve a

detailed “telling.”

Section Three: One Detailed “Telling” of the First Story

McCabe, Donald L., Linda Klebe Trevino, and Kenneth D. Butterfield.

“Academic Integrity in Honor Code and Non-Honor Code Environments: A

Qualitative Investigation.” The Journal of Higher Education 70.2 (March/April

1999). 211-34.

24

Early in this article, the authors recount the strong academic interest, during
recent years, in academic dishonesty on college campuses. They go on to recite
tendencies discovered in their earlier research about cheating: that underclassmen
cheat more than upperclassmen, males more than females, lower-achieving students
more than higher, and fraternity and sorority members more than non-members (211).

As the title of this article hints, the authors hypothesize - building on an earlier
study by McCabe and Trevino -- that honor codes may diminish cheating. Under
their governance “it may be more difficult to rationalize and justify cheating because
there are fewer grey areas” (212). And indeed, this hypothesis seems logical; honor
codes can more clearly delineate who is responsible for what, and they can grant
students enforcement powers they would not otherwise possess.

Early in the article, the authors frame their study’s methodology for readers. The
thirty-one colleges and universities comprising the study sample were “highly
selective in their admissions policies” (212). McCabe and fellow authors solicited (in
writing) student participants from among those thirty-one. Student responses
received were then divided initially between those from honor code institutions and
those from non-code institutions (212). According to the authors,

in this study, which was part of a larger study of academic cheating in honor
code and non-code institutions, conducted in the 1995-1996 academic year,
we used qualitative techniques to delve more deeply into students’ thoughts
about academic integrity. At the end of the survey students were asked to

comment openly about the effectiveness of the academic integrity policies on

25

their campuses and the prevalence of cheating, both their own and that of their
peers. (212-13)

The authors further note that this was, to an extent, a blind study — one that hid the

authors’ most significant research motive from participants.
The term honor code was not used here or elsewhere in the survey. The
research instrument focused on cheating, and the term ‘academic integrity
policies’ was used to refer to relevant policies on each campus. Therefore,
respondents were unaware of our interest in the impact of codes on their
thinking. (212)
In addition, the authors suggest that they let participating students “speak for
themselves and allowed the categories to emerge from the data” (214).

Moreover, responses were categorized into “thought units, each of which
represented a complete thought or idea” (214). After the assignment of “thought
units,” the units “were organized into emergent categories by two members of the
research team” (214). Then, “labels were assigned to the categories in an attempt to
capture accurately the content of each category and to allow additional raters to place
the thought units consistently into the same categories” (214). And finally, “in the
third or ‘classifying’ phase of the content analysis, the emergent categories were
grouped into a smaller number of unifying themes” (214-15).

In their classifying methodology, the authors distinguish between “individual”
and “contextual” characteristics that influence cheating (211). “Individual,” in the
authors’ usage, means a characteristic of a group of people (like being

underclassmen), while “contextual” means a concrete, situational environment held in

26

common (like fraternity membership). As seen in the discussion immediately below,
the authors go on to base significant claims upon the importance of that distinction.
Moreover, the authors believe that “honor codes may represent the most important
contextual factor, because they offer faculty and administrators a means to influence
behavior across the entire student body” (211-12).

Among the "institutional/contextual” response information obtained by the
authors, the three most frequent categories of response are -- first from code
institutions:

0 Statements regarding code effectiveness (e.g., “cheating rare, I have not
observed cheating, I wouldn’t cheat)”;

o Statements indicating that the “code is deeply embedded in a culture of
integrity (via tradition, communication, training, penalties, via peer, faculty and
community expectations, trust and support). Code is liked, respected, valued, taken
seriously. Code provides valued freedoms”; and

0 “Statements regarding less cheating than other schools (e.g., high school,

other colleges)” (217).

The corresponding top three (in frequency) among the non—code category are:

0 “Statements regarding lack of cheating”;
o “Cheating occurs, but it’s not a big problem here”; and
0 “We live in a moral community — quasi honor system, expectations clearly

communicated, moral socialization by school, students encouraged to know/abide by

27

rules, school sets policies/guidelines, mutual respect with professors, honor system in

certain courses/programs” (217).

Among the “Attitudes/Personal Factors,” the top three in frequency from code
institutions are:

0 “Grade pressures, intense competition, societal and family expectations,
desire to excel, laziness, getting a job.”;

0 “References to ethical standards, responsibility and character (e.g.,
integrity, respect, honesty, conscience, self-image, pride)”;

0 “Ethical gray areas. Definition of cheating depends on contextual

factors/is often stretched. Students unaware they’re cheating?” (219).

Finally, among respondents from non-code institutions, most designated the
following attitudes/personal factors:

0 “Grade pressures, intense competition, societal and family expectations,
desire to excel, laziness, getting a job.”;

0 “People don’t cheat due to individual factors (e.g., personal ethics,
integrity, pride, honesty, religion, upbringing, experiences). Students should be
responsible, trustworthy”;

0 “Ethical gray areas. Definition of cheating depends on contextual

factors/is often stretched. Students unaware they’re cheating?” (219).

28

Based on the nature and frequency of responses in these categories, the authors
conclude that

one consistent theme emerges from this analysis - students at institutions with
honor codes frame the issue of academic integrity in a fundamentally different
way from students at non-code institutions. This difference seems to stem
from the presence of the honor code and the influence such codes have on the
way students think about academic honesty and dishonesty. Although honor
code students feel the same pressures from the larger society as their non-code
colleagues, they are significantly less likely to use such pressures to
rationalize or justify their own cheating. Rather, they refer to the honor code
as an integral part of a culture of integrity that permeates their institutions.
(229-30)

This closing emphasis on “permeates” raises some interesting concerns for my
study — issues I will discuss further in Chapter Five of this study. Do the authors
mean that successful honor codes do not allow any other influences ‘in’? If so, can
students preserve that sanctity when they move from the realm of their college
campus to other sites of rhetorical engagement: workplaces, civic sites, churches,

political arenas?

Section Four: Enriching the Story Through Metaphor
Given space constraints, the remainder of this chapter will not explore each of the
eighteen relevant storytellers with the same depth as the section immediately above.

Instead, it steers the focus more narrowly, toward the ethical vocabulary of this story

29

as a whole. That emphasis, after all, is my primary interest with each of the four
stories in this study. Therefore, this final section identifies particular places where
David Leight’s key ethical metaphors (discussed in Chapter One) emerge in the
eighteen articles comprising this first story."i

In exploring these metaphors, I am applying a methodology similar to that used
by Leight in his 1999 article, “Plagiarism as Metaphor.” There, he identifies
metaphors of plagiarism in college textbooks. By contrast, as noted in Chapter One,
my study explores the “talk” in professional journals about plagiarism and cheating,
on the assumption that many of our concrete teaching tools and practices flow from
our theoretical views, rather than the converse. I focus primarily on moral or ethical
vocabulary (explicit and implicit), since I believe that teaching is at its core an ethical
activity. To succeed in that respect, our ethical discourses - our stories — must have
meaning, coherence, and, in some (rather complicated) sense, consistency for both
our students and ourselves.

While selecting the particular materials for this chapter (and section), I have
confined my focus to the core data sample I identified in Chapter One. Rather than
identifying and categorizing all uses of particular words that qualify as “morally” or
“ethically” resonant, I have looked for academic responses that — in one sense or
another - respond to the question “what do students owe to others, and why?”

As noted earlier in this chapter, one interesting challenge has been the relative
scarcity of direct commentary about why plagiarism and cheating violate this sense of
obligation. Among the materials from my data sample, the quotation reprinted in the

following paragraph is a notable exception, perhaps because the authors here sought

30

to provide an explicit model for thinking about the ethical components of academic
misconduct. In 1996, Joanne Risacher and William Slonaker surveyed members of
the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators. In their survey, they
sought to detemrine member preferences for how best to handle academic
misconduct. And based on the written responses they received, the authors created an
academic integrity policy to serve as a “benchmark” that members could adapt to
their own working contexts (117).

That policy reads as follows:

Students must not cheat or plagiarize. Also, they must not condone these
behaviors or assist others who cheat or plagiarize. Academic misconduct not
only jeopardizes the career of the individual student involved, but it also
undermines the scholastic achievements of all students, and attacks the
mission of the institution. Students are inherently responsible to do their own
work, thereby insuring the integrity of their academic records. (Risacher and
Slonaker 118-119)

Embedded in this quotation are numerous attitudes concerning why cheating and
plagiarism might strike members of the academy as unethical. To do so is dangerous;
it “jeopardizes the career.” The import of cheating and plagiarism is criminal, an
“attack” on the cheaters’ academic records, on their fellow students, and on the
institutions they attend. Of just as much concern, these behaviors violate the
cheaters’ own, innate moral core, their “inherent responsibility to do their own work.”

Such themes resonate richly in the metaphors explored below.

31

A. Plagiarism and Cheating as Symptoms of Disease

In the professional literature between 1995 and 2000, some of the language of
morality centers around an explicit, or more often implicit, metaphor of disease in the
individual body. For example, in their 1995 analysis, “Communication Strategies for
Addressing Academic Dishonesty,” Nancy L. Roth and Donald L. McCabe quote a
1993 United States Department of Education brief, which suggests thirty years of
research have established “‘that academic dishonesty is a chronic problem’” (531).
Indeed, this emphasis proves to be a long-term feature of the discourse. In a 1996
article on “Plagiarism (Coming to Terms),” Darsie Bowden reflects on the entrenched
“disease” characterizations of plagiarism by university scholars.

“Alice Drum (1986) calls plagiarism ‘a disease that plagues college students
everywhere’ (241); it is a pervasive and pernicious sickness that students must
be cured of, presumably by the teacher. Augustus M. Kolich (1983) refers to
it as the ‘worm of reason’ . . . . Richard Murphy (1990) calls it ‘the cheating
disorder’ (898) . . . ”(1)

Problems of cheating have also proven to be broadly communicable - disorders
that spread. As Diekhoff, et. al. report in their 1996 longitudinal study, “College
Cheating: Ten Years Later,” “[t]en years ago we reported that cheating was
widespread and epidemic . . . . The present report represents the first of a series of
anticipated follow-up studies” (487). In this first follow-up analysis, Diekhoff once
again stresses the epiderrric, or society-wide, proportions of the cheating problem in

higher education. “It is also widely accepted that student cheating is part of a broader

32

societal problem where people sidestep ethics in favor of the bottom line” (“College
Cheating” 489).

Moreover, the spread of this ethical disease takes on additional urgency for at
least one scholar concerned with modern technology’s ability to resemble viral cell
replication. In the November/December 1999 issue of Academe, Marcel C.
LaFollette reviews the recent publication of Perspectives on Plagiarism an_d
Intellectual Property in a Postmodern World.Vii In establishing the context for both
the book’s publication and his review’s tone, LaFollette notes that plagiarism has
become “standard operating procedure in an era when electronic media, which
combine the capabilities of print, radio, video, computers, and personal interaction,
can offer borderless publication and the ability to scan, alter, and reconstruct without
restraint” (2).

Other scholars, too, bemoan the rampant ethical virus -— one that defies all
attempts at a cure. In the Fall 1995 issue of College Teaching, Alfred S. Alschuler et
al. stress the importance of colleges and universities “curbing epidemic cheating”
(“Curbing” 123). Lester Paldy, a professor of science and mathematics at
SUNY/Stony Brook, complains in a 1996 editorial in the Journal of College Science
Teaching that “[c]heating is endemic on my campus despite regulations and
recommendations for faculty designed to deter it” (“Problem” 5). Such is the
frustration, Paldy continues, that “you sometimes wonder whether measures dealing

with the symptoms have any relation to the disease” (5).

33

B. Plagiarism and Cheating as “Policing” Concerns

Those who act unethically might also be expected (at least sometimes) to behave
in ways deemed criminal. The recent explosion of commercial “paper mills” on the
intemet may have reinvigorated the notion of plagiarism as theft. As a result of this
market trend, Robert J. Kloss suggests, we too frequently see “the single,
conscienceless entrepreneur setting up local shop” to provide students with
cheating/plagiarizing resources (“Writing Things Down” 3). In his 1996 article,
“Writing Things Down vs. Writing Things Up: Are Research Papers Valid?,” Kloss
questions whether the research paper, as traditionally taught, leads students to acquire
an emotional and intellectual investment in their work, or whether it leaves students
disengaged from their academic task.

According to Alfred S. Alschuler, the expanded paper-mill market evokes
criminal behavior on an epidemic scale -- fostering the worst nightmare of law
enforcement.

Cheating is the academic equivalent of urban crime. Gangs of students
routinely steal, bootleg, and sell test answers. Essays, like guns, can be
purchased without proof of purchase or waiting periods over the Internet
counter and through advertisements in national magazines under the code
name of “original research.” (123)

Given the metaphor, once cheating students have been designated as criminals,
their supervising faculty members become the law enforcement officers. Richard J.
Murphy suspected one of his students had copied large segments from a critical work

on James Joyce. As a result, he notes, “though I should not have had time to play

34

detective, I made room among all the duties of my life to pursue this student. I was

thrilled by the chase” (Murphy 7).

C. The Cheater as a Morally Immature or Insufficient Self

Just as an inadequate immune system renders the body more vulnerable to
disease, some researchers conclude that academic misconduct stems from an
inadequately developed moral constitution. Under this view, “plagiarism is important
because it violates the moral code of learning, not because it offends (or does not
offend)” any particular member of a campus community (White, “Student” 209).
Writing in Academe, Marcel C. LaFollette insists that “plagiarism is the ultimate self-
indulgent act; it is neither generous nor altruistic” (3). In their 1999 study published
in Research in Higher Education, Kim Pulvers and George M. Diekhoff set up a
moral divide between cheaters and those who follow the rules. “It seems clear,” they
note, “that cheaters tend to operate from lower, less mature stages of moral
development than do noncheaters” (Pulvers, et a1, “Relationship Between” 488).

In June 1995, Charlotte Ferrell and Larry Daniel published an article with the
highly descriptive title, “A Frame of Reference for Understanding Behaviors Related
to the Academic Misconduct of Undergraduate Teacher Education Students.” Like
many in this first story, the authors’ underlying study featured a survey in which
students self-reported instances of academic misconduct. The authors’ assessment
complements quantitative conclusions with the suggestion that academic misconduct
in higher education is a "form of deviancy” (346). Thus, we see that in both

empirical and more philosophical investigations, scholars theorize that behaviors like

35

plagiarism and cheating reflect a deficient self — one that is perhaps criminal, but at a
minimum less moral than others.

What ails the immoral self, in the first story, is its lack of self-restraint and self-
discipline. In their 1999 study, Pulvers and Diekhoff suggest that “the incidence of
cheating has been positively correlated with the need for social approval and
negatively correlated with a sense of internal social control . . . . Also, students
possessing a strong personal work ethic are less likely to cheat than are students with
a low personal work ethic . . . ” (“Relationship Between” 489).

The same 1999 study extends a body of Diekhoff’s research about features of
college cheaters. Based on an earlier survey of college students, Diekhoff and
colleagues concluded in 1996 that “students who cheat tend to be younger, less
mature, less committed to the goals and values of higher education, and feel pressured
to succeed by maintaining GPAs” (“College Cheating” 489). This trend is difficult to
eradicate, since the same group of cheaters suffers from “immature moral reasoning
[that] enables them to neutralize their cheating” (“College Cheating” 500).

Stephen E. Newstead and his colleagues sought to discover the incidence and
causes of academic misconduct through a questionnaire distributed to 943 college
students (230-31). Before charting the self-reported responses, Newstead et. al. note
an important, existing conclusion from earlier first-story research. According to other
sources, they indicate, “students who cheat in the classroom tend to ‘neutralize’
[rationalize] their behavior, blaming it on the situation rather than on themselves”

(“Individual Differences” 229).

36

Efforts to identify such “at-risk” categories of students lead to the classification of
various catalysts associated with plagiarism and cheating. As noted earlier, some
researchers divide these factors into the “situational” and the “individual” — with the
latter grouping lending itself to the metaphor of moral immaturity. In a 1995 article,
for example, Nancy L. Roth and Donald L. McCabe summarize research findings this
way: “results suggest that student cheating may be associated more strongly with
beliefs and values than with situational factors . . . ” (531). A 1999 investigation by
McCabe, Trevino, and Butterfield — explicated in section three of this chapter -— notes
that recent studies have divided the research focus between the roles of “contextual”
and “individual” characteristics in college cheating behaviors (“Academic Integrity”
21 1).

One example of these researched results — from around the time of Roth and
McCabe’s assertion - appears in Stephen F. Davis and H. Wayne Ludvigson’s 1995
study of academic dishonesty on a single university campus. According to the
authors,

Our data suggest that external deterrents will fail in the long run. Alternatively,
the existence of ethical—moral-religious systems of social control, from apparently
early in our species’ history, tells us that only when students have developed a
stronger commitment to the educational process and an internalized code of ethics
that opposes cheating will the problem be eradicated. (“Additional Data” 120)

In explaining how to foster such “internalization,” the authors stress reinforcing
acceptable behaviors and teaching relevant rules. With both approaches, they say,

“we aim to produce or strengthen dispositions that naturally resist tendencies to

37

cheat” (“Additional Data 120). Davis and Ludvigson complete this image of a self
immune to improper behavior by noting that “long-term training in effortful tasks
contributes to durable industriousness, a work ethic that naturally resists cheating”
(“Additional Data” 120).

Bernard E. Whitley, Jr.’s 1998 investigation of “Factors Associated with Cheating
Among College Students” also offers a methodological distinction between
individualized and more contextualized factors. In Whitley’s scheme, fairly isolable
factors like a student’s maturity, learning orientation, emotional investment, and
degree of alienation contribute directly to his ability to perceive the moral aspects of
cheating (or not cheating). By contrast, the more contextualized factors influencing
the student -- extracurricular activities, grade pressures, competition, and so on — also
affect his possible intention to cheat, but they do not have any causal bearing on his
moral/ethical considerations.

As the last several paragraphs reveal, first-story authors raise a number of
different, but thematically related oppositions: situational vs. individual, contextual
vs. individual, external vs. internal. Use of these oppositions allows the authors to
describe more carefully their concerns about the poor moral standing of students who

cheat

D. Plagiarism and Cheating as Reflections upon Society or Institution(s)
In contrast with those who view academic misconduct as a personal deficiency,
other scholars place more responsibility upon institutional forces. There is an

obvious connection between this metaphor and the one discussed immediately above.

38

For example, in some of the statements discussed below, institutions corrupt the
individual and must be bypassed, while in others institutions have a more hopeful role
to play; they can redeem academic misconduct.

The former category posits cheating and plagiarism as almost Romantic
phenomena - cases where collective units (often the campus or society as a whole)
corrupt the individual. In C.O. Mathews’ 1999 article on “The Honor System,” the
author seeks to test the effectiveness of a long-standing (25-year-old) honor system at
Ohio Wesleyan University (504). Mathews finds that, despite the presence of a code
compelling such action, “the majority of the students probably could not be depended
upon to report academic dishonesty” (509). And this finding leads the author to
speculate about reasons why. In this process, Mathews juxtaposes the (hypothetical)
untainted, matriculating student with the spectre of forces foreign - and dangerous -
to him or her.

Are there forces at work in college and university which cause the idealism of
beginning students to come into contact with academic realities in such a way
as to build up a system of rationalizations which will justify actions not
justified by a high moral standard? (506).

Alschuler et al. offer a similar description of the corrupting process. “The
problem . . . is not in individual students who lack moral fiber, but in the norms,
values, rules, and roles of the collegiate culture that support cheating . . . ” (“Curbing”
123). And because in this view the problem is systemic, “curbing epidemic cheating
requires seeing it as a systemic problem, understanding what blocks solutions, and

taking collaborative action to transform the system” (123). While Diekhoff and

39

colleagues acknowledge this assessment, they define the moral culprit even more
broadly than Alschuler. “It is . . . widely accepted,” they note, “that student cheating
is part of a broader societal problem where people sidestep ethics in favor of the
bottom line” (“College Cheating” 489). To view cheating and plagiarism as merely
personal faults, the authors maintain, is to miss the social embeddedness of such
phenomena. “Academic dishonesty is only a reflection of the normative patterns of
the society in which it occurs” (“College Cheating” 501). And that society, Edward
M. White notes, is one “that values competitive ownership more highly than integrity
or scholarship” (“Student” 205). The “mere accumulation of facts and units” - a
plagiarist’s tendency — is indeed “fully embedded in the American dream of success”
(“Student” 210).

Given this interrningling of broader cultural norms with the campus environment,
how do we determine which entity (or entities) most contributes to cheating? For his
part, Alschuler differentiates between the corrupted “collegiate culture” and the more
virtuous “educational community” (124). The Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching defines the latter as “a place where individuals accept their
obligations to the group and where well-defined governance procedures guide
behavior for the common good” (qtd. in Alschuler 124). This latter conception, then,
complicates the Romantic vision of the innocent “self” at war with society’s
compromises. It offers instead a belief that ethical wholeness can and must be an
institutional achievement. Students must, however, first place their faith in the proper

institutions.

40

In a view similar to Alschuler’s, Joanne Risacher and William Slonaker reinforce
the notion of an intrinsically virtuous academy, threatened by cheating that corrupts
its ethical core and reputation. “Transcripts that misrepresent academic
performance,” they claim, “not only endanger students’ chances for success in their
careers but also damage the integrity of the institution” (105). For other authors as
well, this idea of colleges and universities fostering a discrete ethical wholeness is
important. Sibylle Gruber expresses concern that if writing center tutors silently
acquiesce in a student’ plagiarism, they might thereby “endanger [the writing
center’s] own integrity as an academic organization” (“Coming to Terms” 54).

Nancy Roth, et al. suggest one way to preserve this integrity. Perhaps a given
institution can — in effect — use language to ethically quarantine students from
negative outside influences. In “Communication Strategies,” the authors build on
their earlier research’into connections between cheating behavior and communication
(532). According to the authors, that research suggests the following lesson:
institutions must communicate more effectively with students about anti-cheating
policies (533). Roth, et. al. then apply what they term a “Coordination Model” to the
challenge of getting that message across. That model consists of three components:

0 Understanding, as a campus community, what constitutes cheating;

o Finding/discovering cheating incidents with relative accuracy; and

o Agreeing what the penalties for cheating should be (537-38).

Once such a framework is in place, the authors believe an ethical quarantine may
work. “[I]t may not be possible to persuade all students to value integrity and honesty

if they do not already do so, but it might be possible to persuade them to change their

41

cheating behaviors for the duration of their stay at the university” (“Communication”
539).

To achieve the agenda outlined by Roth, et. al., monitors of academic dishonesty
must agree to a core ethical paradigm. Indeed, Davis and Ludvigson suggest that “the
values implied by a world view that naturally opposes cheating may be nearly
universally accepted in all education” (“Additional Data” 120). This solidarity proves
vital since its foe is so strong; failing to confront plagiarism allows “the slippery
ethical values of our commercial culture [to] rest unopposed . . . ” (White, “Student”
207).

In contrast with Davis and Ludvigson, Sonia Bodi offers an elaborate definition of
the “academic community” paradigm.

The norm for the academic community should be free and open scholarly
communication. The common search for truth requires open sharing of and
equal access to information. Fraud, theft, deceit, plagiarism, and withholding
results of research are unacceptable behaviors within such a norm (“Ethics”
461).

One way to forge this solidarity — and a common recommendation in recent first-
story literature on academic dishonesty - is through campus “honor codes.” In most
cases, such codes consist of students pledging to do their own work and/or behave
with integrity on examinations and in completing other academic assignments. In
Lester G. Paldy’s description, an honor code promotes ethical self-identity within a
campus community. It “attempts to share responsibility throughout the community of

one’s peers and inculcates a sense of pride, honor, and achievement” (“Problem” 6).

42

McCabe, Trevino, and Butterfield acknowledge that an honor code proves most

durable and successful
when the vast majority of the student community understands that each
student plays a vital role in the success of the code . . . On larger campuses,
where commuter students, part-time students, and students living off campus
often fail to develop the strength of community membership that may be
required to support an honor code, the task may be even more difficult.
(“Academic Integrity” 232)

A final advantage of honor codes is the following. They work to close off the
ethical “loophole” otherwise available to the morally immature cheaters described
above in section three. In McCabe, Trevino, and Butterfield’s analysis, such codes
define expectations so clearly that “it may be more difficult to rationalize and justify

cheating because there are fewer grey areas” (“Academic Integrity” 212).

Conclusion:

This chapter, featuring the first of four key stories in this dissertation, has laid out
a dominant thread in recent professional articles about cheating and plagiarism.
Several characteristics symbolize this first story. Perhaps strongest is the concern for
how widespread, persistent, and destructive academic misconduct has become. First-
story authors, “led” (as I suggest earlier in section two) by Donald McCabe and his

co-authors, address the cheating problem in its many facets: its scope, duration,

43

demographic characteristics, and the possible solutions it makes available. For the
most part, this first story treats cheating and plagiarism cases as interchangeable.

The other dominant first-story feature is the strongly ethical quality of its
metaphors — the images and comparisons authors use to describe, albeit indirectly, the
harms inherent in academic misconduct. In Chapter Three of this study, which
follows, I chronicle a “second story,” one very different from the first in its points of
emphasis. The second story is much less descriptive in its approach to academic
misconduct. Instead, it frequently raises questions about the definitions and
conventions governing our discourses on cheating and plagiarism. In so doing, the

second story becomes almost anti-metaphorical in its approach.

 

’ See, for example, Bernard L. Whitley, Ir.’s exhaustive charting of the links between demographic
characteristics and cheating behaviors.

“The other six provided qualitative analysis of previously established trends.

'” The authors’ model is based specifically on Vroom’s expectancy theory of employee motivation — in
short, the notion that employees - or here, students - respond better if they clearly understand the
consequences (both positive and negative) of different courses of action.

"' See httm/lwwwchiostatepress.orgliournala/Jhemainhtm.

" Appendix A to this study provides a bibliography of these eighteen works, which are listed in
alphabetical order.

"' Actually, more than eighteen works emerge in the metaphor section that follows. That stems from
the interesting presence of what I term “polyphonic” voices in the discussion about cheating and
plagiarism - authors who, because of their acknowledged ambivalence about how to confront these
problems, contribute both to the first story and to the second.

"“ As noted in Chapter One, several essays from this collection are voices in the “stories” of this
dissertation.

Chapter Three:
A “Second Story” of Plagiarism and Cheating

Section One: Defining the Second Story

Twelve articles comprise the heart of this second story - articles selected using
the criteria discussed in Chapter One of this dissertation. When comparing features
of the articles in this story to those of the “first story,” much more homogeneity
emerges. For example, eight of the twelve key articles in this narrative were written
by specialists in rhetoric and composition (Minock; Murphy; Gruber; Moore Howard,
“Plagiarisms”; Moore Howard, “Sexuality, Textuality”; Bowden, “Stolen Voices”;
Bowden, “Plagiarism”; Kitalong). Of the remaining three, one was written by a
professor in educational studies (Johnston), one by a scholar in teaching English as a
second language (Pennycook), and two by attorneys (Steams; Stevens). Of the
twelve articles, all but two are grounded in pedagogically focused branches of
English studies.

Moreover, nine of the twelve articles appear in journals targeted toward scholars
and teachers in English, in English composition, or in related but more specialized
fields. Those nine are published in the following: Journal of Composition Theorv.
Quarterly of the National Writing Proiect. the Writing Center Journal, Mp
@gLiap, Eaglish Journal. TESOL Quarterly, Computers and Composition, and
Composition Studiea/Freshm English News. Thus, while there is a fair amount of
disciplinary similarity, this story also features considerable diversity of publications.

In the over-all data field for the second story, only one publication is represented even

twice: College English.

45

As suggested in Chapters One and Two, the first story focuses largely on
cheating, without delving into nuances that may define “plagiarism” differently than
other forms of “cheating.” The second story, by contrast, treats both cheating and
plagiarism at different points, but with a very strong emphasis on the latter. Perhaps
the most conspicuous second-story voice is that of Rebecca Moore Howard. Since
1992, many of her published works have centered directly on nuances of plagiarism,
its definitions, and the tensions created by enforcement of plagiarism policies.’ A
look at Moore Howard’s influence will help to highlight and introduce key features of
the broader second narrative.

Moore Howard’s article, “Plagiarisms, Authorships, and the Academic Death
Penalty,” published in the November 1995 edition of College English, ignited a
debate about the role, importance, and definition of plagiarism in the academy.
Moore Howard raised those issues with the understanding that postmodern
approaches to language theory greatly complicate the notion of epistemologically
“owned” versus “shared” words and ideas. As writers and thinkers, we can never
fully credit all of our “sources”; thus, we can never claim pure ownership of any texts
we write. Nevertheless, as a culture, we continue to insist that students “give credit
where credit is due,” and - just as importantly — that they “do their own work.”

This paradox creates a dilemma for classroom instructors who must speak
effectively with students about plagiarism. Does” the sense of language as an
intrinsically shared commodity mean that students can never truly “do their own
work”? And if that is the case, what happens to the ethical dimension of our

admonitions against plagiarism?

46

To help resolve this paradox, Moore Howard’s “Plagiarisms” article lays out three
scenarios under which students (allegedly) plagiarize: when seeking to cheat (to gain
unfair advantage), when ignorant of citation conventions, and when compelled to
patchwrite in order to make sense out of another writer’s discourse (797). Only the
first category, in Moore Howard’s scheme, merits an ethical inquiry. On the other
hand, the prevalence of deliberate cheating makes it unlikely “that many theorists
would actually want to abolish all policy on plagiarism, for very few find the
purchase of term papers acceptable” (798).

Because of this ongoing concern, Moore Howard admits that a “postmodern
dismissal of all academic plagiarism policies would be unreasonable” (798). And
therefore, Moore Howard’s resolution still leaves a gap, one in which postmodern
academics must seek a coherent ethical discourse for addressing willful cheaters — the
aforementioned category one. That question is one for which the second story (as
yet) has no clear answer, no significant narrative strand.

Despite this missing link, many voices in this second story work to frame their
articles — and their classrooms — with a clearly ethical vocabulary. One key becomes
the complex nature of the relationships between each student and those to whom she
owes some allegiance. The scenario in which the individual must give credit to the
discrete ideas of others creates a clear boundary between her and the learned
community in which she seeks membership. In other words, that student’s
relationship to the academic community is clear; it is subordinate and deferential.

” 6‘

But, as Moore Howard points out in “Plagiarisms, no one is ever a member of just

one community at a time. Perhaps none of us makes neat switches between mutually

47

exclusive communities; instead, our communities and our allegiances to them
compete and overlap with each other” (793). The higher education academy, for any
given student, is only one of those communities, and the relevant set of relationships
constraining that student at any point in time is vast.

Mary Minock makes a similar point in her 1995 article, “Toward A Postmodern
Pedagogy of Imitation.” In the article, Minock notes that advanced writers, of
necessity, employ complex strategies of imitation. It is therefore unrealistic for
undergraduate writers to avoid all imitation strategies - and thus to avoid the broadest
definitions of “plagiarism” (490). Just as students must learn to appropriate linguistic
patterns from other writers, so too must the authority of a term like “plagiarism . . .
[be] made authoritative within a complicated web of context” (495; italics in
original). A key challenge for this second story, then, is to elucidate the various
contexts, or situations, through which students approach the ethics of cheating and
plagiarism.

From this summary, we see several key strands of this second story emerging. As
noted two paragraphs earlier, the story focuses on the variety of situations faced by
students — a complexity those students must negotiate when deciding whether or not
to plagiarize, as well as when trying to understand what constitutes improper conduct.

This story also questions existing attitudes and practices; it wonders whether they
are helping (or hurting) students and the academic institutions those students attend.
While the first story offers a rich array of metaphors characterizing the ethics of

cheating, the second one questions the usefulness of many of the same metaphors. In

48

fact, as I hint at in Chapter One of this study, the twelve relevant second-story articles
were selected in part because they self-consciously examine those moral metaphors.

Perhaps the most dramatic example of this effort comes in Moore Howard’s
essay, “Sexuality, Textuality: the Cultural Work of Plagiarism.” There, the author
argues for discontinuing the very use of the term “plagiarism” — a word she believes
perpetuates “hierarchized textual values that operate from a model of heterosexual,
binary gender” (10). Moore Howard suggests that other, more clearly ethical terms
(like fraud, for instance) would more accurately label the willful plagiarist, while
avoiding the negative metaphorical work currently done by “plagiarism” (10). In
section three, subsection A of this chapter, I provide more extensive discussion of
Moore Howard’s link between metaphors of plagiarism and gender politics.

Finally, this story, through some of its key voices, questions its ability to
successfully influence students’ ethical behavior. In Chapter One, I endnote a
reference to the “polyphony” of several voices from my database — specifically,
places where the authors’ language has characteristics of both the first and the second
story. The polyphonic voices belong most strongly here, in the second narrative,
because while second-story authors are troubled by plagiarism and cheating, they
cannot fully endorse the dominant ethical vocabulary (embodied by key “moral
metaphors”) governing those behaviors. Second story authors worry, in particular,
about how they can be both effective teachers and vigilant gatekeepers of academic
integrity.

What is the perceived conflict? In “The Cheating Disorder,” Richard J. Murphy,

Jr. offers one detailed explication. Murphy suggests that moral indignation — an

49

emotion he admits to feeling strongly after suspecting a student has cheated -
distracts from a teacher’s primary role. He calls this distraction “the comic
peculiarity of my claiming to be committed to helping students learn but sometimes
spending large chunks of everyone’s time trying to comer them in a fraud” (9). In
Murphy’s framework, the proper relationship - or metaphor — for teacher-student

interaction becomes an important question begged.

Section Two: The Second Story Seeks its Contradictions

The illustrative text synopsized below satisfies all of the criteria just discussed. It
shows how one teacher and scholar struggles with ethical ambivalence -— and tries to
answer the key question begged. D. Kay Johnston wants to create an ethical
vocabulary in the classroom, but she acknowledges the complex web of relationships
- including personal interactions beyond the teacher’s direct control — shaping and
limiting what each class can achieve. Moreover, Johnston finds that students are
more accustomed to prescriptive relationships — between teacher and student, most
notably — than they are to collaborative classroom relationships that might better
promote ethical behavior. Faced with those stumbling blocks, the author engages in
frequent self-reflection: pondering how better to motivate her students to behave

ethically.“

Johnston, D. Kay. “Cheating: Limits of Individual Integrity.” Journal of Moral

Education 25.2 (1996): 159-71.

50

One notable element about Johnston’s approach — like that of Moore Howard - is
that she addresses issues of academic misconduct with an explicit concern for better
learning. Early in her article, she tells readers

[T]his is a story about cheating. It is also about pedagogy and relationships in
a classroom. Since it occurred in a class which I was teaching, it is my story
about my students and what they taught me was at stake in my classroom. I
also think it is at stake in all of our classrooms.” (159)

Several of Johnston’s students — all senior-level undergraduates in a course on
“Moral Development and Education” — cheated on an unproctored examination held
while she was attending a conference off—campus. Johnston left one student in charge
of picking up the essay exam questions from the department, then distributing them to
the class (159). As the professor later determined, a small number of students then
violated an agreement previously established in the class. Johnston first identifies
this problem as failure to abide by “the usual expectation that [students] would be
doing their own wor ” (159). Later in the article, however, she specifies that the
cheating “took the form of consulting notes” during the exam (161).

When she discovered the cheating, Johnston acknowledges, her first temptation
was to lash out. “My initial reaction to the cheating was anger. I could not
understand how ‘they’ could do it in a class in which they were actively working with
their own ideas about morality as well as theories of morality, and I could not
understand how they had done this to ‘me”’ (159-60).

Rather than acting on that frustration, Johnston posits two “moral orientations” as

possible frameworks for examining the cheating dilemma that arose with her class.

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One is the “orientation of care,” which looks at the impact on classroom relationships.
The other Johnston calls a “justice” orientation; it responds directly to the question,
“how could they do this to me?” (160).

As Johnston points out, these two orientations “are not opposites” (160). That is,
they can operate at the same time — with a contradiction that bears examination. The
contradiction stems from the competing pressures facing faculty members who
confront possible instances of cheating. The teacher may respond as the enforcer —
drawing applause from certain corners, but often at the expense of the learning
environment — or as a more complicated figure caught in a web of conflicting
relationships.

The following is Johnston’s description of the latter approach.

Thinking about the orientation of care suggested that I take another tack,
which was to try to uncover the reasons for cheating and begin to explore with
the students how cheating affected the relationships in the class, mine with
them, and them in relationship to each other. (160)

While such a process would prove difficult, time-consuming, and uncertain,
Johnston notes that the “justice” orientation - by contrast - seemed clearly
inadequate. In the article, the author does not mention whether she could ascertain
who the specific cheaters were. Her key assumption seems to be that the cheating had
undermined the integrity of the testing process. Thus, applying the justice orientation
would involve “throwing out the tests, or making [students] take another test” (160).
Both options, she decided, “would not be fair to the majority of students who did not

cheat” (160).

52

Johnston therefore chose to engage the class in a complex analysis of what had
taken place.

During the rest of the term we returned to our real-life moral dilemma over
and over again, both in relation to theories we were studying and to ideas
about how that theory connected to our own experience and informed
education. While the mythical ‘right’ solution, objectively correct and
satisfying everyone, was never reached, I believe we learned about our own
moral thinking and choices during that semester of struggle. (161)

This process, in Johnston’s view, called for a broader metaphorization of the
cheating process — one that would cast the various parties in clearly social
relationships with each other. Johnston notes that in the course of follow-up
interviews with the class’s students (interviews held, on a voluntary basis, the
following semester), “I began not only to worry about these students’ definitions of
friendship and co-operation but also to wonder what we teach students and teachers
about relationships” (162).

As she analyzes her findings from the follow-up interviews, Johnston suggests
that her students themselves constructed both “justice” metaphors — rooted in the
process of enforcing power and authority — and “care” metaphors, rooted in social
interconnectedness. In some students’ comments, “the classroom is constructed as
students against teachers,” with the teacher as all-knowing authority - and in others
there emerges “the idea that the student develops a relationship with the teacher in

which trust develops and in which conversation is possible” (163). “These two views

53

of the teacher,” the author suggests, “were not integrated in the students’ worlds, but
stood parallel” (164).

Johnston notes, however, that this parallel vision creates ethically troubling
conflicts. For many of her (interviewed) students, friendships with others in the class
had “silenced” them from criticizing/acting against the cheating behaviors (166).
That is, broader social networks reinforced the power relationship between teacher
and students. Students had to choose: were they “with” the teacher, or “with” their
friends? And the choice was fairly easy.

Late in the article, Johnston describes her most important finding. “What we do
not have, even in a class which students describe as a partnership, are student-student
relationships that can deal with conflict. We then have no alternatives to solve this
dilemma except turning to the authority, or silence in relationship” (167). In other
words, students in the classroom resort to the policing metaphor — and its affiliates —
because that is the default choice.

In Johnston’s ideal -— and more contextually self-aware — learning universe, by
contrast, she would try to avoid the ethical schizophrenia that seized many of her
students/interviewees.

The constructions were always dichotomous, us vs. them, me vs. the class,
telling the authority or not saying anything, my responsibility vs. their
responsibility, feelings of anger vs. no control over others. These either-or
constructions seem to- be at the root of the teaching problem this dilemma

illuminates. (167)

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Section Three: The Second Story Seeks New Metaphors

In the quotation ending the previous section, Johnston suggests that students fail
to behave ethically when the relationships they’re most attentive to do not invite such
behavior. Such relationships, of course, are not static. They change as circumstances
change, and as we think about them differently. For example, a teacher does not
relate to citizens the same way a police officer does. But what if people come to view
the teacher more as a police officer? What then happens to teacher-student
relationships?

This last set of questions typifies attempts by second-story voices to alter the
common metaphors about cheating and plagiarism. In Chapter Two of this study, I
lay out how first-story voices provide a rich metaphorical tapestry for these subjects.
Here, by contrast, the authors try to weave new patterns of language by explicitly
critiquing many of the ways academic misconduct is characterized in Chapter Two: as
disease, as crime (a policing matter), as the reflection of an immature or insufficient

self, or as the problem of a corrupt society or institutions.

A. Disease and Crime

Moore Howard, perhaps the leading critic of traditional approaches to “curing”
plagiarism, is one of few recent voices to view the disease metaphor critically. In
“Sexuality, Textuality,” she does not belabor the phenomenon of epidemic
plagiarism, but instead assesses the descriptive metaphor and its ability to wield

cultural power. Moore Howard finds, specifically, that the plagiarism “virus” has

55

been characterized not merely as contagious and pernicious — but also as
metaphorically female in character. “Plagiarism is a disease; disease is of the body

. . . and the body, Aristotle and his successors have convinced us, is the feminine”
(“Sexuality, Textuality” 6). As a result of this association, Moore Howard argues,
plagiarism ends up reinforcing an unfortunate sexual hierarchy — rather than helping
to produce good pedagogy (6-7).iii

When the focus turns from internal, organic threat (cheating and plagiarism as
disease) to external, criminal threat, criticisms emerge more strongly. If academic
misconduct is crime, after all, someone must police the criminal “turf.” Who will,
and who is best positioned to, assume that responsibility?

At least one author suggests that college teachers cannot, or will not, easily
assume that task. Economist Franklin G. Mixon, Jr. published a 1996 study testing
the applicability of the theft metaphor to the problem of college classroom cheating.
Mixon found that “many professors do not believe and do not act as if cheating can be
controlled easily or costlessly” (“Crime” 195). He suggests that various situational
factors contribute to this belief, including control by administrators over important
logistical factors in deterrence (like adjusting class sizes), institutional fears of
litigation, and a difficulty in proving violations.

In addition to such procedural challenges, teachers must deal with more
theoretical challenges as well. Darsie Bowden cites Susan McLeod’s 1992 argument
that only a strong — and uniquely Western -- cultural focus on discrete authorship of
words “makes it possible to steal language” (“Coming to Terms” 2). Perhaps more

crucially, Bowden notes, postmodern understandings about intertextuality render the

56

policing metaphor highly problematic for cases of suspected plagiarism. “If the
audience has such an enormous role in shaping [written] personae, the notion of
stealing voices seems a bit peculiar. If we plagiarize, whose voice have we actually
stolen?” (“Stolen Voices” 11).”

Critiques like Bowden’s, however, also must confront the ongoing cultural
presumption that texts can definitively be “owned.” Because of this attitude, suggests
Alastair Pennycook, “the extent of moral rectitude and vehemence with which
teachers sometimes pursue student plagiarizers can be extreme . . . the borrowing of
words is often discussed in terms of ‘stealing,’ of committing a crime against the
author of a text” (“Borrowing” 213-14). Moreover, the search for such thieves is
characterized by a “ferocity of . . . hunting” (“Borrowing” 214). Moore Howard even
suggests that plagiarism has been culturally constructed as rape of another’s property
- a kind of crime eliciting tremendous emotion (“Sexuality, Textuality” 8).
Throughout this article, Moore Howard argues that authorship has long been
gendered as male, involving “the equation of masculinity, abstraction, strength, and
originality” (4). Women, by contrast, cannot be authors in the classical proprietary
sense established by John Locke; “they do not own the product of their labor” (8).
When someone plagiarizes, then, that person - by definition - violates male integrity.
But since “the plagiarist has recourse not to the person of the proprietary author but to
his text,” the text becomes the rape victim (8).

If plagiarism victirnizes the female text, in the conventional trope, where does the
responsive “ferocity of hunting” (Pennycook’s term) emerge from? To discover that,

we have to let Moore Howard finish the syllogism begun above. Since the author —

57

not his female text - is most often publicized as the victim of plagiarism, by
implication “the male author has been raped” (8). This intimation of homosexuality,
Moore Howard argues, “goes a long way in explaining the fury expressed by many
commentators on plagiarism” (8).

It is interesting that, of all criminal offenses, rape may be the one that most
strongly connotes a violation of “personhood” while leaving the victim legally
autonomous. (Murder, by contrast, obliterates — at least in a legal sense — all traces of
the victim’s intrinsic self.) While that association is quite powerful in criminal law
and public policy, when applied to language “violations,” the rape metaphor — in
Moore Howard’s view - overstates the viability and value of “strictly private”
language (10).

Like Moore Howard in “Sexuality, Textuality,” Karla Saari Kitalong suggests that
much punitive anger may stem from the degree to which plagiarism and related
behaviors threaten key cultural norms. Kitalong’s 1998 article in Computers and
Composition suggests that the World Wide Web — in particular — threatens the
scholarly community’s traditional ability to control and punish those who violate its
norms. As Kitalong indicates, “when the written word is a culture’s primary form of
capital, those who appropriate that capital are regarded as thieves” (“Web” 257). And
because the idea of textual ownership holds great weight, the victim reacts quite
strongly. Kitalong recounts the true story of a student who reproduced (nearly in full)
another student’s web site for purposes of a class assignment — then without

prompting acknowledged the “borrowing” to the original author.

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Like the victim of a burglary, [the original author] felt he had been robbed —
not of material but of symbolic capital. And, as victims are inclined to do, he
responded with violence of his own. He reported Dave’s plagiarism to the
person he felt was most empowered to act, Dave’s teacher. (“Web” 258)

In his examination of Western responses to plagiarism, Pennycook - a specialist
in teaching English as a second language - also discusses implications of the policing
metaphor. While grammatical errors and misreadings of a text might elicit faculty
members’ “frustration, censure, and perhaps wrath, I cannot think of anything else
that is viewed as a crime in [the same] way” as plagiarism (214).

Pennycook’s approach toward plagiarism is reflective, in that he questions
whether aggressively policing it serves educational communities well. In this spirit,
some scholars warn that failing to reflect upon the policing stance leaves teachers —
and especially language professionals -- in a difficult situation. Emphasizing
deterrence, a concept from criminal law, may work against key values and goals of
college educators — especially the fostering of some sense of a language community
that is both ethical and coherent. Indeed, even a scholar writing from a lawyer’s
perspective reinforces this dilemma. In her article, “Copy Wrong,” Laurie Stearns
summarizes the dilemma quite succinctly. “The property metaphor is misleading for
words because words are meant to be shared, not possessed” (13). And Janice R.
Walker notes that students get confused by “our focus in the classroom on
punishment for failing to accurately use scholarly citations rather than on the purpose

of those conventions . . . ” (“Copyrights” 244).

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Ironically, this hesitation about conflicting instructional roles emerges even in an
article from the first story — one that touts a statistical program for detecting
(“policing”) cheaters. According to the authors, among the logistical and practical
problems classroom teachers face in gauging academic misconduct is that “they often
believe that they have a professional responsibility to discuss suspected cheating with
the students involved” — a process that impedes the reporting process (Bellezza et. al.,
182). If faculty treat suspected cheating cases as educational opportunities, the
authors imply, fewer cases will eventually be characterized as academic misconduct.

The processes of criminal investigation and educational inquiry may not coexist
comfortably, as Edward H. Stevens notes when discussing the role of due process in
suspected cases of academic misconduct. “If a student and a professor are willing to
discuss their differences frankly, they may come to a mutual understanding. But
imposing procedural requirements tends to increase the adversarial nature of the
relationship” (141)."

There is a tension, according to various second story authors, between enforcing
proper academic behavior and promoting viable, productive academic relationships.
This problem creates near-paralysis in Bowden’s description of writing center
interactions. In Bowden’s view, writing center employees are - above all - writers
helping other writers (2). This posture, however, creates tension with the
expectations that individuals will own their ideas and language. Tutors must
therefore monitor carefully “how much help can be given to students,” in order to

avoid the appearance of plagiarism (2).

This means, in practice, policies like “never write any part of the paper . . . never
point out grammar, spelling, or punctuation mistakes; never hold the pens or pencils”
(2). The benefits of tutorials diminish because of what Bowden describes as such
“paranoid” behavior. “Teacher, tutor, and student fears of transgressing a particular
code of ethics actually prevent them from working together effectively on writing and
error correction, both mechanical and global” (“Coming to Terms” 2).

Tensions like those just described perhaps leave writing center staffers in a unique
position to detect tensions in the policing metaphor. In the Fall/W inter 1998 edition
of The Writing Center Journal, Sibylle Gruber describes her center’s predicament
after a tutor discovered strong evidence of student plagiarism. Gruber notes that her
center stresses the importance of academic honesty, given its role at the intersection
of so many university offices and departments. But the picture is more complicated.
The writing center is also “a safe place for students” — away from the pressures of
grading and the authority of teachers (50).

In a sense, we considered ourselves to be in a no-win situation. We would
either fall short of . . . the trust that students put into their interactions with
Writing Center staff, or we could be blamed for encouraging and perpetuating
unacceptable behavior. Furthermore, remaining silent about [the student’s]
open contempt for academic integrity could prompt him to tell other students
about the Center’s “policy” of non-intervention, endangering our own
integrity as an academic organization which reports to the department chair,

the clean, the provost, and the president of the university. (54)

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The unique - and uniquely vulnerable -- political and institutional position of
writing centers may create a sort of double bind. A brief discussion of two sources
related to the second story - but not part of the research sample I have defined for this
narrative - should help to clarify the problem. According to Judy Hatcher, a writing
center director at San Jacinto College Central, “our tutors, who are full-time faculty,
[have] said they do not want to inform instructors that we have seen a plagiarized
paper. They feel the instructor will spot it and that we should not be policing what
the student or the instructor does” (2).

One suggested resolution for this tension emerges in an electronic listserv. There,
a writing center administrator suggested to colleagues that the policing metaphor
could be constructively transformed. At the suggestion of a tutor, she began fostering
a new strategy — the “what if it were my close friend?” approach — for handling
suspected cases of student plagiarism. While tutors would never “turn in a friend . . .
. on the other hand, what ethical friend would ignore, condone, or encourage
cheating?” (Adang 1).

This construct invokes a new kind of relationship among those involved with the
tutorial. A similar alternative relationship emerges in D. Kay Johnston’s article,
“Cheating: Limits of Individual Integrity,” the piece discussed at greater length earlier
in this chapter. When Johnston discovered clear evidence of cheating on an
unproctored classroom examination, she chose to apply her own research into moral
orientations as a basis for addressing the problem with her class as a whole (160).
Rather than punishing the class, Johnston incorporated the incident into its

discussions. In doing so, she sought “to try to uncover the reasons for cheating and

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begin to explore with the students how cheating affected the relationships in the class,
mine with them, and them in relationship to each other” (160).

From repeated discussions with students - and voluntary interviews during the
following semester - Johnston detected a key tension, a conflict between two
paradigms. In one, the class consists of “a group of autonomous individuals in
conflict with the authority,” the instructor (163). Within that view, the policing
metaphor fits nicely — and indeed, two of Johnston’s students told her they saw
“pinpointing” the cheater or cheaters as her responsibility (163). And yet, Johnston
also notes recurrent student concerns about the negative impact of punishing cheaters
on the working relationships created by the class: among students, and between the

students and the instructor (163-67).

B. Plagiarism and Cheating: Problems of the Self or Society?

Early in section three of this chapter, I suggest that second-story voices often
critique the same characterizations of academic misconduct (here, usually plagiarism)
held out as pivotal by first-story authors. As the previous section indicates, this is
abundantly true with the crime metaphor, in particular. On the other hand, authors in
this second narrative offer little commentary on the other two key constructs from the
first story: the limited self and the problematic society. In Chapter Five, I will
comment further on this gap.

Two second-story authors do briefly question the relationship between the self
and any linguistic or literary activity. As Darcie Bowden points out, there is a strong

cultural language working hard against nullification of selfhood. Bowden finds this

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trend suggestive of the “connection between ownership and selfhood, with the
implication that whatever one owns (language included) makes up one’s personal
identity” (“Stolen Voices” 13-14). Within this cultural ethos, according to Moore
Howard, a scholar like Thomas Mallon disdains forms of textual collaboration, since
individuation, rather than communalism, is “the desired outcome of the creative

process” (“Sexuality, Textuality” 4),"i

C. The “Anti-Metaphor”: Morality Must Go

Consistent with their self-reflective tendencies, some second-story authors even
call for removing the concept of “plagiarism” from the realm of ethical discourse.
This trend perhaps should not surprise us, given the degree and intensity with which
some scholars have sought to deconstruct the moral metaphors outlined in the
previous two sections of this chapter.

For some theorists, deconstructing the moral images of plagiarism helps validate
pedagogical honesty and complexity. Darsie Bowden clarifies the challenge for
instructors with grounding in postmodern theories of language use. “Giving credit
where credit is due is a maxim belonging to a value system that is deeply embedded
in our culture, but this system is problematic because it seems to contradict other sets
of values that are central to current views of language” — the recognition of
intertextuality, in particular (“Stolen” 12).

Alastair Pennycook poses the teacher’s challenge — and important choice — in
more concrete terms by drawing upon his own classroom experience. When one of

his non-Western students wrote an essay on Abraham Lincoln’s life by copying

verbatim - and from memory — from a high school textbook, Pennycook “might have
responded to this with moral outrage or delivered a lecture on plagiarism, ‘or
academic norms.” But he instead found himself “fascinated by the issues it raised:
questions about ownership of texts, practices of memory, and writing” (“Borrowing”
202). Pennycook’s comment seems to clarify the line between unintentional
plagiarism — what most second-story writers on plagiarism deem to be a matter
requiring more careful pedagogy - and willful violation of academic norms, in
response to which we can more justifiably show an ethical concern.

For her part, Janice Walker suggests that punishing plagiarizers, rather than
teaching them “the purpose of [documentation and citation] conventions” in fact “has
created much of” students’ confusion about appropriate textual practices
(“Copyrights” 244). By failing to focus on the rhetorical goals behind discourse
practices, she argues, we encourage students to adopt a common default motive for
academic behavior: simply avoiding penalties by not getting caught (“Copyrights”
244). This concern seems to echo Edward Stevens’ warning (noted earlier in this
section) about the risks of adversarial student—teacher relationships. Faculty members
occasionally get involved in disputes over alleged academic misconduct by students.
During such processes, Stevens notes, a counterproductive tension emerges between a
professor’s teacherly posture and her implicit role as ethical enforcer (140-41).
Richard J. Murphy terms this a “comic peculiarity,” the duality of “claiming to be
committed to helping students learn but sometimes spending large chunks of
everyone’s time trying to comer them in a fraud” (9). Clearly, turning academic

misconduct discussions into elaborate legal-ethical procedures may damage

65

professor-student interaction and certainly “increase the adversarial nature of the
relationship” (Stevens 141).

In his 1995 article on “The Cheating Disorder,” Murphy takes a reflective look at
his own reactions to two suspected cases of student plagiarism. Because he finds his
experience with plagiarism issues “perverse,” Murphy’s rhetorical posture disavows
any ethical agenda in favor of portraying the pedagogical complexities. “I am not
inquiring here into the causes of plagiarism among students nor describing how
teachers ought to respond to it. I am simply telling two stories in order to convey
something of the . . . experience of it” (Murphy 6). For Murphy, suspecting
plagiarism brings both a feeling of being “exhilarat ” by the pursuit of misconduct
(7) and a gnawing distrust stemming from the breakdown in his classroom
community — from “the slanderous suspicion that all my students are cheating” (8).
Seeking out plagiarizers harms the learning environment, Murphy suggests, even as it
brings a “sense of self-satisfaction at the thought that . . . I was preserving the
integrity of the university” (7).

Murphy’s conflict raises a key question for the second story: how much strength
do the various “moral metaphors” of academic misconduct really have? Pennycook
characterizes outrage against plagiarism as a reactionary move -- a response
eventually doomed to fail because the theoretical “times” have passed it by. “(T)he
ferocity of this hunting down of borrowed words may be seen as part of a desperate
rear guard action against changing textualities” (“Borrowing” 214-15).

If the moral outrage is reactionary, as Pennycook hopes, it also embodies a still-

deeply entrenched set of cultural values, as other second-story voices have argued in

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this chapter. Kitalong describes textual ownership and the moral revulsion at its
“theft” as doxic in Western cultures - a series of “predispositions, habits, and belief
systems that seem natural” (“Web” 256) and that are “reified and ultimately
reproduced without question” (260).

The notion of doxa may be applied to the question of why victims in plagiarism
cases feel so violated. A web-page creator whose page has been plagiarized can only
react as if “he had been robbed,” Kitalong notes (“Web” 258); that response is so
customary, so universal, that he cannot imagine another possiblity. Moreover, doxic
practices exacerbate the tension between moral and pedagogical goals; they
“reinforce polarized student/teacher relationships that cast teachers as uncoverers of
plagiarism and place students on the defensive” (“Web” 260).

Two second-voice theorists, Bowden and Moore Howard, seem to envision a new
order that strictly separates the pedagogical from the ethical. They propose what
might be termed postrevolutionary replacements for the situation Pennycook and
Kitalong describe. Bowden suggests that rather than automatically deeming
plagiarism an ethical problem or a question of theft, “it seems more productive to
consider plagiarism a rhetorical problem, one that involves not just the writer and the
act of inscription, but the audience, context and nature of the medium” (“Stolen” 15).
In that way, Bowden notes, we could learn to draw more nuanced (ethical and
pedagogical) conclusions based on the merits of each individual case (“Stolen” 15-
16). We could determine more accurately when “plagiarism” implies misconduct,
when it suggests student misunderstanding, and when it might connote something(s)

else.

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As noted earlier, Moore Howard believes we should abolish the use of
“plagiarism” as a comprehensive term for all rnisappropriations of text. The word
itself, in its cultural construction, “asserts a moral basis for textual phenomena that
are a function of reading comprehension and community membership, not ethics”
(“Sexuality” 3). In addition, Moore Howard claims, the term “plagiarism . . .
involves us in hierarchical [work] in the very ways that many of us abhor” (3),
including the de-authorization of female writers (10). Discussion of other kinds of
allegedly hierarchical work follows, in Chapter Four of this study, where a third story

about academic misconduct emerges.

 

' A detailed list of these relevant works (in alphabetical order) rs available rn Appendix B.

IiIt may seem odd that I have chosen an article about cheating— and not plagiarism— as a
representative text for this second story, since I note earlier in this chapter that a plagiarism focus
dominates the narrative. While Johnston’s approach does not explore issues that are unique to
(alleged) cases of plagiarism, her article nevertheless offers the richest explication of the second-story
criteria I have just laid out: it highlights the situational complexity faced by students, it questions
existing attitudes and practices toward academic misconduct, and it treats with skepticism the prospect
of influencing students’ ethical behavior.

”' I further explicate Moore Howard’s reasoning later rn this section.

"' This question about the victim’s identity— the person(s) who suffers most from academic misconduct
— is one I will return to in Chapter Six.

' By using the term “differences,” Stevens signals that students and faculty might negotiate (to some
degree) their differing views about how students should act. By contrast, an adversarial stance seems
at odds with a more socially collaborative - and thus overtly ethical — one. Teachers and authority
figures often frame acts of language and knowledge-acquisition for students as competitive ones.
Students compete for grades (on class curves, in order to enter graduate schools, in order to obtain
better job offers), which in turn obscures the naturally collaborative elements of language “at play” in
their worlds. Chapter Six of this work will argue for an anti-plagiarism and anti-cheating discourse
that more effectively frames the social “job” of language without abandoning the ethical
responsibilities of language users.

” Moore Howard likely refers to Mallon’ 3 Stolen Words, a book published m 1989. That work rs
subtitled “Forays into the Origins and Ravages of Plagiarism.”

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Chapter Four: Telling a Story with Class(es)

Background

This chapter presents an important “third story” regarding academic misconduct:
that of a group of students. While the narratives in the preceding two chapters survey
the breadth, causes, and complications of, as well as possible solutions for plagiarism
and cheating, there is one important vantage point those stories cannot adopt.
Scholars who teach cannot view academic misconduct directly from the perspective
of college students. Fortunately, however, during the course of my dissertation
research, I found a unique opportunity to let such a group “speak for itself.” This
chapter gives a particular group of students an audience, with the hope that their
voices will further enrich this study’s discussion - and even highlight important
features, problems, and/or omissions of the earlier narratives.

Toward the middle of each academic semester, the Basic Writing Program at Ball
State University administers a timed writing prompt to all enrolled students.i For the
spring 2002 semester, this prompt focused on plagiarism. The prompt first offered
students some context, including discussion of recent plagiarism controversies
involving historians Doris Kearns Goodwin and Steven Ambrose, as well as Senator
Joseph Biden. Then, students were asked to do the following: “In a well-developed
essay, examine your position on plagiarism. Provide specific examples from your
reading, your experience, or observations to support your points.”ii

Given the rather liberal wording of the prompt, students could shape their

positions in a variety of ways. They knew, of course, that faculty members would

read their writings, and they may have carried certain expectations about faculty

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attitudes toward plagiarism. Nevertheless, as the explication below indicates, replies
to the prompt show an impressive diversity of viewpoints, metaphors, and ideological
or theoretical orientations.

Having obtained human-subjects research permission from review boards at the
two relevant institutions,iii I collected essay copies from student volunteers in two
Basic Writing course sections. Out of thirty-two potential subjects, twenty students
gave informed consent and agreed to participate in the study. The research protocol
required that all copies be obtained anonymously. Moreover, I have taken the
following steps to ensure the students’ anonymity within this dissertation. Each
student has a pseudonym, and I use only first names with no duplication. In this way,
each writer is clearly distinguishable, and his or her identity remains protected.

I should also note that these twenty subjects were my students. Thus, while I
carefully followed all required human subjects’ and informed consent procedures,
those volunteering may have felt some allegiance to me — and as a result been more
apt to make their writings available for this study. While this allegiance could not
affect what students wrote — they drafted their essays before I had time to seek
permission — it may have affected the representativeness of my research sample. That
is, those who chose to participate may have done so in part out of sympathy for my
teaching style or my approach to classroom issues.

One other item bears mention here. I do not “teach” students not to plagiarize.
Instead, I foster a classroom culture that I hope leads students to value their own
contributions to a common discourse. Student reactions to my teaching philosophy

may have colored their responses to the prompt in ways I cannot fully guess.

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Moreover, as hinted at earlier, since plagiarism is such a strong cultural taboo in the
United States, some volunteers may have felt some compulsion — reinforced by the
fact that they were writing for an audience of teachers/authority figures — to criticize
plagiarism more strongly than they otherwise would.” Despite those complicating
factors, I am confident that the broad array of attitudes and language patterns
demonstrates students’ willingness to write frankly about their opinions.

Except where indicated, I have made only minor corrections in the students’
punctuation, spelling, and sentence structures. My only goals with these edits are
clarity and ease of reading. Furthermore, I have been careful only to make changes
that preserve each author’s intentions as closely as possible. For example, here is a
student sentence, analyzed later in this chapter but written here in its original form:
“The world continues to just speed up and get in a big hurry for this new generation
to take over losing the true purpose of the young individuals” (Michelle). I may
reasonably infer that the student did not blame “this new generation” for diverting
youth from their true purpose. Instead, she faulted the ever-speedy world. To head
off ambiguity, the amended sentence — with only an added comma - reads: "This
world continues to just speed up and get in a big hurry for this generation to take
over, losing the true purpose of the young individuals” (Michelle).

Here, as elsewhere in this study, I’m looking primarily at the language of ethics,
at how discussions of plagiarism call attention to what writers owe others, and why.
In Chapters Two and Three of this study, I outline the use in professional articles of
the following “moral metaphors”: plagiarism and cheating as disease, as

policing/criminal concerns, as signs of immaturity, as symptoms of societal pressures,

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and as behaviors that defy moral treatment. In this chapter, I will provide a somewhat
analogous structure for elucidating student comments, but without using the identical
metaphors. The primary ethical descriptors emerging from student responses are
laziness and crime. In addition, some students “situate” (and mitigate) their ethical
judgments by acknowledging the situational pressures students often face. A few
even point to the confusion between ethical and pedagogical matters — a concern
discussed at length in Chapter Three (the second story) of this dissertation. As the
following paragraphs will demonstrate, the categories I have adapted are not mutually
exclusive; a number of students “cross” categories in their attempts to deal with

plagiarism.v

Plagiarism as Laziness

The most dominant ethical theme from the student sample is that of laziness.
Fully 55% (eleven out of twenty) make some reference to student laziness as a factor
in plagiarism (Neil; Michelle; Darla; Fiona; Stacy; Annie; Aaron; Grant; Edward;
Thomas; Victor). Of those eleven, only one interrogates the laziness factor, rather
than echoing it. That same student is therefore the lone critic of this sub-group whose
voice resembles one from the “second story.” He acknowledges that “some people
would argue that there are no new ideas. Everything comes from something else
someone else did or wrote down.” The same student also recognizes, however, a
need for the individual writer to generate “a few words of (her) own” (Neil). Having
perceived that complicated distinction,Vi the student declines to render a verdict about

those who plagiarize. “Maybe there is just an overabundance of lazy people that

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cannot come up with a few words of their own. Nevertheless, I am not one to judge”
(Neil). The broader context of Neil’s essay implies that he, like many of the second-
story authors in this dissertation, reserves ethical judgment because he is still sorting
through the complications of this notion called “plagiarism.”Vii

Among the other ten students, one — Michelle — resists categorizing plagiarism as
an immoral act. She renders it more amoral than immoral, as the final line of the long
quotation below makes clear. The tendency toward plagiarism is, she suggests, first a
personality trait - a product of procrastination - and secondly (in chronological
order), a behavior induced by societal pressures.

When writing assignments are given to students, many of them look at the date
and realize the specific amount of time. This gives a student a very relaxed approach
on the assignment and they tell themselves they have plenty of time. All of a sudden
the date comes up on them because of their procrastination, and due to the pressure
that society puts on getting good grades, many students try to find the easy way out
by plagiarizing. The honesty of the whole act is thrown out of many students’ minds
because all they can think about is getting that desired grade. (Michelle)

This quotation stands out because Michelle refrains from criticizing or
condemning the moral laxity of plagiarizing students. The remaining students in this
group of eleven, by contrast, all refer directly to the role of laziness. Only three of
them, however, render that quality an individual ethical failing (Darla, Fiona, Stacy).
Darla notes, “I think plagiarism happens as often as it does because people are lazy
and love to procrastinate. I feel that procrastination leads to plagiarism. . . . By

waiting to the last minute, people are forcing themselves to brainstorm in a short

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amount of time.” Darla also sums up the phenomenon with this causal relationship.
“Unfortunately, some college students like to take the easy way out of things; this is
when plagiarism comes into effect.”

For Stacy, the relationship is even simpler. “I feel that students might plagiarize
because they are too lazy to do the research themselves.” She goes on to cite
examples from her experience in high school — for instance, “copying a little bit from
an encyclopedia,” then turning “in their papers without stating where they got the
information from” (Stacy). The third student suggests two possible reasons for
plagiarism: an immature student, and the difficulty of academic work. But for this
student - alone among her peers — the choice between individual responsibility, and
broader pressures or expectations is clearly not relevant to the morality of the
behavior. “Plagiarism is becoming a growing problem; whether it’s because the
teachers are giving out more difficult assignments or the students are becoming lazy,
it ’s wrong either way” (Fiona; emphasis added).

The other six students (in this broad first category) frame laziness as a more
broadly social phenomenon, one for which students bear some responsibility, but in
which “outside” pressures also play a role. The context, in short, matters a great deal
to these writers. The complicit agent, for one student, is the academy."iii “I
personally don’t agree with plagiarism. I believe that college is a filtration system,
weeding out those who don’t want to give that extra effort” (Annie). Another
broadens responsibility to include society as a whole. Plagiarism, he suggests, may

have increased “because our society has become lazy. People don’t come up with

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their own ideas anymore. It is much easier to take credit for someone else’s work”
(Aaron).

Although Aaron does not pinpoint specific culprits in “society,” in the responses
of four other students, technology plays a large role. While scholars discuss how the
intemet has further problematized the notion of “doing one’s own work,” these
students see recent technologies as enablers, entities partly responsible for students’
misconduct. According to Grant, for example, “students plagiarize more now,
because they are too lazy or too busy and try to find the easy way out. With the
computer systems we have now, they make things a lot easier for everyone, and
people are starting to rely on them.”

For these four, computer-based technologies and social pressures further
complicate what might otherwise be deemed a moral weakness of the individual. One
describes this process quite eloquently.

When I was in high school, I had a friend that paid money to be a member of a
web site that distributed various research papers. He would get on the Internet
and choose from hundreds of papers already completed, and print out the one
he wanted. At first I thought of him as an idiot who was too lazy to do his
own work. However, I would look like the idiot when he would turn his
papers in and get A’s, while I was actually writing mine and getting C’s. I
started to think about what was right and wrong. He got an A in the class, and
I got a B. It became perfectly clear to me why people plagiarize and cheat.

(Edward; emphasis added)

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The intemet, in particular, becomes a lazy student’s illicit techno-drug of choice.
“Students might plagiarize from the intemet because they have waited until the last
day to write a research paper and there is no time to go to the library. The library
could be closed by the time you get there, so your only option would be the intemet”
(Thomas). And once additional social pressures come to bear, students who are
already “lazy and procrastinate” cannot escape the snare that’s been laid for them. In
Victor’s view, they plagiarize because, despite their flaws, “they have always been
taught to do well in school. When they come across something that may be a little
hard for them, all they have to do is get the answer on the intemet; it’s that simple.”
Here, Victor’s view parallels that of Grant, who places weight on the combination of
social pressures and individual failings. “I also think that today students are pushed
even more to get good grades and phat pressure makes students feel not as confident
about their writing, so they obtain papers from the Internet” (Grant, emphasis in

original).

Plagiarism as Crime

Institutions may implement honor codes, or codify prohibitions against
plagiarism, cheating, and other activities they object to. Once codified, those
prohibitions become - in effect - “laws” of the institution. Nevertheless, alleged
violators do not also have to deal with traditional law enforcement officials (police,
prosecutors, etc.) unless their behaviors violate local, state, or federal statutes or
regulations. For example, a student who allegedly committed arson would be subject

to criminal, as well as institutional, investigation. The same holds true, in theory, for

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a student who allegedly violates copyright law by duplicating musical soundtracks
available on-line, then selling copies at a discount among his classmates. Alleged
plagiarists, however, fall into a different category. Their behavior may violate
institutional (and cultural norms), but “mere” plagiarism is not criminal behavior.”

This background paves the way for an examination of the third story’s second key
metaphor. While the laziness motif is the most apparent, seven of the twenty students
(35%) directly link plagiarism with crime (Carl; Darla; Stacy; Yvonne; Michelle;
Pam; Edward). Of those seven, two use language that does not accept the criminal
metaphor as a literal reality. According to Car , “my view on plagiarism is sometimes
the matter is taken way too seriously and is (treated) like it is a criminal offense.”
Carl goes on to highlight two aspects he believes distinguish student plagiarists from
criminals: the more private, or at least confined, nature of the student’s act, and the
lack of obvious damage. “Students are not copying the items of people and putting
them into articles in newspapers and magazines or books and then selling them. They
are handing them in to receive a grade, and after that the works are usually never seen
again.” On the other hand, according to Carl, “when an author or a writer for a
magazine or newspaper plagiarizes someone’s work, this is a time when things should
be taken seriously.”

Edward, by contrast, believes that plagiarism is a serious offense, although he
invokes only part of the criminal equation: the guilty mind.x “A kid should be taught
that it is wrong to cheat and should have a guilty conscience if they do it” (Edward).
In addition, Edward sees parents — rather than the legal system or law enforcement —

as the primary enforcers of this attitude. “I know when I was younger, I was scared

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to get caught cheating because I knew I would be in serious trouble when I got
home.”

The other five students, by contrast, treat the crime metaphor literally, not
distinguishing between the violation of ethical norms and the breaking of laws. Three
directly appropriate language used in law enforcement. In this category, the most
detailed response offers a scenario that is both inaccurate and highly provocative.
“Not only is (plagiarism) wrong, but it is against the law. A person could be fined or
even thrown in jail for plagiarism, so why would someone risk plagiarizing?” (Darla).
One of her fellow students offers a pithier version: “Plagiarism is not only wrong; it is
a crime” (Stacy). In the third student’s vocabulary, which I have left unedited for full
effect, we see some of the confusion wrought by the policing metaphor. “Plagiarism
is not official punishable crime by law,” Yvonne writes. “Once convicted as a
plagiarizer, it stays with you for life,” she adds later. This combination leaves readers
to speculate: is plagiarism not officially a crime (to this writer), or is its commission
officially punishable by law?"i

Three students, including one from the sub-group just discussed, write about
plagiarism as at least metaphorically criminal, yet they hesitate when assigning legal
weight to the act (Michelle, Pam, Stacy). Each offers qualifying language that
suggests confusion. What is the link between legal prohibition and moral
condemnation? Like Yvonne’s statements quoted in the previous paragraph, these
students’ uses of language create multiple (and at times inconsistent) truths — or

interpretations — about the policing metaphor."ii

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“Plagiarism is in my book a crime and should not be taken lightly,” notes
Michelle. Another offers a similar qualifier. “In my eyes, plagiarism is stealing and
it should be stopped” (Pam). In addition, Pam - having just labeled plagiarism a
criminal act — immediately thereafter exculpates its perpetrators. “The problem is
that I don’t blame the students for doing it. Opportunities of plagiarism are
everywhere and the students are taking advantage of them” (Pam).

Stacy, who earlier in her essay clearly labels plagiarism a crime (see above), later
amends slightly: plagiarism is “somewhat stealing, in my opinion.” Stacy’s qualifier
seems to imply that plagiarism at least should be treated criminally, given its clearly
unethical quality. As Stacy points out immediately before the “somewhat stealing”
label, “an author may have worked long and hard on a document, and for someone to
just put that work into his or her paper without giving the author credit is wrong.”
The “somewhat,” however, remains self-interrogating; it opens the door for
interpretation, for debate over whether the offending student has actually done
something wrong — and, if so, whether and how he should be punished. The
remaining sections of this chapter will further allow us to observe students debating a

subject whose ethical significance is highly contested.

Plagiarism and its Problems: Students Adhering to the “Second Story”

In discussing both the laziness and the crime motifs in student responses, I have
occasionally pointed to places where the students back off from indicting plagiarists
as immature or criminal. The final major section of this chapter examines responses

from students who reason further about plagiarism — who seek to understand its

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possible complications. Common to these final two sets of responses is an emphasis
on the role of context in the putative plagiarist’s thought process.
“The world is too much with us” might be an apt tagline for the first of these final
two sections. Michelle’s lament captures this predicament quite eloquently.
This world continues to just speed up and get in a big hurry for this new
generation to take over, losing the true purpose of the young individuals. We
need to step back and realize that we are expecting too much out of our
students, and we should slow down and realize grades are not of so high
importance. This problem of plagiarism can only be solved if we slow down,
show care, and strive to aid in exciting every individual to learn.
Another student outlines, in greater detail, the variety of social forces pushing
students to plagiarize.
Teachers put a lot more pressure on the students to get proficient grades.
Parents are additionally an ongoing obstacle in the child’s life. Some parents
reward their children with money or benefits that push them to get good
grades and keep their school work pertinent. School officials reward students
for being in the top ten percent of their class and making honor roll. There is
so much pressure on the student’s shoulders, and obligating them to do more
than their best is shameful. (Regina)
In each of these comments, students offer a critique of competitive pressures. The
students’ mini-story reads something like this: we have an economic system that
rewards winning, while the dirty little secret is that few can meaningfully “win.” For

Uma, what purports to be a moral exhortation — “do your best” - instead becomes an

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ironic incentive to cheat. “I feel that students plagiarize because maybe they feel that
their own work is not good enough and they need to get good grades, so they feel that

9’

someone else’s work would be better than their own. Regina points out a related,
almost symbiotic, irony: even as colleges and universities crack down harder on
plagiarists, students feel increasing pressure to succeed. Greater competition to do
well, she argues, in turn fuels more plagiarism problems. “Academic dishonesty
keeps growing and growing as the schools get more and more competitive. Overall, I

think the main reason that people cheat is because of the pressure, obligation and

responsibility put on the students’ shoulders to do their best quality of work possible.”

As earlier sections in this chapter have suggested, a notable percentage of students
offer either meta-analysis of the plagiarism discourse, or otherwise attempt to take
apart the concept. Only one student out of the total sample (of twenty) anchors
objections to plagiarism in the view that knowledge can privately be “owned” - the
assumption underlying crirninalization of plagiarism. “Plagiarism is not necessary in
today’s life. Our society is based upon coming up with our own ideas and our own
opinions. If someone has stated something that you want to use in your paper, cite
the author since he/she is the one who deserves the credit” (Annie).

Another student creates a tentative analogy between personal property and
language. Both can be owned, and thus — if not adequately protected -— taken away.
Pam argues, “I believe in freedom of speech, and someone can’t copy someone else.
It is just like copying an art piece or money and that is wrong. Why is writing so

different? Hopefully one of these days our society will find out.”

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At the end of her essay, having already argued that plagiarism “is a crime, and I
will stick by that,” Pam seems to pose her “why” question as a rhetorical one, but also
as one whose answer society at large, ironically, has not (yet) figured out. Indeed, as
I suggest earlier in this chapter, Pam herself seems ambivalent about to what degree
plagiarism should be criminalized. Thus, in the process of stigrnatizing the forger,
Pam grudgingly leaves her question somewhat open.

Moving in a very different theoretical direction, Neil - as previewed earlier in this
chapter — offers an extensive critique of the plagiarism debate, raising insights similar
to those highlighted by second-story voices in recent years.

A lot of people would argue that plagiarism does not or should not exist.
Some people would argue that there are no new ideas. Every thing comes
from something else someone else did or wrote down. This may not be the
absolute truth, but sometimes it is hard to write something because another
author has stated it as well as it can be stated. Should someone be tagged as a
plagiarist because they decided to use one sentence that another man used
before him? Who knows; maybe he should be; maybe there is just an
overabundance of lazy people that cannot come up with a few words of their
own. Nevertheless, I am not one to judge.

Another cluster of responses worth noting is that from students who — like
Rebecca Moore Howard in “Plagiarisms” — distinguish between the ethical offender
and the developmental amateur. If students don’t realize they’re doing something
wrong, the students reason, how can that be morally objectionable? One student

highlights two of the “non-moral” categories outlined by Moore Howard: that of the

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patchwriter, and that of the student confused by citation protocol. One “reason why I
think plagiarism has become such a problem is because some people don’t have the
education to know or understand how to cite their sources. It sounds silly, I know,
but when I first came to school here, at Ball State, I didn’t know how to cite my
sources” (Aaron). And Aaron further notes, “high school students don’t write a lot of
papers that use outside information, so their teachers never had to teach their students
about plagiarism and how to avoid it” — a dilemma that may implicate both
patchwriters and students unsure of citation protocol.

Aaron also feels compelled to admit that the dilemma “sounds silly,” yet others
among the twenty share his experience. According to another student writer, “most
students who plagiarize don’t even know that they are doing it, or they don’t know
how to correct it and hope it slides by without the professor noticing” (Sam). The
panic created by such a situation seems to resonate quite strongly with inexperienced
college writers, as Thomas attests.

In elementary and middle school, I can think of so many times where I was
doing a short report and I copied straight out of the book because I didn’t
know what I was doing. I think it is very unfair for a child so young to get
punished for something they probably don’t know about.

The previous two examples highlight — from a student’s perspective — the power
imbalance between student and teacher. The litmus test in responding to suspicions
of plagiarism, from Zena’s perspective, is whether students have been adequately
taught how to avoid breaking the rules. If they have, they should be punished.

Otherwise, “they really might not know what they were doing” — and punishing those

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students becomes an arbitrary use of power. Zena continues by sharing a personal

experience in which that arbitrariness stood out.
I did Cadet Teaching last year for a kindergarten class, and while at the
school, there was a big issue going around about plagiarizing. A child in the
third grade plagiarized a paper. He was to write a small essay on an animal.
He went home and looked on the Internet and found a whole page of
information on monkeys. Well, when he turned in the paper, it was
handwritten, but the information on the page was exactly what was on the
Internet. He didn’t know he had plagiarized. The punishment he received
was failing that assignment.

Continuing the emphasis on pedagogical rather than moral concerns, Carl notes
the difficulty students face when confronted by a strong ethical discourse before
they’ve had a chance to understand the rich context behind that vocabulary.

Some students I believe are scared and fear that no matter what they do, they
are going to end up plagiarizing the work they’re citing their sources from.
Plagiarism is a gray area to many people and needs to be explained more in
detail before people can really understand the significance of why plagiarism
seems to be such a little thing that can do lots of harm to you if you commit it.

This fear is, of course, the patchwriter’s dilemma, and one that Moore Howard
wants removed from moral condemnation. In one student’s articulation, the research
paper assignment raises this problem most acutely. “Plagiarism is done mostly on
research papers. Students will plagiarize when they cannot find a better way to

explain their ideas. If teachers or professors would not assign research papers, then

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there would be less plagiarism” (Sam). Sam does recognize the importance of
distinguishing his written voice from that of others. But that goal comes much more
easily, he notes, when writing from experience rather than research. “If a student
must write about their life, experiences in their lives, or make up stories, then they
would not be able to plagiarize. Instead, they must write using their own words to
explain their feelings about situations that they went through” (Sam).’“’i
Even after he becomes aware of plagiarism’s impropriety, Peter still wants to
mediate the focus on ethics — depending on the degree of betrayal involved. “I think
plagiarism is wrong, too,” he suggests,
but it is really easy to forget what you did later on. You might forget to do the
bibliography if you leave it to the end. I know that my parents would be mad
at me if I did plagiarize a paper and knew that I was doing it. But, if I was
plagiarizing a paper and forgot to put the quotes around it and to do the

bibliography, they would not be as upset with me.” (Peter)

This chapter has laid out the broad range of student responses to the prompt about
plagiarism. In so doing, it depicts an important “third story” in the academic
discussion about academic misconduct. As my explication demonstrates, the
students’ voice does not function independently. My students’ story, after all, is one
embodiment of first- and second-story theories put into messy and complicated
practice. Thus, this most recent story reflects — and sometimes complicates -- many

of the key themes and concerns emerging in the first and second narratives.

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In Chapter Five, which follows, I will analyze that interaction and others, looking
especially at places where the first three stories in combination reveal important work
yet to be done. Chapter Five will thus begin this dissertation’s final shift: moving
from what has been written toward new steps that we should still take. Are there
ways of talking about academic dishonesty that might produce better results? Can we
begin to compile a fresh ethical vocabulary? From among the first three stories, what
metaphors - or anti-metaphors - should we emphasize with students, and why? And
should we care about the contextual pressures that “everyone else” imposes -

everyone who isn’t a teacher or student in one of our classrooms?

 

’ Those placed in the Basic Writing track have a particular combination of ACT ISAT Verbal scores and
high school grade-point-averages from academic courses. Because this combination is lower for this
group of writers, they take two semesters of writing — with smaller class sizes and more individual
attention from faculty - rather than one for their entry-level writing course. Following each nridterrn
timed writing exercise, the Basic Writing faculty meet to evaluate the resulting essays. During this
evaluation process, no faculty member grades the responses of his or her own students.

”The full text of this writing prompt is included as Appendix C of this study.

'" I obtained review board approval at Ball State University (where I was teaching at the time) and
Michigan State University (where I was pursuing my doctorate). A copy of the informed consent letter
for research subjects is included as Appendix D of this study. In addition, the student essays comprise
Appendices B through X.

“’ One could, of course, make a similar argument about writers addressing plagiarism in professional
articles.

" I comment on this fluidity in Chapter Five of this dissertation.

"’ In fact, I argue in Chapter Six that maintaining this distinction is a key to addressing cheating and
plagiarism constructively.

V" As I mention in endnote i of this chapter, the Basic Writing faculty grades these midterm timed
writings each semester. The grades for Neil, whose response I have termed reflective in a fashion
befitting this dissertation’s second voice, were extraordinarily divergent: a 6 (the strongest), a 4, and —
to mediate the difference, a l on a 6-point scale. In Chapter Five, I’ll talk further about implications of
these scores.

”" The context of Annie’s essay offers another interpretation of this quotation. College pressures may
“push” students to plagiarize, the connotation I note here, or the college experience weeds out those
who, a priori, might be tempted to plagiarize rather than work hard. If Annie intends the latter, her
comment also fits with the sub—category just discussed: plagiarism as an individual ethical failing. But
regardless of her specific intention, Annie’s essay repeatedly highlights the role of societal pressures.
"‘ There is an interesting question of legal interpretation here — one that goes beyond the scope of this
dissertation. According to the US. Copyright Office’s Circular 1 on Copyright Basics, published in
2000, the creation of copyright no longer requires publication, registration, or even the use of formal
written notice to ensure copyright privileges. Instead, copyright “is secured automatically when the
work is created” (5, emphasis in original). These facts, according to the same circular, represent
elements of copyright protection that are “frequently misunderstood” by the general public (5).
Applying this information to my dissertation, one might logically argue that students who plagiarize

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texts automatically violate copyright law, almost regardless of the plagiarized work’s status or origin.
At this point, however, I am not aware of any civil or criminal prosecutions of student plagiarism cases
as copyright infringements.

" In common law theory, adapted for American jurisprudence, a “crime” consists of two basic
components: a “bad act” (one prohibited by law) and a “guilty mind” (the intent to do wrong). In this
instance, Edward refers only to a guilty conscience, but does not mention or argue that plagiarism is a
criminal act.

" In Chapter Five, I suggest that the policing metaphor paradoxically allows teachers to answer “yes”
to both questions — leading students to fear criminal-type sanctions, while keeping them ignorant of the
broader social roles plagiarism serves.

"" I also run the risk, in this section, of misinterpreting students’ intentions, or seeing ambiguities in
places where more careful proofreading would have eliminated the confusion. In critiquing a passage
from a non-fictional text, of course, we generally assume the writer intends whatever connotation the
reader finds most logical in context. I have therefore been careful to elucidate the relevant writing
context carefully.

m This viewpoint, of course, creates a dichotomy between personal writing and research-based
writing. That’s a distinction that many students seem to learn from their writing courses. Therefore, in
my own teaching, I encourage students to see “research” as the constant process of asking new
questions, of collaborating with previously written materials to create new insights. Thus, even a
“strictly” personal story invokes research. In planning a literacy narrative, for example, a student may
ask her parents for memories about the children’s books she once preferred.

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Chapter Five: Insights from the first Three Stories

This chapter analyzes both strengths and weaknesses of the first two stories. It
also discusses, in Section 11, how those points affect students (exemplified here by the
third story, from Chapter Four) trying to cope with warnings not to cheat or
plagiarize. As I lay out this analysis, I begin building a set of guidelines for dealing
more effectively with academic misconduct. Later, Chapter Six — my new and
“fourth voice” — will attempt to employ those guidelines and to situate them in a

theoretical framework for progressive writers and teachers.

1. Notable Tensions among the First Two Stories:

Perhaps the most notable difference between the first and second stories is in the
subject matter they treat. Following the selection criteria I explain in Chapter One, I
looked for journal articles focusing on cheating and/or plagiarism in American
undergraduate education. It is interesting, therefore, that no first-story voice
distinguishes between the significance of cheating and of plagiarism - instead treating
both categories in the same terms (ethical and otherwise). Just as notably, the vast
majority of second-story voices discuss situations involving alleged plagiarism but
not other forms of cheating.i

These patterns create some intriguing gaps in the respective narratives. D. Kay
Johnston’s article in the second story, which deviates from the dominant focus on
plagiarism, helps to demonstrate this. By focusing on a clear case of cheating, the

author applies important pedagogical insights to what virtually everyone would agree

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is an ethical problem. None of Johnston’s second-story contemporaries do this,
preferring instead to focus on what I characterize in Chapter Three as a realm where
the ethical nature of student behavior is disputed. This dispute centers primarily
around cases of alleged plagiarism that involve difficult questions about pedagogy
and language practices.

I do not mean to criticize this focus; I do mean, however, to suggest that by itself,
this emphasis on disputed territory does not articulate a “model” ethical stance for
students, one that would benefit that group and that second-story (and perhaps even
first-story) authors might take pride in. Most of these authors miss the opportunity to
wed ethical concern with a sophisticated awareness of the complexity created by
students’ lives. This is a fact that Johnston seems to lament, and which she says
limits her ability to foster an ethically self-aware classroom. What Johnston
complains about in her own classroom situation, coincidentally, is also a limitation of
the second story as a whole: it does not demonstrate how students can cope with
multiple contextual pressures while maintaining some allegiance to each other and to
their academic environment. To illustrate this, we note Johnston’s argument about
the dynamic in her classroom where cheating took place. “What we do not have,”
Johnston argues, “even in a class which students describe as a partnership, are

student-student relationships that can deal with conflict” like cheating (167).

For their part, first-story proponents, by conflating all cases of plagiarism with

academic misconduct, and by often casting student behavior in reductive metaphors,

give up the chance to make careful ethical distinctions that students can respect and

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negotiate successfully. The constant admonition that many — or most — students are
cheating and must be stopped creates an adversarial relationship between students and
college faculty and employees. The crime metaphor, explained at length in Chapter
Two, is perhaps the furthest extension of this adversarial posture. When Alschuler,
for instance, calls cheating “the academic equivalent of urban crime” (123), he helps
to foster an environment in which students will not likely reflect on the ethics of their
behavior. Their ethical position has already been fixed metaphorically, and only
punishment may follow. While the criminal metaphor certainly creates a
“relationship” between students and their academic institutions, it is one that makes
conflict intractable, rather than attempting to mediate it in ways that Johnston seeks.
Part of this objection is also enunciated quite strongly by Rebecca Moore
Howard, Darsie Bowden, and Janice Walker in the second story. If a student gets
penalized for plagiarizing without understanding, if students are punished irrespective
of their intent (their ethical posture, after all), and if the complexity of student lives is

ignored, then the first-story creates a credibility gap with those it most needs to reach.

Just as the first story risks condemning too many kinds of behavior too quickly,
its nearly unanimous silence on another issue is troubling. Specifically, where is the
first-story commentary on why cheating and/or plagiarism bother us? Indeed, as I
note in Chapter Two, the lack of a “why” voice becomes a key defining characteristic
for this story. Throughout this dissertation, I have defined my primary concern as the
following: exploring academic discussion of what students owe to others in the realm

of proper academic conduct. In this light, exploring why cheating and/or plagiarism

bother us should help to define the obligation more narrowly. Whatever behavior is
objectionable casts light, through contrast, upon the behaviors we want to encourage.

On the other hand, while second story authors at times seem to address this ethical
focus, they do so for the most part through indirect means. As discussed in Chapter
Three, Moore Howard has devoted considerable attention to distinctions between
plagiarism and cheating, in an effort to narrow the realm of objectionable student
behavior. If a student “plagiarizes” inadvertently, in Moore Howard’s scheme, she
simply is not cheating, and we should approach her as teachers, not as moral
enforcers.

In other instances from the second story, a focus on ethical behavior is rendered
inconvenient by the complicated circumstances in which students and teachers must
operate. Richard Murphy says he tries to police his students, but calls the act of
trying to implicate a potential cheater a “comic peculiarity,” given the conflict
between his teacherly and policing roles (9). As noted in my Chapter Three, Murphy
also disavows any attempt to offer an ethical judgment in his presentation (6). This
posture we may assume is an honest one - most second-story authors find labeling
plagiarists or cheaters a complicated matter — but it does not offer teachers or students
any clear ethical guidance.

In Chapter One of this dissertation, I describe David Levine’s decision to use
“thick description” as a way of adjudicating the best course of action when
confronted by ethical difficulties. Although Murphy is not employing Levine’s
scheme, the comparison is instructive. Murphy does seem to value thick description

as a problem-solving too]. He argues that telling the stories of his two (alleged)

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student plagiarists should help “to convey something of the . . . experience” of
plagiarism” (6). But Murphy’s decision as adjudicator, as noted in his article, is to
avoid judgment. “I am not inquiring here into the causes of plagiarism among
students nor describing how teachers ought to respond to it” (6). Instead, Murphy
suggests, he hopes to lay out a variety of issues and complexities for further thought
(6). Thus, Murphy consciously does not take what would constitute the final step in
Levine’s method, as applied here to the issue of academic misconduct: analyzing the
students’ stories to determine what is missing, what remains unsaid, and what should

be done next.

Other second-story authors lament the difficulty in or complications of “solving”
academic misconduct issues. Franklin Mixon’s concern, as noted in Chapter Three, is
that cheating may be a logistical problem beyond the scope of classroom professors
(195). In Mixon’s view, so many factors - class sizes, social pressures, etc. - remain
beyond professorial control (195). Alastair Pennycook criticizes the extreme “extent
of moral rectitude and vehemence with which teachers sometimes pursue student
plagiarizers” (213-14), but does not offer an alternative vision of ethical behavior for
students — one that might better honor the linguistic realities and complexities he
stresses throughout his article. And Karla Kitalong offers perhaps the most dramatic
illustration, one discussed at greater length in Chapter Three. In recounting the story
of a student who plagiarized a fellow student’s web site for a class assignment,

Kitalong terms the latter’s act of reporting the plagiarism “violence of his own” (258).

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One wonders what better - that is, less violent and more ethical - recourse the victim
might have had available.

What this pattern of second-story commentary produces, then, is a virtual silence
about how students should act in the area of academic integrity. That gap would
seem to leave readers -and certainly students — in a quandary. Should they follow the
ethical model of the first story, replete with simplicities, or should they adhere to that
of the second story, which moves beyond those simplicities . . . into ethical

confusion?

As an alternative to the quandary I have described, we might seek common
ground between the first and second stories. At this point, let me sketch out what
might comprise this common ground. In the second story, Rebecca Moore Howard
argues that inadvertent plagiarists (patchwriters, along with those who do not yet
understand academic discourse conventions) do not behave unethically, and therefore
should not be treated as if they do. Her focus would make an ethical concern only out
of willful plagiarism, which includes the intent to do wrong.

This bad intent, like the mens rea (guilty mind) required of any “crime” in
American jurisprudence”, should provide a key building block for an effective
discourse about academic misconduct. In Chapter One, I identify two general
categories of misconduct that implicate this guilty mind: cheating and willful
plagiarism. These are the behaviors that — I speculate -— virtually all academic writers
about academic misconduct would want to criticize. I “speculate” not out of

negligence, but rather because such a consensus never emerges in the stories

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themselves. I believe my analysis in the preceding paragraphs of this chapter makes
that fact clear.

But why even bother seeking a new discourse for willful misconduct, one might
ask? Disdain for such behavior is a given, so universally understood as hardly to
merit discussion. Cheating and willful plagiarism clearly violate the ethical norms of
the academic community in which, and against which, students work and live. They
also diminish the work of others who proceed honestly.

My sense, however, is that such claims function persuasively only against the
backdrop of the first story - and only without other complicating narratives added to
the “mix” of the academic misconduct discussion. The second story - and even, to a
much lesser extent, the first story — raises a set of issues that complicate any claims of
universal agreement. As Minock and Moore Howard point out, students operate
concurrently among a variety of contextual pressures: from the classroom, from their
peers, from parents, from prospective employers, and so on. Moore Howard’s
comment in “Plagiarisms” captures this potentially confusing muddle quite cogently.
“No one is ever a member of just one community at a time. Perhaps none of us
makes neat switches between mutually exclusive communities; instead, our
communities and our allegiances to them compete and overlap with each other”
(793).

Thus, we cannot reasonably claim that reasons not to cheat or plagiarize willfully
are self-evident, unless those reasons have equal and unopposed resonance across this
wide range of students’ contexts. The latter seems unlikely. Even many first-story

authors acknowledge a variety of contextual pressures to cheat: the influence of

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friends, a competitive job market, demands from parents for good grades, a
conditioned fear of failure, and so on.

In Chapter Two, I lay out this acknowledgement at some length. The trend
emerges primarily among authors who cast academic misconduct as a battle between
innocent matriculating students and “darker” forces either within or outside the
academy. For instance, as noted in Chapter Two, C.O. Mathews describes the
entering college student as full of an “idealism” that unfortunately falls prey to her
“contact with academic realities” (506). By implication, those realities are the
troublesome contextual pressures that lead some students to cheat.

What is also notable about the first story is that while it recognizes the role of
other contexts (besides the higher education academy) in affecting students’ behavior,
it does not legitimize any of those others. This may stem, logically, from the
perception that anyone (or anything) else encouraging students to cheat is not worthy
of our respect. But if we return to the lists developed in recent paragraphs, we cannot
persuasively tell students to completely ignore all the competing ethical lessons of
their homes, their workplaces, the major media, their peers, and virtually every other
influence they encounter. In short, we cannot persuasively ignore that there are
battles raging.

This struggle over the role of other contextual pressures comes to a head in the
first story’s treatment of what I have termed ethical “quarantine.” A pernicious
influence, organic or ethical, may be quarantined “out” or quarantined “in” - to
protect (potentially) infected individuals or to protect others from those infected. In

the first story, the quarantine works both ways, depending upon which author’s

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characterization we choose to emphasize. We recall that Chapter Two divides first-
story theories about responsibility for academic misconduct into two basic categories:
in some versions, the individual matriculating student is corrupt, immoral, or at least
immature. In others, the individual begins pure, only to risk corruption at the hands
of some powerful “other”: extracurricular pressures on campus, or perhaps a
competitive outside world. Given this range, the quarantine must work in one of two
ways, again depending upon the circumstances. If the individual or other agent is
corrupt, she must be quarantined out; if pure, she must be quarantined in.
Relationships suffer, of course, in this vision for change. Or perhaps it is more
accurate to claim that one relationship becomes supreme: that between the student
and her academic obligations to the institution. Students who want some way to
honor other relationships — student-to-student, as Johnston suggests, or with

influences from other contexts — are not offered a vision for doing so.

Let me end this section with a more positive way of looking at these issues. First
and second-story writers both hold worthy objectives. In the first story, authors stress
(at least implicitly) proper behavior within a given context, the academy, but to the
exclusion of all (or most) other contexts. That is the quarantine principle at work.
Perhaps because of their disciplinary backgrounds in rhetoric and composition, some
second-story authors (most notably, Minock and Moore Howard) frame context more
broadly, as an important ingredient for the operations of rhetoric. Minock

emphasizes, for instance, that students can understand warnings about plagiarism only

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when they learn the broader workings of academic discourse, which frames the
meaning of “plagiarism” (495).

Context forms the broad foundation around which, and through which, individuals
negotiate with others for meaning and agreement. Although she does not make this
claim herself, I see Johnston’s view of academic relationships in the classroom as a
rich vision of contexts at a fuller degree of “play.” As noted in Chapter Three, she
examines the different relationships formed - and, in some cases, not formed
successfully — by her students in a class where cheating occurred. Each relationship
creates its own rhetorical triangle(s): interactions between writers (or speakers), texts
(written or verbal), and readers (or listeners). In this fashion, the range of possible
messages about academic misconduct — indeed, about virtually any subject of interest
- is immense.

By contrast, when McCabe, Trevino, and Butterfield conclude in “Academic
Integrity” that honor code students “are significantly less likely to use . . . pressures to
rationalize or justify their own cheating” (229-30), they imply that the academy’s
context can be a “trump” card, defeating all competing ethical signals from
relationships whose messages might conflict with the academy’s.

As I hinted at above, we might wonder if writers’ disciplinary backgrounds affect
the way they characterize cheating and/or plagiarism. One trend, as just noted, deals
with writers’ views of context and situational complexity facing students. Another
trend shows up in research methodology. As noted in Chapter Two, a majority of
first-story authors employed a quantitative approach, carefully surveying

undergraduates to determine the nature of academic misconduct and/or to assess the

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value of possible solutions. With this approach, the nature and sc0pe of problems
become measurable, reliably ascertainable. On the other hand, with the limited
exception of D. Kay Johnston’s article, which blends qualitative discussion with an ad
hoc, unscientific survey, second-story authors are much more anecdotal in their
approaches. Their explorations generally do not quantify the problems of academic
misconduct; they instead question and often deconstruct the issue of what constitutes
the “problem.” In this fashion, second-story writers tend to stress how difficult it is to

fix what appears to be broken.

II. Implications of the First two Stories for the Student Voice

I have argued that both the first and second stories create important tensions when
read together. The discussion in Section I. of this chapter highlights perhaps the key
distinction: “first-story voices” speak with such clarity and unanimity, while second-
story voices attempt to elucidate the complexities that arise because students deal
with different contextual pressures, demands, and discourse conventions.

On this point, my other important source of evidence, of course, is the set of
student writings about plagiarism that I explicate (as the third story) in Chapter Four.
There is, as one example, a tremendous dissonance between these students’ strong
concerns about plagiarism’s impropriety, and the efforts of leading second-story
authors to deconstruct its meaning. Chapter Four illustrates how strongly most

students condemn plagiarism, frequently citing its connotations of laziness and/or

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theft. They have been influenced strongly by the crime metaphor; they want to
behave in ways that society will respect and honor.

That desire, however, becomes question-begging, since — as these students have
discovered — their societies (in different situations, at different times, or even at the
same time) honor both integrity and hypercompetitive behavior. Thus, students also
resent what I have characterized as the taken-for-granted ethical quality of much first-
story discourse. Kayla’s views are outlined in some detail in Chapter Four. There,
she actually identifies a variety of contextual pressures and emphasizes that, while
plagiarism is wrong, it is not enough simply to label it as such. Among the
mediations Kayla suggests: “We need to step back and realize that we are expecting
too much out of our students, and we should slow down and realize grades are not of
so high importance.”

The ability of students to benefit from either the first and/or the second story may
depend upon their ability to negotiate both voices at once - to engage with a
multifaceted dialogue about academic misconduct. This sense that plagiarism is a
multifaceted topic can be seen clearly from a variety of student voices in Chapter
Four. As I note in that chapter, many students “cross” voices — expressing views that
alternately coincide with first- and second-story emphases. For example, Carl warns
that “plagiarism is a gray area to many people and needs to be explained more in
detail before people can really understand the significance of why plagiarism seems
to be such a little thing that can do lots of harm to you if you commit it.”

From my perspective, what is most interesting about this “gray area” is precisely

the elusive nature of its fogginess. Yes, clearing up the gray areas might help to

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justify punishments for plagiarists, penalties that Carl currently sees as too punitive.
But glossing over important disagreements — from the perspective of numerous
second-story authors — might further weaken an ethical appeal whose foundation is
already shaky. This reinforces my argument from Section 1. above that writers should
focus their ethical concern on behaviors that both first- and second-story adherents (as
well as many of the students from my research sample) can agree are unethical:
cheating and willful plagiarism. It also, however, suggests that Carl and his
colleagues might benefit from an honest admission: there is significant academic
debate about what constitutes plagiarism, and about how to successfully encourage
academic integrity in all types of academic situations.

Carl, like many (or most) of his colleagues in my sample, senses that there may be
a debate about what properly constitutes “plagiarism.” On the other hand, he has
never been invited to share in the details and nuances of that debate. Similarly, Neil,
whose complex treatment of plagiarism in his essay earned both a “6” (highest score)
and a “1” (lowest), must be given some way to cope with such radically conflicting
signals. What he might be tempted to read as professorial inconsistency in my view
implies a rich area of intellectual dispute and disagreement. Neil and his colleagues

deserve to participate in that conversation, too.

Finally, we must wonder how to achieve the educational “voice” that Carl’s
argument envisions. One possible approach, of course — embodied by Barbara
Welch’s discussion in Chapter Two - is simply to dismiss theoretical disagreements

about the roles of student intent and discourse conventions. But my sense is that

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such glossing over, such an assumption of univocality, leads only to the kind of
confusion that Carl and others express. There is, as the concluding section of this

chapter reveals, a better way.

111. Implications for a Fourth Story of Academic Misconduct

Based on the foregoing, I can make the following suggestions for a new story
about the ethics of academic misconduct in American undergraduate higher
education. Chapter Six, which follows, will highlight these components and establish

a strong theoretical grounding for this final narrative.

1. Our discourse about academic integrity (and misconduct) must be more
complete when we address students, through our writings or in class. We must search
for ways of urging proper behavior that better reflect the situational diversity (and
difficulty) of student lives;

2. We should be explicit about our ethical expectations for students — in a way
that neither the first nor the second story manages to be. That explicit quality should
include: a. explaining why willful plagiarism and cheating bother us (and should
bother our students) as academics, and b. acknowledging that, because they live and
engage concurrently in a variety of contexts, students face legitimate and often
competing ethical demands and pressures both from within and from outside the
academy.

3. To mediate the paradoxical demands of 2. above, we should also “teach the

conflicts” to students - a concept whose relevant history I explain in Chapter Six. As

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the earlier chapters in this dissertation have shown, such conflicts cover at least two
key areas: disagreements among educators about the scope of, definitions for, and
solutions to academic misconduct; and competing academic and extracurricular

pressures (and messages) faced by students.

 

’ In the latter instance, the one significant exception is the D. Kay Johnston article, which I return to
below.
” See also endnote x in chapter four.

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Chapter Six: A New “Fourth Voice” on Cheating and Willful Plagiarism

This final chapter will answer the following three questions:

0 Based on my earlier explication and analysis of three stories of cheating
and plagiarism, what more can usefully be “said” about these topics?

0 What are the scholarly touchstones for a new fourth voice — one that can
begin to address the important gaps in stories one through three?

0 How can teachers help students benefit from this fourth voice? What
instructional changes, however modest, would help students better grapple, in an
ethical fashion, with their variety of obligations to and pressures from different

communities concerning academic integrity?

The Fourth Story Finds its Working Space:

Chapters One through Five of my study have led toward an interesting “gap.”
How do we encourage students to behave ethically without ignoring the complex web
of contexts in which they operate — contexts that may send conflicting messages
about cheating and willful plagiarism? As I suggest in Chapter Five, each of the three
stories I’ve explicated and analyzed has important elements to contribute toward a
new, “fourth voice.” Each story also omits, however, important features of a more
ideal narrative — that is, one that might work more persuasively for students.

The first story makes clear how severe academic misconduct is, and therefore
how urgent the need for improvement. In its preferences for strong condemnations

and firm action, this narrative generally does not stop to reflect on its shortcomings

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and contradictions. Moreover, the first story minimizes the role of other, extra-
acadernic factors in students’ lives - peer pressures, competition for grades or jobs,
and messages from other parts of society — often deeming them part of a process of
excuse-making that mature students manage to avoid.

In the second story, authors also recognize — at least implicitly — that willful
cheaters violate an obligation to others. They spend much of their time, however,
pointing out two factors that complicate the assessment of a cheater’s guilt —
especially if that person is (allegedly) plagiarizing: the confusion between
developmental and ethical problems, and the intricate workings of rhetorical context.
If students do not understand why their actions constitute “plagiarism,” according to
second-story theorists, that’s an issue of academic development, not impropriety.
Furthermore, as noted in Chapters Three and Five of this study, students must “tune
in” to a variety of communication contexts simultaneously: not only their interactions
with teachers and tests, but with peers, cultural messages, media images, and so forth.
The broader import of the second story thus becomes: we must think carefully, and
move slowly, before condemning students for academic misconduct. This advice
seems wise, but it does not take the logical next step: creating a careful, positive
language of academic integrity that respects these important second-story concerns.

Finally, students “narrating” the third story reveal a remarkable hybrid of first-
and second-story features. Many of them write eloquently about the complicated role
of situational complexity in motivating cheaters. And yet, this story still features a
strong note of ethical condemnation: cheating and willful plagiarism are wrong, even

(quasi-) criminal. But the tension between that condemnation and the various

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pressures to cheat leaves numerous third-story authors ambivalent. Students in my
third story have repeatedly received — and come to understand well — the message that
plagiarism is wrong. But that message strikes many of them as too simplistic. Kayla,
whose ideas I discuss at some length in Chapters Four and Five, both argues against
plagiarizing — in the spirit of the first story - and injects doubt about the effectiveness
of such an argument, given the variety of pressures and expectations students must
face. This ambivalence presents a significant challenge for teachers dealing with
academic misconduct in the classroom. Here, my final chapter will take up that
challenge, albeit with tentative steps.

To reinforce this tentative quality, let me return briefly to Peter Levine’s use of
“thick description.” This is the scheme with which I began to frame my study in
Chapter One. The first three stories necessarily suffer from what Levine deems the
omission of “inconvenient facts” (33). Authors in those stories are, after all, trying to
argue for their “sides” - to be effective advocates for the points of view they support.
Indeed, no story could avoid this limitation, despite the best efforts of its authors.
There is always something more to said, some additional fact or nuance to highlight.

In Chapter Five of this dissertation, I have pointed to some of those omissions,
highlighted some additional nuances. That is what Levine describes as the
magistrate’s task: narrating an ethical vision that is more persuasive than that of
competing parties because it is “more nuanced and complete” (34). This, then, is my
modest hope for Chapter Six: to supplement the first three narratives with a “fourth
story” of cheating and willful plagiarism. This, ideally, will be a more

comprehensive narrative, and one that establishes useful precedents going forward. It

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will not be, and cannot be, a final verdict. Near the end of this chapter, I will note

some important work calling for further studies.

Articulating a Viable Fourth Voice:

In Chapter Five, 1 note that second-voice authors tend to contextualize the often-
used language about academic misconduct (and particularly about plagiarism),
thereby exposing its problematic status as a “master narrative” for students to follow.
I also note, however, the supposition that both first and second—story writers — and
indeed virtually everyone - would still value a thoughtful discourse that criticizes
willful academic misconduct. Because writers about cheating and plagiarism (in both
the first and second stories) have not provided that conversation, we must look to
other authors for guidance in creating such a new discourse.

Throughout this final chapter, I will draw upon a variety of authors - most of
whom do not address academic misconduct in their own writings —- to develop a new,
fourth voice in this storytelling matrix. In addition, my work here is not grounded in
a particular scholarly or theoretical tradition. Instead, it explores touchstones that
may help us blend respect for contextual complexity with concern for ethical behavior
in the academy’s own context(s).

In my estimation, the pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty provides an excellent
set of materials for mediating the difficulties left by the blending of postmodern
attitudes about language communities with an ongoing emphasis upon ethical student
conduct. In his 1999 collection of previously published essays, Philosophy and

Social Hop_e, Rorty starts with the proposition that there is no transcendental moral

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imperative for human beings to follow - and thus no ultimate (that is, beyond
negotiation) recourse for determining which behaviors are right and wrong.
Therefore, the “right decision” in any instance cannot rest upon some slice of “truth”
or “reality” that we perceive to be immutable. To Rorty, asking “whether a belief
represents reality accurately” is “not only a bad question, but the root of much wasted
philosophical energy. The right question to ask is, ‘For what purposes would it be
useful to hold that belief?”’ (“Introductionz Relativism” xxiv).

We can imagine, of course, many useful purposes for believing that students
should not cheat. Many of them have emerged through the course of my previous five
chapters. In the academy, we care about the credibility of our policies on academic
integrity. We want to praise good work and deter intellectual laziness. We care about
fairness, about confronting (more or less) equally-situated students with comparable
academic challenges. And we care about the kind of world, the kind of justice, that
our behaviors and those of our students help to make available. Any one of these
goals - and, of course, there are so many other good ones — could by itself form a
strong argument against academic misconduct.

The difficulty comes with the strong - and quite understandable - impulse to
make the “do not cheat” admonition an immutable law, the kind of transcendent
principle Rorty — along with the vast majority of second-story authors — believes is
not persuasive. At such a point, there is no argument, no academic discussion about
what students should do and what they should not. And there is certainly no
conversation about why. I have argued in Chapters Four and Five that students do not

find the ethical imperative against cheating, represented largely by the first story, to

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be unproblematic or fully credible. Moreover, those students will not — cannot - be
subject to quarantine, cannot be rendered immune to the influences of other ethical
messages they receive from the multitude of discourse communities in which they
live, act, and communicate.

We need, therefore, to open the discussion for students, while making the
argument - as one among many - for why they should not cheat. We also need to
acknowledge the situatedness of our argument, which is another way of noting that
our positions have considerable opposition. Others, differently situated, offer
differing views (explicit and implicit) about the importance of academic integrity.
Competition for jobs pushes students to be aggressive in obtaining good grades.
Cultural preferences for individualism make it easier for students to see themselves
“against the world,” rather than engaged in a common ethical endeavor with others.

I would argue, as well, that colleges and universities provide the ideal locations
for this new conversation. Rorty suggests that the transition from secondary to
postsecondary education invites a shift in approach from socializing students to
individuating them. Having learned what members of a society hold in common — and
we can include in this common ground the sharp condemnation of cheating - students
have the sense of security necessary to learn about the fissures in that common
ground (“Education as” 116). In doing so, Rorty argues, “they can rework the self-
image foisted on them by their past, the self-image that makes them competent
citizens, into a new self-image, one that they themselves have helped to create”

(“Education as” 118).

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Rorty sees this process of re-working as vitally important to a well-functioning
democracy. Only those who become aware of the contingency of their rules and
constraints will ever feel empowered to alter what previously seemed — during what
Rorty describes as the socialization phase of education — part of a transcendent
reality: simply the “way things are.” Stifling student recognition of the complications
in our academic talk thus does a disservice not only to individual students, but also to
future prospects for improvements in social justice, for improving the lot of oppressed
minorities, for alleviating economic stratification in American society. One may
respond, certainly, that teaching students about the harder-to-find tensions and
contradictions in our “cheating talk” will only confuse them and undermine our moral
authority. I have shown, however, that what often confuses students is actually the
disjunction between these tensions - which students, in their gathering sophistication,
learn to detect - and the morally absolutist bent of the first story.

Even if talking with students about the complexity of “cheating talk” creates
confusion, that confusion may be a form of cognitive dissonance educators should
value. In my own relatively brief (ten-year) college teaching career, I have frequently
encountered another situation in which applying absolute rules to fluid, multi-
contextual problems creates more student misery than it creates “proper” behavior.
Much of my time has been spent with developmental writers, many of whom identify
“grammar” as their biggest weakness in writing. If only they could do a better job,
they think, of following the “rules,” their essay grades would improve dramatically.

Working with this audience, I have developed and refined a system for thinking

about the relative importance of problems traditionally classified as “grammatical”:

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spelling, punctuation, sentence structure errors, and others. This scheme draws
initially from Joseph Williams’ textbook, Stvle: Ten Lesson_s in Claritv and Grape. In
that text, Williams lays out a three-part system for determining how much a possible
mistake “matters” to the effectiveness of a written text. In the first - and most
important - category, Williams places “basic structure” errors, flaws in writing that
prevent readers from understanding the writer’s message or messages. The key for
students, then, is to focus on creating the most open channel of communication
possible with their readers. Other kinds of errors may matter — for example, we still
encourage students to spell “their” to show possession and “there” to show location.
But inverting those uses is a problem of non-standard usage; it does not generally
interrupt the message, and thus it deserves less concern from both writers and readers.

This technique offers what I deem a significant psychological advantage for
anxious writers. While it takes a long time to implement effectively, and incites a lot
of what Andrea Lunsford terms “silent resistance” from students who expect clear
expressions of authority,’ linking the highest-priority “rules” primarily to a text’s
effectiveness frees students from the vision of their intellectual activity as
fundamentally prescriptive. They come to see many questions about how they write
as negotiable, since different mistakes fall into different categories depending upon
the particular context. A missing coma, for instance, may be a category one
problem if it creates ambiguity, or a category two phenomenon if its absence is
simply non-standard.ii And even category two problems, under Williams’ scheme, are
not clear demonstrations of what is “right” and “wrong,” but rather illustrations of

which contextual imperative holds power in a given situation. To put that more

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plainly, in academic prose we generally use “is not” rather than “ain’t” because such
is the convention of standard American English. That decision, reinforced through
political agreement (and disagreement) over time does not automatically invalidate
the alternatives. Students can use “ain’t” in other discourse communities. We do,
however, expect them to understand the conventions particular to our discourse
community (or communities) in the higher education academy.

By analogy, we need a way to respect the contextual imperatives facing students
in the relationships they bring from outside the academy. And we need to do so in a
way that talks about contextual effectiveness, just as Williams’ scheme offers the
opportunity to do with sentence-level writing concerns. The pressure to “get ahead”
may justify behaviors in certain other situations that classroom teachers and
administrators nevertheless will not tolerate. That does not end the debate, however.

One might argue - and many do — that “ain’t” is not a “proper” word in any
context, and that cheating never qualifies as ethical behavior. From this perspective,
there is no value to contextualizing the pressures students face from various extra-
academic comers. This, however, is a meta-determination, a conclusion that speaks
of values in absolute terms and thus belongs to the realm of traditional philosophy
rather than postmodern pragmatism. Moreover, as I have suggested throughout this
dissertation, absolute ethical prohibitions impose a kind of ineffective “quarantine”
around educational communities. Classroom teachers can certainly argue for the
pernicious effects of messages from other contexts —- say, the adverse messages sent
by historians who plagiarize and whose works continue to make the best-seller lists.

But to do so persuasively, they must first acknowledge and elucidate those contexts.

lll

There is a remaining insecurity that stems from adopting Rorty’s position and
applying it toward a new discourse of academic integrity. Once we have turned the
academic integrity conversation into a truer argument, acknowledging to students that
different communities configure cheating differently, what if amidst all of the
confusion we then — and again! — “lose”? That is, what if the academic argument
against cheating still fails in its competition with pressures that push in other
directions? Rorty seems to offer little reassurance on this point. His promise is merely
(though it deserves more than “mere,” I think) that of an open conversation among
differing visions. The promise is thus democracy itself, fraught with its lack of
guarantees that things will work out the way we want them to. Rorty says he exalts
“democracy for its own sake and . . . growth for its own sake - an exaltation as
fruitful as it is fuzzy” (“Education as” 126).

In his writings, Rorty does not go much beyond this prospect of a “fuzzy” ethical
perspective — perhaps because he fears creating a quasi-imperative in a universe
where imperatives (in his view) do not work. But we can find occasional references
that provide slightly more detail. For example, according to Rorty,

Our identification with our community — our society, our political tradition,
our intellectual heritage - is heightened when we see this community as ours
rather than nature’s, shaped rather than found, one among many which men
have made. In the end... what matters is our loyalty to other human beings
clinging together against the dark, not our hope of getting things right. (qtd. in

Smith 250)

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We notice that Rorty’s sense of obligation to others is rooted paradoxically in
vulnerability, in the sometimes-frightening contingency and frailty of human
experience (“one among many which men have made” and “clinging together against
the dark”) — and not in the hope of a single, infallible ethical discourse that everyone
must rely upon (“getting things right”). Rorty’s anti-Platonic vision of ethical
experience thus offers a combination that this study’s first and second stories lack:
intellectual honesty and a concern for reciprocal obligations. I believe that
encouraging students to “do justice” — even in the contingent, highly rhetoricized way
I am describing here, a way that by definition never fully “gets it right” - creates the
potential, although not a guarantee, for more ethical behavior in the classroom.

In the spirit of thick description that animates this dissertation, let me supplement
the voice of Rorty’s (self-admitted) fuzziness with that of another writer engaged in a
similar — and similarly problematic — quest for ethical conduct. With training in both
law and literature, James Boyd White has written extensively about the ethical
endeavor of engaging with literary and legal texts. More specifically, White advances
the notion that conducting academic discourse means creating a cultural definition of
ethical behavior in a slow, almost painstaking way. This defining - and constant
redefining — occurs as writers (and readers) work their way through the particulars of
whatever rhetorical situation they confront. Here is White’s description of this
process.

While a writer is reconstituting his culture as he puts its resources to work in his
composition, he is at the same time establishing a relationship with his reader, the

person to whom he speaks. This community is different from the culture enacted in

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the real or imaginary world reported in the text and different from the culture in
which the author lived; it is a community of his creation between himself and his
reader. (W orda Lose 280).

From this initial summary, we see three tenets that may prove useful for
addressing cheating and willful plagiarism in a new way. First, White argues that
writers create concrete, specific, situation-contingent relationships with their readers
and text(s). This happens each time a writer engages with a text and with readers.iii
Secondly, each writer’s contribution is an intrinsically creative, transforrnative one —
a “community of creation.” And finally, this act of creative engagement helps the
writer contribute to what White terms the “inherited language and morality” of a
society (Word_s Lose 282, ftn.).

This endless process of re-shaping one’s ethical world is White’s vision of
“doing” language successfully. In many of his academic writings,” White argues that
some authors, and some texts, offer a richer ethical universe than others. While
White often focuses on the works of classical (especially Greek) authors, here I
suggest that his ideas offer a rich model for academic integrity, one that modern
American students can draw upon regardless of how successful their own texts
become.

There are, of course, circumstances under which White’s new “community of
creation” fails to materialize. The most obvious comes when a student willfully
refuses (or fails) to act in any meaningful way upon the academic and cultural
resources — the texts, ideas, and readers - White refers to. Throughout this

dissertation, those concerned with academic misconduct have focused on students’

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academic engagement with texts: primarily taking exams and writing essays. Each of
those situations provides students with the opportunity to, in essence, create a new
rhetorical triangle - pondering a text or texts, and then appropriating those materials
to engage readers in a unique or personalized way. That act of appropriation permits
the “reconstitution of culture” that White refers to. On the other hand, students who
cheat - stealing test answers or plagiarizing an essay for class — consciously refuse to
engage with this new rhetorical opportunity. They take — out of context - materials
whose uniqueness belonged to another rhetorical situation, a different composite of
writer(s), reader(s), text(s), and circumstances.

In the language of the first story, discussed in Chapter Two of my study, students
who behave this way are morally immature. But in Plato, Derrida, and Writing,
Jasper Neel attributes students’ frequent lack of effort on written projects primarily to
a more broadly social cause: the theory of knowledge-creation long in vogue in
Western education. In Neel’s narrative, college students often see their intellectual
work-product — and especially their writing — as fundamentally deficient, inevitably
short of the perfect Platonic “truth” writing ought to transmit from their minds to their
papers. Therefore, they carry little hope for creation, for doing justice by applying
themselves to new academic situations and relationships. Instead, student work
becomes, Neel notes, a “cheap imitation” of an unreachable Platonic ideal. Rorty,
based on the earlier discussion in this chapter, might term this student frustration a
failure of democracy - one attributable to the futile quest for a transcendental

standard of judgment. Although neither Neel nor Rorty addresses cheating or willful

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plagiarism, their concerns certainly are relevant to such behaviors — and, indeed, to all
occasions when students fail to generate new intellectual work.

But of course, what is “cheap imitation” to a Platonic foundationalist is something
much more valuable for the rhetorician following White’s model. Each act of writing
opens the door to previously unthought-of possibilities: ideas, reactions,
combinations, syntheses. On this count, Neel offers a vision that shows why offering
one’s own writing is like the pursuit of justice -- endless, frustrating, but necessary for
those who hope to reach fair conclusions.

Writing could have been introduced to the West as a celebration of endless
possibility. It could have opened the ultimate mode of democracy because it
allows everyone the time and the place to discover the rhetoricity of whatever
text presents itself as the closure of truth. The first thing the writer learns is
the impossibility of writing to close itself down in truth. (P_lat_q 73).

So why not encourage our students to adopt a “justicial” view toward avoiding
cheating and plagiarism? This could be the start of what Roskelly and Ronald, in
their anthology referred to in Chapter One, term “a theoretical stance that will provide
a reason to believe in the vocation of a teacher as intellectual and as social agent of
change” (23). Each time they write, work, or take a test, students could become
seekers of rhetorical justice, establishing new, unforeseen discursive relationships (in
White’s view), while resisting the anti-democratic “closing down of truth” criticized
by Neel and by Rorty. In order to do so, those students must offer nuances, “takes,”

derivations of their own. They must act upon existing texts and ideas in ways that

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appropriate those materials intellectually — and thus make them “new” in the best
postmodern sense.

Perhaps the strongest limitation to my approach is one — ironically — that I have
offered repeatedly: why should students profess allegiance to the values of an
academic community (in this instance, a teacher who asks them to offer nuances of
their own) when their other communities of influence are sending contrasting or
competing messages about plagiarism and cheating? In short, doesn’t my call for a
special form of academic justice - like the first story that I have critiqued — fail to
acknowledge situational complexity? And how is my solution different from the
problematic “academic quarantine” I describe in Chapter Five?

I will address this concern in several stages, beginning with one author’s sense of
how heterogeneity functions in the university setting. In his influential 1994 essay,
“What are Universities For?”, literary and social critic Louis Menand articulates the
distinctive ethical/pedagogical dilemma faced by modern colleges and universities.
In Menand’s conception, those institutions, rather than applying some form of ethical
quarantine, have invited “in” many of the behaviors that clash with the process of
academic inquiry. In their quest to serve an increasingly diverse group of students,
Menand argues, schools have also increasingly adapted to various heterogeneities of
the broader society. “The university has become,” he suggests,

too many things to too many people. It now reproduces all the conflicts of the
culture at large; but it reproduces them, as it were, in vitro. For unlike the

society it simulates, the university is unequipped, both administratively and

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philosophically, to deal with conflicts that cannot be treated simply as
conflicts of ideas. (97)

In this essay, Menand cites date rape as the primary example of an antagonistic
behavior that the academy is unable to arbitrate successfully (98). Devoting precious
institutional resources to issues like crisis counseling, prevention, and prosecution,
Menand believes, detracts from the university’s primary — but increasingly diluted —
function: “the business of imparting some knowledge to the people who need it” (99).

Interestingly, Menand does not mention cheating or plagiarism as issues beyond a
university’s scope of competence. As several commentators from the first and second
stories have noted, however, forms of cheating pervade the world outside of academe.
Thus, academic misconduct might, one could argue, constitute one of what Menand
terms “the inequities and attitudes that persist in the society as a whole” (97) - but
which he cautions universities against trying to fix.

Others may counter, though, with the argument that cheating and willful
plagiarism more directly impede the traditional academic mission than do acts of date
rape, accusations of racial insensitivity, and other tensions wrought by large groups of
diverse college students living and working in close proximity. I doubt that this
distinction can be maintained successfully. As noted several times in this
dissertation, student populations are increasingly more heterogeneous; that fact is
both undeniable and irreversible - and in many senses that is a positive development.
In any case, racial taunts and physical violence may occur within the classroom as
well as outside it, and when the former happens, faculty cannot meekly retreat behind

the “basic knowledge” of their academic subject matter.

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On the other hand, the first story of my dissertation makes clear that many
commentators believe academic misconduct is of special concern to those in the
university -— perhaps in ways that other kinds of ethical violations are not. In fact,
when it comes to academic misconduct, one might actually reverse Menand’s
argument. That is, colleges and universities do have mechanisms in place for
confronting cheating and willful plagiarism — the problems have long been pervasive,
after all; the broader criminal justice system, as noted in Chapter Five of this study,
does not. (There is, for example, no particular law against cheating on a final exam.)

Menand’s broader argument shows skepticism about the ability of colleges and
universities to take on large social problems in effective ways - that is, to persuade
students that the academy has a worthwhile position for them to emulate. While
Menand questions institutional competence on complex issues of social justice, Rorty
calls into question whether higher educational institutions have the political will to act
in ways the broader society may criticize. There would likely be significant
opposition to the idea of a “voices of cheating” forum. As Rorty notes, higher
education administrations are highly attuned to popular conceptions of what colleges
and universities should do. And those conceptions highly value foundationalist views
of language and truth. There is, as several voices from the second story in my
dissertation lament, strong lasting power to the idea that ethical behavior must have
an unshakeable foundation. And this idea leads to thinking that cheating can be
simply, objectively, unequivocally wrong. As Rorty suggests, college teachers “are
still expected to make the ritual noises to which the trustees and the funding agencies

are accustomed -- noises about ‘objective criteria of excellence,’ ‘fundamental moral

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and spiritual values,’ ‘the enduring questions posed by the human condition,’ and so
on” (“Humanistic” 128).

To overcome such “ritual noises” without losing credibility in the eyes of key
constituents (students, administrators, the general public), we need a much more
sophisticated exercise in rhetorical practice. As a starting point, we should develop
an alliance among those who do agree to my key proposition: that we must wed
postmodern sensibilities about the unstable truth value of a concept like “academic
integrity” with an ongoing concern for students (and others!) behaving as ethically as
possible. For Rorty, it would appear, this area of agreement is tightly confined. This
lack of a broad consensus, he laments, means that “those of us who have been
impressed by the anti-Platonic, anti-essentialist, historicizing, naturalizing writers of
the past few centuries (people like Hegel, Darwin, Freud, Weber, Dewey, and
Foucault) must either become cynical or else put our own tortured private
constructions on” claims that certain truths are foundational (“Humanistic” 128).

Rorty’s pessimistic caution likely means a new discourse about academic integrity
must take root in two places: within particular classrooms, where individual teachers
(hopefully) still have sufficient academic freedom to attempt broader discussions
about the variety of cheating-related messages facing students; and secondly, in
campus-wide workshops staffed and attended by sympathetic faculty, those willing to
think about academic misconduct in new terms.

Eventually, however, these new teaching units need to seek broader forums, a
wider realm of adherents to a new approach. This need is rooted in a problem I have

come to think of as “latent ambiguity”: the difficulty students have in trusting

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messages that seem to be delivered outside of their most resonant contexts. Let me
further explain this difficulty by drawing another analogy to my own professional
experience.

At Ball State University, students must successfully complete an exit writing
requirement — one designed to show that they can write in a manner befitting
prospective university graduates. For most students, the means of completing this
requirement is a two-hour impromptu writing exercise, completed using pen and
paper, accompanied by 100-200 others in a large lecture hall.

As the Assistant Test Administrator of the Writing Competency Exam since
August 2003, and earlier as a proctor and grader for this exam, I have closely
monitored the way students react to a variety of impromptu writing topics. What
stands out to me is the high degree of anxiety students often demonstrate about the
prompts’ language, even when that language would appear (to administrative eyes,
anyway) unambiguous. For example, during one of the November 2003 exam
administrations, several students in the “Science and Technology” cluster queried the
head proctor about the prompt as it appears below and as it appeared on the overhead
projection. The first line designates the title of the subject cluster for which students

registered.

Science and Technology
Identify one writer, scientist, or expert practitioner within your major field of
study who has had a profound effect on society and/or the field itself. Discuss this

effect, including its significance either for society or the field.

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The students’ concern centered on the fact that they were not majors in science or
technology-related fields. And indeed, the exam registration protocol does not
require that students sign up in accord with their majors.v Therefore, they wondered,
did they need to pick a scientist, even though they were not experts in any science
field?

Watching the exam session from the back of the room, my initial reaction was to
wonder how students could “find” such an ambiguity that seemed to belie the clear
import of the prompt’s language. That is, the prompt invited writers to respond from
“within their field of study.” Moreover, it did not restrict writers to choosing a
scientist, but added “writer . . . or expert practitioner” as valid general categories.
The questioning students’ apparent inclination, however, was to read the first part of
the prompt against — almost in opposition to — the title on the projection screen.
Reassured by the head proctor that they did not need to focus on issues peculiar to
science/technology figures, students nevertheless continued to express concern about
this issue.

On further thought, I have wondered if it is possible, within the confines of a
single classroom, to mediate ambiguities like the one I have just described. Rather
than asking students to demonstrate their writing where and how they are accustomed
to using that skill, the competency exam asks them to “prove” their ability out of
context, in response to a prompt that is — by design — framed in very broad terms to

allow a huge diversity of writers some point of written entry into the subject matter.

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As a result, the familiar operating contexts of students’ lives get “flattened” for
this exercise, into one particular discourse community, that of the university-wide
writing exit exam. Moreover, this community is not a highly resonant one for student
writers; they do not spend time “practicing” with the elements of this environment.
They do not meet the proctors, or the exam graders, in advance. They do not see the
writing prompt before they write. Given these constraints, the exam in essence
invokes a “trump card” over all other sets of operating guidelines to which these
students are accustomed.

The students’ anxiety and lack of trust, then, become much easier to understand
when viewed as part of a rhetorical configuration that is by definition impoverished.
Like the ethical quarantine imposed by the first story of my dissertation, this exit
writing requirement privileges one set of relationships —- here, that between the
student and this particular testing environment — to the exclusion of all others that
more richly inform students’ lives. Ironically - given the way the “Science and
Technology” registrants reacted - only the specific language of the prompt itself tries
to invite students to recover access to their other operational contexts. But, from a
broader perspective, it should not be surprising that students view this “invitation”
with skepticism and confusion.

Some of us who have worked for several years with this exit writing requirement
harbor a longer-term hope for the program. That hope would integrate the exam with
a substantial, fleshed-out Writing Across the Curriculum requirement. With such a
component, students could demonstrate writing ability within their major field, in

response to issues organic to their studies. They would direct their work toward

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professional readers who have taught or worked with them during the preceding three
or four years.

By analogy, my hope for a longer-term vision of this new cheating discourse
works on two levels. In the first, we will need an across-the-curriculum agreement to
teach cheating as a complex rhetorical construct, rather than as a self-evident artifact
to be avoided. Until that is achieved, isolated workshops on cheating risk reifying
academic misconduct, making it, like the writing competency exam administrations,
an awkward “thing in itself,” rather than a rich, rhetorically situated variable. And
that characterization, more appropriate for language in the first story of this
dissertation, is not fitting for the fourth.

On the second level, a new, multi-contextual discourse on cheating must find its
voice in places outside the formal classroom setting, perhaps in discursive sites that
exercise greater influence over students: in sorority and fraternity meetings, at sports
practices, and so on. Students who only participate in this new discourse in isolated
workshops or classroom units will - like the writing competency exam-takers at Ball
State - find themselves perennially uncomfortable with the limited confines of a
conversation whose richest and most familiar evocations occur elsewhere, and indeed
occur throughout a variety of contexts in students’ lives (in clubs, in organizations, at
work, with their peers, in their job searches, through the commercial media, and so
on). This sense that the subject matter of cheating has been divorced from its most
resonant setting(s) will make students dig for ambiguities everywhere — and that
cynical search for damning contradictions calls the whole educational effort into

question.

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The question of content for workshops on academic misconduct also becomes
significant. After all, students currently are bombarded with “literature” about
academic integrity and misconduct, and yet that subject matter seems to have little
impact on rates of cheating. Recently, Steven Mailloux has offered what he views as
an ideal literary curriculum for English departments, one that uses rhetorical theory to
structure class work in ways that create more authentic relationships between subject
matter and each individual context in which it is addressed. In his 1998 book,

Reception Histories: Rhetoriciragmatism. apd American Cultural Politics, Mailloux

 

builds on Gerald Graff’s notion (from Professing Literature) that we should “teach the
conflicts” about literary and textual interpretation to students. Mailloux proposes
using Graff’s strategy to reforrnulate the way English departments structure their
undergraduate courses. More specifically, he discusses the long-term planning and
debates behind Syracuse University’s new English and Textual Studies (ETS) major.
The new major, Mailloux points out, replaces “literary historical coverage as the
overarching frame for all the courses,” instead implementing a variety of modes of
inquiry (Reception 184-85). The Syracuse ETS major, after years of intense
deliberation, was eventually conceived of as a triangle, with the sides labeled
“history,” “theory,” and “politics” — and with the core of the triangle, the key
departmental subject matter, deemed “culture” (198-99).

This structure, according to Mailloux, allows for three modes of inquiry.
Historical inquiries “assume that texts bear meaning as they are produced and read in
specific historical formations” (197). Theoretical inquiries, by contrast, “investigate

the conditions under which texts can be said to bear meaning, as well as the questions

125

of whether and how such meaning can become available to a reader” (197). And
finally, political inquiries “assume that texts are bearers of political meaning: that is,
they mediate power relations” (198). Examples of courses under the historical leg are
those involving “reception aesthetics, modes of historical inquiry, and specific
histories of genres” (197). Psychoanalysis, hermeneutics, and rhetoric courses find a
home under “theoretical inquiries” (197). And “political inquiries” subsume courses
in ideology critique, Marxism, and materialist feminism, among others (198).

I have suggested throughout the final two chapters of this dissertation that we
must make our discourse on academic integrity as respectful as possible of divergent
views and messages. To this end, I suggest that we apply the triangular concept noted
above — a scheme that honors Rorty’s and White’s views of rhetorical justice - to
specific workshop offerings on academic integrity. For example, one workshop
might employ a historical lens, looking at literature on academic integrity (and
misconduct) in their particular contexts. Teachers or discussion leaders might survey,
with participants, particular examples of written and/or oral “getting ahead” rhetoric
from a variety of student discourse communities - popular media, job advertisements,
television commercials, church bulletins, and so on. Viewing such a broad display
would help students to better understand the appeals and contradictions of various
behavioral pressures they must negotiate.

Another workshop - this one on the theory side — might look at works by Moore
Howard and others who problematize the meaning of “plagiarism,” who question its
usefulness for readers because of its tangled theoretical legacy. A third could -

among other options in the “political inquiries” category - apply an approach that is

126

conspicuously absent from the first two stories in my dissertation: a Marxist critique
of the notion of cheating, focusing on how tensions over this construct go to the heart
of American capitalism, rather than defy its core values.

The key to this triangular scheme is that students should view cheating and other
forms of misconduct through a wide variety of perspectives, and focus on a diversity
of texts related to the broader themes. Only then can we make the ideas about
academic integrity and misconduct resonate in credible ways, ways that acknowledge
the true complexity of this subject matter. While academic misconduct need not
become a full-fledged discipline in itself (akin, say, to an English department!)
approaching the phenomena of cheating and plagiarism as a rich and worthy subject
matter is a vital step. Only as a complement to that step can we credibly ask students

for the “justice” of their own nuances, their own contributions.

Conclusion:

There is, of course, much more work to be done in creating a better dialogue
about academic integrity and misconduct. The end of the previous section speaks
clearly to this: alliances must be forged and workshops created. Faculty and
administrators — including those beyond the postmodern humanists in English
departments - must be invited to share their views as part of the triangular workshop
structure.

As I conclude, let me address a broader reaction that surely will strike some
readers. I do not mean to lightly dismiss real incidents of academic misconduct. In

fact, this dissertation has sought to figure out how better to address cheating and

127

willful plagiarism - given my strong sense that traditional methods of deterrence and
punishment have largely failed. That is not only my sense, but a verdict rendered —
albeit with different emphases - by most first and second-story authors, and by most
students, in my study. Moreover, the dominant focus of many professional articles
published after the end date of my primary research sample (that is, after 2000) is
honor codes."i Those articles thus maintain the hope for what I have termed academic
quarantine — a hope which, as I have suggested in the last two chapters, does not
address students’ lives in a sufficiently comprehensive, credible way.

Ultimately, the failure to alleviate the ongoing crises of cheating and willful
plagiarism raises the persistent question of why college faculty and administrators fail
to “get through” to their students. While my study may not change this reality
profoundly, and change - if it comes — will happen slowly, I have offered a blending
that deserves further consideration. New approaches to cheating and willful
plagiarism should be postmodern in the finest sense: recognizing the variety of
competing and conflicting messages faced by our students, messages that differ and
overlap, that shift and evolve as rhetorical circumstances change. But those
approaches should also borrow some resonance of the strong ethical concern shown
by first-story authors. Rorty, James Boyd White, and Mailloux, in particular, offer
the prospect of wedding these strongest of first and second-story insights — and

perhaps leading us toward more successful, though much more complex, visions of an

ethical academic community.

 

:Lunsford used this term during a lecture at Michigan State University on February 5. 2004.

" Contrast these two examples: “When the ocean roared loudly the seagulls complained” (category
one; the meaning is ambiguous) and “When the ocean roared no one listened” (category two: the use is
non-standard).

128

 

 

'" Although White does not employ this term, each such relationship forms what composition theorists
generally term a “rhetorical triangle” — a concept I return to repeatedly below.

"' The work I draw from in this chapter is When Words Lose Their Meanig. Justice as Translation is
a related book by White.

' For each exam registration, students may choose among the following subject clusters: social studies,
business, science/technology, liberal and fine arts, education, and general (a “catch-all” category).

” See, for example, appendix A of this dissertation, which lists all relevant professional articles
published to date (March 2004) by Donald McCabe, the leading author in my first story.

129

Appendix A

Cole, Sally and Donald L. McCabe. “Issues in Academic Integrity.” New Directions
for Student Services 73 (Spring 1996): 67-77.

McCabe, Donald. “Cheating: Why Students Do It and How We Can Help Them
Stop.” American Educator 25.4 (Winter 2001): 38-43.

McCabe, Donald L. “Academic Dishonesty among High School Students.”
Adolescence 34.136 (Winter 1999): 681-87.

---. “Academic Dishonesty Among Males in College: A Thirty Year Perspective.”
@1113] of Collage Student Developmgat 35.1 (Jan. 1994): 5-10.

---. “Faculty Responses to Academic Dishonesty: The Influence of Student Honor
Codes.” Research in Higher Educatia 34.5 (Oct. 1993): 647-58.

McCabe, Donald L. and Andrew L. Makowski. “Resolving Allegations of Academic
Dishonesty: Is There a Role for Students to Play?” About Campus 6.1
(March/April 2001): 17-21.

McCabe, Donald, and Gary Pavela. “Some Good News about Academic Integrity.”
Chapge 33.5 (Sept.-Oct. 2000): 32-38.

McCabe, Donald, and Linda Klebe Trevino. “Honesty and Honor Codes.” Academe
88.1 (Jan-Feb. 2002): 37-41.

McCabe, Donald L. and Linda Klebe Trevino. “Academic Dishonesty: Honor Codes
and Other Contextual Influences.” Journal of Higher Education 64.5 (Sept-Oct.
1993): 522-38.

---. “Individual and Contextual Influences on Academic Dishonesty: A Multicampus

Investigation.” Research in Higher Eduaation 38.3 (June 1997): 379-396.

130

I = L. .1... .A.
lad.

---. “What We Know about Cheating in College: Longitudinal Trends and Recent
Developments.” @pgp 28.1 (Jan-Feb. 1996): 28-33.

McCabe, Donald L. and William J. Bowers. “The Relationship Between College
Cheating and College Fraternity or Sorority Membership.” NASPA J ouma_l 33.4
(Summer 1996): 280-91.

McCabe, Donald L., Kenneth D. Butterfield, and Linda Klebe Trevino. “Faculty and
Academic Integrity: The Influence of Current Honor Codes and Past Honor Code
Experiences.” Research in Higher Education 44.3 (June 2003): 367-85.

McCabe, Donald, Linda Klebe Trevino, and Kenneth D. Butterfield. “Academic
Integrity in Honor Code and Non-Honor Code Environments: A Qualitative
Investigation.” Journal of Higher Education 70.2 (Man-Apr. 1999): 211-34.

---. “Dishonesty in Academic Environments: The Influence of Peer Reporting
Requirements.” Journal of Higher Education 72.1 (J an.-Feb. 2001): 29-45.

---. “Honor Codes and Other Contextual Influences on Academic Integrity: A
Replication and Extension to Modified Honor Code Settings.” Research in
Higher Education 43.3 (June 2002): 357-78.

Pavela, Gary and Donald McCabe. “The Surprising Return of Honor Codes.”
Planning for Higher Education 21.4 (Summer 1993): 27-32.

Roth, Nancy L. and Donald L. McCabe. “Communication Strategies for Addressing
Academic Dishonesty.” Journal of College Student Development 36.6 (Nov.-

Dec. 1995): 531-541.

131

Appendix B

Moore Howard, Rebecca. ”The Gendered Plagiarist.” The Annual Penn State
Conference on Rhetoric and Composition. 12-15 July, 1995.

---. “The New Abolitionism Comes to Plagiarism.” Perspectives on Plagiarism and
Intellectual Property in a Postmodern World. Buranen and Roy, eds. Albany,
NY: SUNY Press, 1999: 87-95.

---. “A Plagiarism Pentimento.” Journal of Teaching Writing 11.2 (1992): 233-45.

---. “Plagiarisms, Authorships, and the Death Penalty.” College English 57.7 (Nov.
1995): 788-806.

---. “Sexuality, Textuality: the Cultural Work of Plagiarism.” College English 62.4
(March 2000): 473—91.

---. Sanding in the fiadow of Garnts: Plagiarists, Authors, Collaborators.

Perspectives on Writing: Theory, Research, Practice. Volume 2. Stamford, CT:

Ablex Publ., 1999.

132

Appendix C

ENG 101-102 Timed Writing Sample Spring 2002

You have read two brief pieces from MSNBC on Internet cheating and a plagiarism
case, as well as an excerpt from Mike Rose’s Lives on the Boundary, pp. 179-81.
Whether labeled plagiarism, academic dishonesty, or cheating, the behaviors of
students in the selected readings have raised questions about ethics, punishment, and
the nature of assignments.

These issues are not new, but cases in the news remind us that they are also complex
and often have long lasting effects. Senator Biden withdrew his bid for the
Presidency because of a plagiarism case when he was a student at Harvard. Two
respected historians have recently admitted to plagiarism; whether their research
assistants were careful or not, Doris Goodwin Kearns’ and Stephen Ambrose’s names
were on their books.

In a well developed essay, examine your position on plagiarism. To support your
position, you may focus on a single incident or several incidents of plagiarism or
academic dishonesty. Why might students plagiarize? Does the Internet make
plagiarism any easier? Why? What should teachers’ responses be to plagiarism?
What about institutional responses - policies, guidelines, punishment? What about
parent and community responses? Provide specific examples from your reading,
your experience, or observations to support your points.

Endorse your paper in the upper left comer as follows:
Full Name
Course and Section number
Date

Skip two lines and then center your title.

133

Appendix D

Plagiarism and Student Sophistication: A Case Study

 

The purpose of this research project is to analyze college students’ attitudes toward
issues of plagiarism. The investigator has been researching the metaphors used by
professional scholars (between 1995 and 2000) to describe what they find
objectionable about plagiarism. The investigator would now like to obtain a sample
of student attitudes toward the same phenomenon, in order to analyze how the
rhetoric of the two samples is similar and/or different.

As a Ball Sate student enrolled in ENG 102 during the spring semester 2002, you
have already completed a mid-term timed writing assignment given to all ENG 101
and ENG 102 students campus-wide. This assignment asked you to develop in
writing your “position on plagiarism.”

The investigator seeks permission to make a copy of and then use your timed writing
text. If you consent, the investigator may use your writing in the following ways: 1.
to examine your attitudes toward plagiarism and cheating; and 2. to compare your
attitudes to those of academic professionals who have recently written about the same
issues. This analysis may appear in the principal investigator’s scholarly writing. If
your written comments are cited or quoted, they will be documented without
revealing your name. That is, your participation will be confidential.

The foreseeable risks or ill effects from participating in this study are minimal.
Participating students are not asked to do additional work or to provide additional
information — beyond their informed consent. Whether or not you participate will
have no impact upon your course grade in ENG 102.

While there are no direct benefits to participants, comments from participating
students will be useful. They may help the investigator develop a theory of how best
to approach plagiarism in colleges and universities.

Your participation in this study is completely voluntary and you are free to withdraw
from the study at any time for any reason without penalty or prejudice from the
investigator. Please feel free to ask any questions of the investigator before signing
the Informed Consent form or at any time after the study has begun.

To learn more about your rights as a research subject, you may contact the following
person: Ms. Sandra Smith, Coordinator of Research Compliance, Office of Academic
Research and Sponsored Programs, Ball State University, Muncie, IN 47306, (765)
285-5070.

134

I, . agree to participate in this research project entitled
“Plagiarism and Student Sophistication: A Case Study.” 1 have had the study
explained to me and my questions have been answered to my satisfaction. I have read
the description of the project and I give my consent to participate. I understand that I
will receive a copy of the Consent Form to keep for future reference.

 

 

Participant’s Signature Date

Principal Investigator:
Steven R. Chalk, Instructor
Department of English

Ball State University
Muncie, IN 47306
Telephone: (765) 285-8384
E-mail: schaflgwbsuedu

Edition date: April 15, 2002

135

Appendix E (Edward)
My Position on Plagiariarp

It turns out that plagiarism has become a major problem in schools and
universities all across this country. In some cases, kids get F’s on assignments, fail
the class, or even kicked out of school. When I was in high school I had a friend that
paid money to be a member of a web site that distributed various research papers. He
would get on the Internet and chose from hundreds of papers already complete, and
print out the one he wanted. At first I thought of him as an idiot that was too lazy to
do his own work. However, I would look like the idiot when he would turn his
papers in and get A’s, while I was actually writing mine and getting C’s. I started to
think about what was right and wrong. He got an A in the class and I got a B. It
became perfectly clear to me why people plagiarize and cheat.

Kids plagiarize because it’s easy and they know they can get away with it. Why
would they take the extra time and effort to get a lower grade, when they can do it the
easy way and get a better grade? With the Internet being a factor for youngsters,
there’s no limit to how they can cheat. They will find ways to do it and get away with
it. I am a teaching major and I don’t know exactly how I am going to detect what is
plagiarized and what is actual honest work from my students. I do know this, when
kids get old enough to know right from wrong and they chose wrong, they should be
penalized. I don’t agree with kicking them out of school or failing them, but they
should have to take an F on the assignment or redo the work. At younger grade levels
kids should not be held as responsible for what they actually write down on paper. It

is just important that they are trying and actually getting involved in the assignment.

136

Parents also play a role in whether or not their kids are cheaters. A kid should be
taught that it is wrong to cheat and should have a guilty conscience if they do it. I
know when I was younger I was scared to get caught cheating because I knew I
would be in serious trouble when I got home. That’s the way it should be with all
kids. I know some parents blow it off as if it wasn’t a big deal. They only care that
the student does it without being caught. Parents should care that their students get a
B the honest way instead of an A the dishonest way.

Plagiarism is a problem we see in our schools and Universities and it continues to
grow. With the Internet as an option for kids and parents not caring, the problem can
only get worse. We can only hope that more incidents like Senator Biden happen,

where we don’t let cheaters become successful for doing the wrong thing.

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Appendix F (Zena)

The Many Wonders of Plagiarism

In life, most people don’t want to be known as cheaters. Who would want people
to look down on them? Who could learn the real material if they were cheating? All
of these questions come into my head when I think about the word plagiarism.

Not everyone, but most people, have cheated at something sometime during their
life. I, for example, have used the Internet for a little “help” when writing a paper. I
feel that the Internet is a very helpful source for all people. It used to be the standard
books, but now we can click a button and look up information most people didn’t
know. In answering the question, “Does the Internet make plagiarism easier?” I feel
that it does. If peOple were to plagiarize from a book, they would have to go to the
library, find the info and copy the material. Most families have the Internet in their
house. Copying material off the Internet is as simple as copying and pasting the
information into a word document.

I feel that some students are not taught well enough what plagiarism really is.
Some teachers hand out information sheets explaining what it means, but some
students need to be shown examples. Students might plagiarize and not even know it.
I feel that teachers need to do a lesson on plagiarism. If a teacher catches a student
plagiarizing, I feel there should be some sort of punishment. People need to learn
material instead of copying other people’s words, thoughts or opinions. If the teacher
finds the student to be plagiarizing, I feel that she/he needs to show the student what

their plagiarized. One time, a kid in my grade got caught plagiarizing, but the teacher

138

never showed him what he did wrong. He didn’t think he plagiarized, but her voice
was stronger than his was and she won the battle.

Punishment is something most people hate. The word just wants to make you
cringe. Whenever someone cheats or plagiarizes, I feel there should always be
punishment. I feel that if the student was taught how not to plagiarize than he/she
should be punished. If the child was not informed, then in all honesty, they really
might not know what they were doing. I did Cadet Teaching last year for a
Kindergarten class, and while at the school, there was a big issue going around about
plagiarizing. A child in the 3rd grade plagiarized a paper. He was to write a small
essay on an animal. He went home and looked on the Internet and found a whole
page of information on monkeys. Well when he turned in the paper, it was hand
written but the information on the pae was exactly what was on the Internet. He
didn’t know he had plagiarized. The punishment he received was failing that
assignment. This is one option for punishment. Some teachers also choose to fail the
student in the class.

I feel that the parents and community need to be involved in children’s
schoolwork. A good education will help that child succeed in life. I feel that parents
need to talk to their child’s teachers. They need to encourage the teacher to talk about
plagiarism. I feel that parents should also check their child’s homework. This might
eliminate some of the problems. I’m sure plagiarism will never completely be
resolved, but with little effort and taking minor steps towards preventing it, most of

the cases on plagiarism will diminish with time.

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Appendix G (Yvonne)
Plagiarism - Does It Deserve That Much Punishment?

Plagiarism is not official punishable by law. Once convicted as a plagiarizer it
stays with you for life. One of the articles says “Senator Biden withdrew his bid for
President because of a plagiarism case when he was a student at Harvar .” This
shows how people, not only in the community, but also parents and teachers look at
plagiarizing as something that is not worth having I the presidential office. It is worst
case of cheating in my opinion.

I believe that plagiarism is only as bad as the teacher makes it. Every teacher, at
the beginning of the semester, makes his or her rules of plagiarism known. The rules
might suggest that if one plagiarizes he or she will receive a zero and will be assigned
another paper that will only receive half credit. On a stricter note, the teacher or
school has a rule saying that plagiarism will not be tolerated at all. This results in
failure in that class or even expulsion from that particular school. If I were a teacher,
my rules would take in consideration how bad/often the plagiarism occurred.

Starting here at Ball State, I thought that the rule for plagiarizing was automatic
dismissal from this University. I have come to recently find out that someone I know
copied an entire paper off of a government site on the Internet. The teacher easily
found out and his punishment was failure in the class. I, on the other hand, would
have had him dismissed from the University because of how bad the cheating
occurred. If he had tried at all, I would have taken that into consideration. Because
he put no effort into his paper, I would not have taken it so lightly. Plagiarism is a

form of cheating, in my opinion.

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I believe that the Internet has helped contribute to plagiarism in the past couple of
years. It makes it easier to cheat because it is always at hand, especially in the dorms.
Everyone has access to the web. One can easily use the cut and paste buttons to copy
the words from the Internet then paste them into his or her paper. He or she doesn’t
even have to write them down. I have heard recently that some English Teachers here
at Ball State use a website that can tell if some wording from a paper has come from
the Internet. All the teachers have to do is type in a sentence from the paper. Just
like one of the articles quotes “Internet cheating has become high tech.” Now
teaching is going to have to become high tech.

Every country, teacher, and different people have different opinions on
punishment plagiarizers. I do not believe in some of the techniques that other
countries have to punish plagiarizers. For example, in China the punishment is death.
I do not believe that killing is the right thing to do. I do believe, however, that the
teacher whose case which took place in Wichita, Kansas did the right thing by giving
punishments by the severity of the crime. She has failed students, given them make
up assignments, and she tries to work out the problem. This is exactly what I believe

should be done.

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Appendix H (Victor)
Is Plagiarism good or bad?

I never knew that plagiarism was that bad until I got to college and saw a
paragraph about it in every syllabus I received. In high school It really wasn’t a big
concern and I didn’t see many students taking advantage of the intemet or anything to
write papers. I still haven’t heard of many students getting in trouble for doing it but
it seems a little more serious. I guess in my mind it is not right for students to do this,
although the intemet makes it very easy for students to want to.

First of all, since I have not really seen it happen I can’t give any examples but I
can give reasons why students might choose to plagiarize. Most students get on the
intemet to get information about what they are looking for, so when a paper is
assigned and the student needs to write a biography on someone, they go search for
stuff on the intemet. When they find it, most of the information is right in front of
their face and they find it easiest to write everything down word for word. Why try
and write a paper when there are a million sources of information on the intemet you
can copy? Don’t get me wrong, I use the intemet to get sources of information but I
don’t copy it down, I just put information in my own words. I just think there are a
ton of students out there who are lazy and procrastinate, so they just get their paper
off the intemet and it makes it twice as easy. Another reason students may commit
this crime is because they have always been taught to do well in school. When they
come across something that may be a little hard for them, all they have to do is get the
answer on the intemet, it’s that simple. They want to make a good impression so they

cheat because they want to do well. Even though most students know it’s wrong they

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may find it as a last resort. Although, I feel students are not always in the wrong
here, it can also be the intemet that makes it so easy.

Go look in the library at the computers and count how many students are on the
intemet just looking around, or how many students just have computer in their dorms,
houses, or apartments. Most of these students use their computers to write papers and
for the use of the intemet. I have seen some articles about sites on the intemet that
show students how to cheat and the best ways to do it. This isn’t helping students at
all from not cheating, it just encourages them even more. The intemet should be used
for retrieving sources of information that help people, but not in the wrong way.
When they read this stuff they think they can get away with copying something off
the intemet and using it for the paper, but most of the time you cannot. Teachers
responses to plagiarism have always been negative because they feel the student isn’t
doing their own work but instead someone else’s. I think this is true but sometimes
take it to another level. Copying your whole paper off the intemet is one thing but
using a sentence is another. If you feel you want to use a sentence in your paper, just
remember to cite it. I think that punishment for this should be something to teach the
student that it’s wrong but not as harsh as it is now. Therefore, I feel that not only is
it in the student’s wrong but the intemet also has something to do with it.

Overall, I feel that plagiarism is a bad thing but you see students taking advantage
of the intemet a lot. Whoever has an opinion on plagiarism it’s always the same,
whether it be the students or the intemet encouraging them to take that step. To me, I
think that students find it an easy way out sometimes but it’s way too risky and not

worth the punishment. Do your own work, it can’t be that bad!

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Appendix I (Uma)
Plagiarism

A growing problem among high schools and colleges across the country is
cheating and plagiarism. Plagiarism is when someone uses the work of someone else
as their own, without giving credit to the original author. Personally, I feel that
plagiarism is wrong, but it is such an easy thing to do. Sometimes people plagiarize
something and do not even know they are doing it. Although I think it is so easy to
do, I still disagree with people who do it and I feel that they should be punished to
some extent.

When students plagiarize papers, it is not fair to the other students who actually
do the assignment by themselves. Also, it takes away the credit from the person who
originally wrote the paper.

I feel that student’s plagiarize because maybe they feel that their own work is not
good enough and they need to get good grades, so they feel that someone else’s work
would be better than their own. Also, the intemet has made it so much easier to cheat
and plagiarize in the past 5 years. You can get onto the intemet and find hundreds of
websites that you can buy papers on, or just print them off and use them as your own.
I’ll admit I have done this before, but that was when I was in high school and I didn’t
realize how much trouble I could get into for doing it. Although I feel that plagiarism
is a wrong thing to do, I do feel that some of the punishments people receive for
doing it is a bit harsh.

In the article from MSNBC, it talked about a teacher who failed a fifth of her

students for taking their semester projects off the intemet. I feel that punishment is a

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bit extreme. I can understand giving them an F for the project, but not failing them
for the whole year. That punishment just does not “fit the crime”. I believe that
teachers should let their students know what the consequences of cheating and
plagiarism are. But the consequences or punishment should be fair and not go to far.
Or if the teachers wanted to abolish cheating all together, then they could have the
students write their papers in class. The teachers could give them a specific amount
of time to write their paper in and then hand it in when the time is up. This would
eliminate intemet cheating and plagiarism.

In conclusion, I know that cheating and plagiarism are wrong, and something does
need to be done to stop it from happening, but I also believe that when students do

cheat and plagiarize the appropriate punishment should be given.

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Appendix J (Thomas)
Internet Chea_ti_n_g

There are many incidents of plagiarism out there today. The one most talked
about around me is intemet cheating. In college, professors are not very happy when
you use the intemet as a reference because it is too hard to refer back to. There are a
lot of intemet site out there for people to cheat off of. Because of this, most
professors like you to use books, magazine articles, periodicals etc. so they can go
back and check if you have plagiarized.

Students might plagiarize from the intemet because they have waited until the last
day to write a research paper and there is no time to go to the library. The library
could be closed by the time you get there so your only option would be the intemet.
Students also might be very lazy to go to the library so they fake getting reference.
Students may never use anything other then the intemet for references but the
professors usually don’t know that because they have lied about their references.

The intemet makes plagiarism a lot easier for students. The intemet is always
close by at college. It could be in your room or in your dorm complex. It is easier for
students to just get online to get research then to go to the library. The library may be
too far for students to get to or they are just too lazy to walk or drive there. Others
may not care and risk the chance of getting kicked out of the University for
plagiarism.

Teacher’s responses to plagiarism are getting out of control. In elementary and

middle school, I can think of so many times where I was doing a short report and I

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copied straight out of the book because I didn’t know what I was doing. I think is
very unfair for a child so young to get punished for something they probably don’t
know about. In high school, I believe it should be enforced but not to the point that
you are getting kicked out of school. There should be warnings giving to students in
this predicament. The students may never have been told about plagiarism so you
can’t assume they do. In college, it should definitely be drilled in your head by now.
Students should be penalized for this now. I still think ruining their career by kicking
them out of school is too harsh. Student’s attending University should also be given
multiple warnings before getting punished. Just kicking them out right away is not
going to help them learn.

I believe the parents and community are being hypocrites if they say they have
never cheated a day in their lives because everyone has cheated at least one time.
Whether it be just copying one question from a friend or copying someone’s paper is
all apart of cheating and we have all done it. Maybe they didn’t have the intemet to
plagiarize from but they have still cheated somehow. Parents and community
responses are always negative towards young adults it seems. I think they have just
forgot how it is to be young.

This whole thing about plagiarism has gotten way out of control lately. Kicking
children out of grade school for something they probably have no idea about is
absolutely ridiculous. When you just kick them out, it is robbing them of their
education too quickly. It is unfair. Universities should be a little stricter but not to
the point where they are kicking them out left and right. They may as well kick

everyone out all at once because all students have plagiarized at some point.

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Appendix K (Stacy)
Plagiarism

I feel that plagiarism is a type of cheating. You are just copying word for word
what someone else idea and word were and turn them into your own. An author may
have worked long and hard on a document and for someone to just put that work into
his or her paper without giving the author credit is wrong. It’s somewhat stealing in
my opinion.

I feel that students might plagiarize because they are too lazy to do the research
themselves. Therefore, they see some information that is compatible and use it as
their own work. When I was in high school, students in one way or another did
plagiarism. Some students would just copy a little bit from an encyclopedia, for
example, and others would just write the whole page sometimes not even knowing
what they just wrote about. They would turn in their papers without stating where
they got the information from or acknowledging the author.

Some students might plagiarize because they feel or know they can get away with
it. In my high school, some teachers couldn’t tell whether a student re-worded
something they read or if they just copied word for word from a text, and those
students would get credit for it. They feel it worked the first time so why not do it
again. Therefore, students get good grades for work that they didn’t deserve.

Some ways to minimize plagiarism is to make students do a bibliography. A
bibliography is a list of resources that you used to write a paper or document. That
way you are giving credit to the author if you were to use information from another

source. It could also be helpful to some teachers who feel they have students in their

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class plagiarizing, all they have to do is look at the bibliography and maybe check the
students resources to see if what they suspect is happening. Another thing that could
be used is to do footnotes which are sort of like bibliographies but are at the bottom
of the page. For example if you were to quote someone in a research paper, you
would just put the person’s name and what source you came from at the bottom of the
page. Footnotes are usually followed by numbers. Another thing is to have students
go over their work in class. Therefore if they really know their material they could
tell you without looking at their paper as much. Students who don’t usually have
trouble talking about what they wrote about.

Parents and teachers should explain to students and their kids the serious
consequences of plagiarism and maybe try to help them if they are having trouble in a

particular subject to avoid. Plagiarism is not only wrong, it is a crime.

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Appendix L (Sam)
Plagiarism: Bad or Good

Plagiarism is a problem that has afflicted the halls of academia for decades. It is a
disjustice to the student when they plagiarize. In many cases the student uses quotes
or parts of another paper that they do not understand. Students should learn to write
papers without plagiarizing someone else’s work.

I find my self from time to time plagiarizing other people’s works. Plagiarism is
easy to do without even knowing that you did. In high school I wrote a report for
French class on Louis the XVII. During his time as king he razed the walls around
Paris. When my teacher asked me what “razing the walls” meant, I told him that it
meant he fixed them and built them up. In all reality it meant to tear down the walls.
This time plagiarism backfired on me. Plagiarizing someone else’s work when I did
not understand it made me look like a fool and dropped my grade on the paper.

Plagiarism is done mostly on research papers. Students will plagiarize when they
can not find a better way to explain their ideas. If teachers or professors would not
assign research papers then there would be less plagiarism. If a student must write
about their life, experiences in their lives, or make up stories then they would not be
able to plagiarize. Instead they must write using their own words to explain their
feelings about situations that they went through.

In recent year the Internet has made plagiarism easier and more accessible to
students, especially college students. All that a college student has to do to get a
paper written for him/her is get online, go to a paper writing web site, type in what

kind of paper they need and when they need it, pay with a credit card, and in a few

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days they receive a college quality paper in the mail to turn into their professors.
Cheating is as simple as point, type, and click. All from the comfort of their
apartment, house, or dorm room.

Institutions of higher learning should not tolerate plagiarism but they should also
be lenient on the students the first time that they plagiarize. The University should
dock the student a letter grade the first time, expel the student from the class the
second time and then expel them from the University the third time they are caught.
Most students who plagiarize don’t even know that they are doing it or they don’t
know how to correct it and hope it slides by without the professor noticing.
Universities and high schools need to teach students proper writing techniques and
tell them to the problems with plagiarism. Students will then understand how serious
of a problem plagiarism is and they will know how to correct it.

Plagiarism is a problem that will plague academic institutions for many years to
come. In my opinion, every student no matter how smart they are or how good their
grades are will plagiarize at one point in their academic careers. Most will never get

caught and yet, some will never even know that they are plagiarizing.

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Appendix M (Regina)
Is Plagiarism Overrated?

Internet cheating is obviously a growing problem in the United States of America.
I believe there are some children and young adults who cheat because the answers are
simply right in front of them. The Internet is a big factor that contributes to the high
numbers in statistics that are rising. According to the article “Internet Cheating: A
growing problem in Wichita schools,” there are over three hundred web sites that help
students cheat. Granted, I do believe that the Internet makes plagiarism easier. I am
betting that almost every household in the United States has a computer in their
household or one that is accessible to them. This computer probably obtains the
Internet, the dreadful source of everything possible to create a well written paper.

In addition to the Internet, I think there is also another reason that students would
want to cheat. Teachers put a lot more pressure on the students to get proficient
grades. Parents’ are additionally an ongoing obstacle in the child’s life. Some
parents reward their children with money or benefits that pushes them to get good
grades and keep their school work pertinent. School officials reward students for
being in the top ten percent of their class and making honor roll. There is so much
pressure on the student’s shoulders and obligating them to do more applicable than
their best is shameful. Every student has their own potential and working to that
potential is the best that one can be.

In the Wichita article, the teacher that failed a fifth of her students for obtaining
their semester projects off the Internet was legitimate. Everyone knows that cheating

is immoral and dishonest so if someone cheats then it’s their fault and they should

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have to deal with the consequences. From the article, “Lives on the Boundary,” I
think Marita from UCLA was not in the wrong. She obviously quoted and listed her
references well at the end of her paper. The university said that after reading the first
paragraph of her essay, that it was not her work. My question is logical; do they not
think that she is capable of quality work?

Punishment is always the question that everyone wants to undergo. Bill Mason, a
teacher at Southeast High School states, “I’ve given zeros before. I’ve had students
complete a different assignment for half credit, usually its something I try to work out
with the student.” I think this is a fair statement. Everyone in his or her life has
cheated in some form of a way whether it’s coping homework, cheating off
someone’s test or getting a paper off the Internet. The only think that is unfair is that,
some people get caught, and some do not. Academic dishonesty keeps growing and
growing as the schools get more and more competitive. Overall, I think the main
reason that people cheat is because of the pressure, obligation and responsibility put

on the students shoulder to do their best quality of work possible.

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Appendix N (Peter)
Plagiarism

The punishment for Plagiarism is wrong when it comes to colleges. The
institution is very hard core about the rules on plagiarism which is good but they are
to extreme about it. I thik if you do it twice you are kick out of school, but I could be
wrong. The reason I think that is because I do not think that a student should get
kicked out of school for it. What they should do is not get credit for they work or get
kicked out of the class. I think that is punishment enough. The reasons students
plagiarize is because the professor wants the students to get sources for there work
and get information about what they are writing about. The students might forget to
put quotes around the work or might not know how to write the bibliography at the
end.

I think plagiarism is wrong but it is really easy to forget that did later on. You
might forget to do the bibliography if you leave it to the end. I know that my parents
would be mad at me if I did plagiarize a paper and know that I was doing it. But, if I
was plagiarizing a paper and forgot to put the quotes around it and to do the
bibliography they would not be as upset with me. I know that anyone can say that
they forgot but it would be hard to tell, but if the student always put a bibliography on
they papers and forgot once then they really could have forgot, if the student never
does and always tends to forget then I would be a little questionable about it.

The intemet makes plagiarism any easier way to get papers already written. The
students can just look it up on the intemet. If the paper is already written for you then

the students might not put who wrote it and would hope that they would not get

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caught by the professor. If the student does that then they should be kick out of the
class and keeps on doing that then they should get kick out of the school. But if the
students just look up parts to add into the paper and does not put a bibliography on it,
they should not get kick out the school. I think plagiarism is not good, but like I said

you should not be kicked out of the school of it.

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Appendix 0 (Pam)
Plagiarism

Pressure, that is what a student feels when writing an essay or report. Each
student wants their work to stand out in the eyes of the reader or make the reader
think. The thing is that some people have the touch and others do not. I know that
through my experiences, writing is repetitive and I believe that people like me look
for excuses to make their writing more interesting. That is where plagiarism comes
into play. Is plagiarism wrong?

I definitely think the act of plagiarism is wrong, especially when it gets into great
detail. I don’t believe that it is something that should be taken lightly. In my eyes,
plagiarism is stealing and it should be stopped. The problem is that I don’t’ blame the
students for doing it. Opportunities of plagiarism are everywhere and the students are
taking advantage of them. Plagiarism is no different from alcohol or drugs, if it is
available then the students will use it. I know that the information just can’t be taken
away, but that is our problem. The main problem in these plagiarism cases is the
Internet.

Let’s face it, technology is taking over our schools and these days, students get all
of their information from the Internet. To tell the truth, I bet that the students even
know more about the Internet than the teachers. It has gotten to the point where
students are getting full papers from the Internet without even doing any work.
Without the Internet at least students had to look off of something and write it. So the

World Wide Web has definitely made plagiarism worse.

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Now let’s get to the punishment that should come from plagiarism. I believe that
if a teacher notice it then the student should get a zero for that paper. I believe that
this is the only way to get 3 students attention about plagiarism. Someone needs to
tell the student that it is just as bad as stealing. I believe that if a teacher obsesses
about how bad it really is than maybe students will think a little bit about the
situation. When I was a student none of my teachers told me how bad plagiarism was
and I got away with it at times. I never took full papers, but I know of people who
did and they got away with it also. So I believe that the only way to get through to
the students is to keep them informed and give them a strict policy.

When you get out of the classroom then it is a different story. I believe that if you
write something that isn’t your writing in a contest or to a company you should get in
trouble. I myself believe that cities should treat plagiarism as stealing and give the
person community service. Like I said before, I think that it is a crime and I will stick
by that.

Finally, I hope that you look into the world of plagiarism and really see why it is
such a big deal. I know that the way I go about it seems a little harsh, but if you look
into it then maybe you will feel the same. I’m not going to say that I am an expert,
but I believe in freedom of speech and someone can’t copy someone else. It is just
like copying an art piece or money and that is wrong. Why is writing so different?

Hopefully one of these days our society will find out.

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Appendix P (Neil)
Plagiarism

At one time or another we have all heard it. “Do your own work!” This is
something that might seem pretty obvious to most of us; but what is doing your own
work? Many times in anyone’s academic career they will be asked to do a research
paper, in which the student will go read several books by different authors and
regurgitate all the information they picked up onto their own paper. Yes, you are
supposed to cite all the sources that you used and give credit where credit is due.
Whatever way you look at it, you are taking information someone else wrote down
and recorded. A lot of people skip out on crediting all the authors they use any way
because it just takes to long to write down all those sources. So, is plagiarism really
an issue, does it really exist or are we just making rules to make rules.

First of all, there are obviously different levels to plagiarizing. If some one took a
book and wrote it down word-for-word and try to sell it as their own that should
obviously be an offense. Writing a research paper and not citing none of the authors
you used, I do not think that is such a serious offense. A lot of people would argue
that plagiarism does not or should not exist. Some people would argue that there are
no new ideas. Every thing comes from something else someone else did or wrote
down. This may not be the absolute truth but sometimes it is hard to write something
because another author has stated it as well as it can be stated. Should someone be
tagged as a plagiarist because they decided to use one sentence that another man used

before him. Who knows, maybe he should be, maybe there is just an over abundance

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of lazy people that can not come up with a few words of their own. Never the less, I
am not one to judge.

If you do think there is not excuse for plagiarism, then you might also be
wondering why society is making it easier to rip off other people’s work. The
Internet is the cheaters best friend. You can get on the web and print off a copy of
someone else’s paper in five minutes if you know where to look.

As far as punishment goes, I think that the punishment should fit the crime. If a
teacher knows that a student copied another persons paper almost word for word and
gave no credit I think that the punishment should be fairly severe. If a student used a
sentence or two from another author and forgot to cite it, I think the teacher or
professor should just pull the student aside to talk with them about the incident and if
the problem persists then take serious action.

Plagiarism is a touch issue with a lot of people so I think that the issue should be
looked at a little more seriously to decide what actions need to be taken and when to

take them.

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Appendix Q (Michelle)
Demanding Society

When writing assignments are given to students many of them look at the date
and realize the specific amount of time. This gives a student a very relaxed approach
on the assignment and they tell themselves they have plenty of time. All of a sudden
the date comes up on them because of their procrastination and due to the pressure
that society puts on getting good grades many students try to find the easy way out by
plagiarizing. The honest of the whole act is thrown out of many students’ minds
because all they can think about is getting that desired grade.

Society, teachers, and parents I feel are the main contribution for students taking
the route of plagiarism. Students feel tons of pressure to get good grades because
how much those three factors harp on them. All students hear throughout their lives is
that grades are all that matters and without good grades you will not last in the “Big
World.” With this pressure many students of different intellects have to find ways
around the system to try to obtain that much expected grade. So the easiest way to do
this is by plagiarizing someone else’s work because seeing how it is already
published this shows the students that the work is of high quality and if they just put a
little of their own thoughts they might get the grade expected by all.

I feel plagiarism is the immoral way to go obtain that needed grade but I feel
teachers are the biggest cause for making this process go on. Writing should be a
very expressive exercise and the limits, which teachers put on writing exercises, only
hold down the creative minds of individuals. So because the writing has become very

systematic or concrete in the way the teacher wants it, students lose their ability to be

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creative and find themselves copying work that they find is under the demanded
assignment. Teachers should also grade not just by every paper an individual writes
but also should have a grade for improvement of the course. With this the student
would know he must write his own because another grade is going to factored in their
final grade.

Plagiarism is in my book a crime and should not be taken lightly. The way
teachers assess this problem I feel is not the most effective way of achieving
anything. For most teachers a failing grade or zero is usually given to the student.
This causes the student to feel like a failure in this society that expects so much out of
them. There must be a reason why the student has chosen this route either the
assignment was not clear or maybe the students just is not a strong academic writer.
So for this reason I think teachers should be considerate and hear the students side
and aid them in the process so they do not consider themselves as a failure in this
demanding society.

The world continues to just speed up and get in a big hurry for this new
generation to take over losing the true purpose of the young individuals. We need to
step back a realize that we are expecting to much out of our students and we should
slow down and realize grades are not of so high importance. This problem or
plagiarism can only be solved if we slow down, show care, and strive to aid in

exciting every individual to learn.

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Appendix R (Iris)
Plagiarism

Plagiarism is everywhere. It is not a recent invention that came along with the
development of the Internet. However, the Internet does provide ways to make
cheating and plagiarism even easier. Teachers need to be aware of what the Internet
offers to students and ways to check if a suspected paper was plagiarized. The
policies on plagiarism in schools need to be stressed to students so they can be aware
of the punishments they will be facing. Parents and the community can also play a
part in cutting down plagiarism by supporting the schools policies toward plagiarism.

Today there is an obvious problem with academic dishonesty and it has gotten to
be more complex with the advancing technology. The Internet is a very useful tool
for students to use. As of now students are encouraged to use the Internet as a way to
research topics. So it’s no surprise to find students using the Internet to find shortcuts
on writing papers. Sites that offer plagiarized papers are not difficult to find. Some
will even show up when you are running a search on a topic. The intemet definitely
makes plagiarism easier, but it also makes it easier to detect.

Teachers can take some steps to stop their students from plagiarizing. A few
things they can do are, talk to their students about plagiarism. Teachers need to
explain to their students that plagiarism will not be tolerated in the least bit. Also to
let the students know the schools policies on academic dishonesty and the
consequences it has. By making the subject more recognized between student and
teacher students will be less likely to feel as though they will be able to get away with

cheating. Even though the policies might be clear to the students it doesn’t

162

completely erase a probability of having some plagiarism. Teachers can also use the
Internet to their advantage on recognizing plagiarism. Just as there are sites to find
papers to plagiarize there are also site available to recognize a plagiarize paper.
Teacher should be familiar with these sites and use them to aid in stopping
plagiarism.

The schools policies on plagiarism should be taken seriously. The punishment

should be harsh to help make plagiarism even less appealing to students.

163

Appendix S (Grant)
Plagiarism

Plagiarism has become well known and very popular these days. It is a lot easier
to do with all of the Internet choices we have now. It is very easy to search on the
Internet and find papers over any subject, some cost a lot of money and there are
some that are free. Teachers’ should respond to this by punishing the student, in my
opinion. Many teachers’ may handle this in a different manner, and I don’t think that
there should be a certain punishment for this, but the student needs to realize that
what he/she did was dishonest. I think that students plagiarize more now, because
they are too lazy or too busy and try to find the easy way out. With the computer
systems we have now, they make things a lot easier for everyone, and people are
starting to rely on them. I also think that today students are pushed even more to get
good grades and mat pressure makes students feel not as confident about their
writing, so they obtain papers from the Internet.

There was one plagiarism situation that I was aware of last semester. Our history
class had to write about a 7-page paper summary, on the book we had to read. There
were many of us that were stressed out about it, because it was 15 percent of our
. grade. There was one person that I know of that waited the night before and got on
the Internet and found a paper on that book for free, so she printed it out and turned it
in. When we got our papers back, she had received a high grade compared to the rest
of us. There were only a couple of us that knew about her paper, and it made us
furious, because we had worked very hard on our papers and all she did was get on

the Internet and print out someone else’s paper.

164

Plagiarism is something that affects a lot of people. If a student decides to cheat,
it affects their parent and their community in many ways. The parents of the student
may be ashamed or may punish them, and people in the community may look at them
differently. For example, if a student’s major is teacher and he/she cheats on a test or
a paper many people that find out are not going to want their children to be taught by
this person, because cheating is something that should not be taught. I know that I
would feel this way. Also younger children in that community may hear about that
student cheating and may think it is okay to do or that it is cool to do. I think to help
keep students away from plagiarism, teachers should have students bring in rough
drafts, write in class, and compare final draft with the rough drafts. Another thing
teachers can do is assign the students to unusual topics or personal experiences,

because then it is a lot harder for students to cheat.

165

Appendix T (Fiona)
Plagiarism

Plagiarism is becoming a growing problem whether its because the teachers are
giving out more difficult assignments or the students are becoming lazy its wrong
either way. From the teachers point of view they are trying to get the kids to explore
new ideas and think about topics and issues they have never imagined. The kids in
return are taking advantage of their resources by plagiarizing.

Cheating and plagiarism goes far beyond papers and tests. It is so easy for kids to
copy homework assignments from each other. Which usually happens about ten
minutes before class period. In my mind cheating on homework assignments is far
worse than a paper. If you think about it kids probably spend 60% of their time doing
homework, that is if they do it themselves. Doing homework is the real place where a
kid learns something and by learning the homework they can do well on the tests. If a
kid is just copying his or her homework down 10 minutes before class they don’t
have a chance to solve the problems and learn the material by giving it a chance to set
in their mind.

Like everyone tells kids, plagiarism is only hurting themselves, but in reality they
are looking at as completing the assignment so there for they benefit from it. Kids
have a lot of pressure on them to get good grades and do well in school but when
push comes to shove they like to take the easy way out. Another thing is kids don’t
really see any danger in plagiarizing. They don’t see any harm in taking a sentence

here and there, they think nobody will ever catch me and nothing will happen. Kids

166

will accept the fact of maybe rewriting a paper or two when they never get punished
for it.

People are asking themselves, “what can we do about this growing problem?”
The solution is simple give the kids topics they cannot plagiarize. For example, have
them write about a specific problem in their life, current events they have
experienced, or have them make up a fictional story. From these topics the teachers
can develop off of them and the kids will learn to take past events that have happened
in their life and apply them to current world events. Teachers and parents truly want
the kids to do well and explore new things but the ultimate thing is that plagiarism is

wrong and is harming the student.

167

Appendix U (Darla)
My view on plagiarism

Plagiarism has become a well-known word among most college universities.
Unfortunately, some college students like to take the easy way out of things; this is
when plagiarism comes into effect. I think plagiarism happens as often as it does
because people are lazy and love to procrastinate. I feel that procrastination leads to
plagiarism. Procrastination is something that all college students tend to do.
Sometimes students or other individuals wait to the last nrinute to everything. By
waiting to the last minute people are forcing themselves to brainstorm is a short
amount of time. Coming up with ideas is sometimes quit challenging, and people
lean towards the Internet for assistance. The Internet grasps the procrastinator’s
attention with arms wide open. The Internet feeds ideas into the procrastinator’s
brain, sometimes even pretty much handing someone else’s work to them, making it
hard to resist the thought of plagiarism. The procrastinator then remembers the
deadline they are on, and decides to use the information provided to them by the
Internet. The Internet is a nice resource, but I feel that some people take advantage of
it, and use it to steal other people’s ideas.

Another reason I think students plagiarize is because they are lazy. Lazy is
another thing that is all too common among college students. Some students just do
not like to take the effort to write a paper and turn to plagiarism instead. I have never
really seen a case in person where someone I know has plagiarized, but I see it on TV
episodes all time when people decide to plagiarize out of laziness. I think another

reason plagiarism is so common is because people are getting away with it and are

168

not being caught. Teachers should respond seriously to plagiarism! It is unfortunate
that students would take advantage of someone else’s writing, and take credit fo it.
Not only is it wrong, but it is against the law. A person could be fined or even thrown
in jail for plagiarism, so why would someone risk plagiarizing? Teachers should take
action, and go to who ever needed to make sure that justice is done.

How should parents react if their college student is caught plagiarizing? I feel
that once a student is in college they are pretty much on their own and are responsible
enough to make their own decisions. I feel that it is really out of the parent’s control.
The student will have to learn the consequences the hard way, and have to deal ith

what the university has in store for them.

169

Appendix V (Carl)
My Views on Plagiarism

Plagiarism is defined by dictionary.com as “a piece of writing that has been
copied from someone else and is presented as being your own work.” According to
this definition anyone whom was to find an article and then copy any part of this
article into their paper without citing the source would have plagiarized the article by
not giving credit to the original author. Here’s were two very different situations
come about dealing with plagiarism does the person who copies one sentence into
their 5 page essay deserve just as much punishment as a person who copies a whole
essay and claims it as their own.

Many assignments given students require for them to cite at a certain number of
sources in their paper. This requires the person to use outside sources beside
themselves to write their paper, which is necessary in writing a research paper. This
brings up some debt some believe that by writing a research paper it makes it easier
for the teacher to grade because it is obvious if something is plagiarized. Due to the
fact that if someone were to name off all the names of the players on a basketball
team along with their weight and height the person would not know these facts off
hand and would have to cite the source. Making plagiarism very easy to catch.

As for copying a whole essays this has become a very easy to do in today’s
society through the Internet people are able to look through the largest source of
information in the world and it is available in the comfort of your own home. Many
online site have made it possible for people to purchase an essay for price one of

these sites is duetomorrowcom the site offers a number of different prewritten essay

170

that you can purchase and down load and use as your own. Of course these methods
are plagiarism because these articles include many whole paragraphs that are copied
from real writings about the subject.

My view on plagiarism is sometimes the matter is taken way to seriously and is
acted like it is a criminal offensive. Students are not copy the items of people and
putting them in to articles in newspapers and magazine or books and then selling
them. They are handing them in to receive a grade and after that are usually never
seen again. I believe however when an author or a writer for a newspaper or
magazine plagiarize someone’s work this is time when things should be taken
seriously.

As far as punishment goes I don’t believe students should be kicked out of
University for minor plagiarism events a couple of sentence in an essay is completely
different then copy a whole paper. I believe if someone does something minor their
punishment should be a zero on the paper, for those who choose to copy whole
writings and put no effort into the work what so every should fail the class for the
term their in then have to repeat the course later.

I understand in the “real world” were items are sold for profit why plagiarism is
such a big concern. But at schools I think the teachers need to go more in depth on
how to cite source and how to properly form a bibliography page. Some students I
believe are scared and fear that no matter what they do they are going to end up
plagiarism the work their citing there sources from. Plagiarism is a gray area to many

people and needs to be explained more in detail before people can really understand

171

the significance of why plagiarism seems to be such a little thing that can do lots of

harm to you if you commit it.

172

Appendix W (Aaron)
Plagiarism

Plagiarism has become a big issue in the past years. You see a lot more of it
occurring now then ever before. I think it may be because our society has become
lazy. People don’t come up with their own ideas anymore. It is much easier to take
credit for someone else’s work. When you plagiarize you basically get to copy down
the ideas of others, there is no thinking involved.

Another reason why I think plagiarism has become such a problem is because
some people don’t have the education to know or understand how to cite their
sources. It sounds silly I know, but when I first came to school here, at Ball State, I
didn’t know how to cite my sources. It also could be that when in high school the
teachers didn’t put enough stress on citing sources. High school students don’t write
a lot of papers that use outside information, so their teachers never had to teach their
students about plagiarism and how to avoid it. I think that children should be taught
at a young age what plagiarism is exactly and how to avoid it. If we teach them at a
young age they have caught on to it by the time they get to high school.

The Internet is a very good source now days for mostly college students to get
information on topics they will be writing about in a paper. It is really easy to find
papers on the Internet that are already written and all you have to do is put your name
on it and print it out. To me, this is another form of plagiarism. I haven’t seen a lot
of action taken against changing it. How is anyone going to know if I turned in a
plagiarized paper or not. If I have my name on it, and it is an “1” paper, you can’t

really tell if I copied someone else’s work.

173

I have only heard of a handful of people who have gotten in trouble for plagiarism
and my dad was one of them. When he was in school here, he wrote a paper, but
forgot to give credit to one of the authors that he had be researching. Since he fogot
to do that he unintentionally committed plagiarism and almost got kicked out of
school. Lucky for him they understood and he had to re-write the paper, and use the
correct citations.

There are a lot of students out they’re who plagiarize everyday and nothing is
done to them. It reminds me a lot of the Internet sites where you can download songs
and movies without paying for them. The artists then get mad because of all the
money that they are losing but isn’t only against the law if you sell them for a profit?
I feel the same way about that as I do plagiarism, it’s wrong but you know people still
do it and they always will. There’s not a lot that can be to stop it. You just have to

stress how important it is that plagiarism not be done.

174

Appendix X (Annie)
Plagiarism

Have you ever waited to the last minute to write a paper? If you are a
procrastinating college student, I’m sure you have. Over the years, people have found
it easier to copy someone else’s work and use it for their own. However, society
doesn’t put up with plagiarism and is trying to put an end to it.

I personally don’t agree with plagiarism. I believe that college is a filtration
system, weeding out those who don’t want to give that extra effort. If students are
constantly cheating, how could you tell who is dong all the real work. I can
remember Junior High School when I worked on a paper for a long time. Lots of
hard work paid off and I deserved the good grade I received. At the time, I was
friends with another classmate who didn’t work on the paper until the night before it
was due. He later told me that he copied it out of a book, and that he ended up with
an “A.” I was infuriated that I had given an extra effort and he just blew it off,
getting a better grade than I did.

Unfortunately, plagiarism has gotten to be very easy, or not? If you want an
entire researched paper on why bears hibernate, get out your credit card and go
online. In about five minutes you will have been able to find a complete paper with 3
works cited, ready to be turned in. In fact, I could probably find a paper written about
plagiarism. The point is that it has gotten out of hand. The Internet should not be
used for cheating and fraud. However, many professors assign certain topics in

which they know the written material on the Internet, in order to catch the plagiarists.

175

I believe this should be done more often and that all teachers should look out for
cheating and a regular, day-to-day basis.

As I said before, society does not put up with plagiarism. I believe that the rules
enforced at most colleges are efficient. However, I don’t think that grade school
teachers enforce the rules to the full extent. Even thought they are kids, they should
not be taught that it is easier to just copy someone else’s work and use it for their
own. I do believe that plagiarism is the same thing as cheating. If cheating can get
you kicked out of a class, so should plagiarism. I think that the punishment should be
up to the teacher, as long as punishment is carried out. In many circumstances,
younger students tend to cheat more often than older students. If the teacher wants to
give the student a second chance, at least tell the student’s parents. Man kids would
rather be yelled at by their teacher, than by their parents.

Plagiarism is not necessary in today’s life. Our society is based upon coming up
with our own ideas and our own opinions. If someone has stated something that you
want to use in your paper, cite the author since he/she is the one who deserves the

credit.

176

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