Cynthia Prescott, Department of History, University of North Dakota
I’m sure that some percentage of students have always cheated. And no doubt some have always attended universities as a stepping stone to other life goals that had little to do with a passion for learning. (As an American gender historian, the 1950s-early 1960s model of young middle-class women attending college to earn their “MRS” degree comes immediately to mind.) However, like Evan Nelson’s comment on Bill’s original “cheating” post, I do get the impression that a growing percentage of college students today view higher education as more of a transaction in which completing a certain quantity of work should get them a certain grade. They believe that those grades will, in turn, get them a diploma, which will aid them in their ultimate goal of a more desirable or better-paying job. As a bachelor’s degree becomes increasingly necessary for many entry-level positions, and as growing numbers of college students find it necessary to work long hours to pay their tuition bills (or to afford the ever-rising standard of “necessary” electronic gadgets), and as our society increasingly seems to value multitasking and sound bytes over deep thought and analysis, it’s hardly surprising that today’s late adolescents would be even more likely than those of previous generations to look for the easiest way out on school assignments.
Besides these cultural shifts, it seems to me that the advent of the internet – and particularly Google – have changed the face of plagiarism. The internet has made it easier for students to plagiarize, and perhaps also made it easier for them to justify doing so. Even 15 years ago, the average college student cheating on a history research paper would have had to (a) retype content from a print source, or (b) found someone to write the paper for them. Today, they can do either or both from the comfort of their dorm room (or while pretending to take notes in another class). I presume that more students of any generation would be more likely to quote without attribution than would actually submit another person’s completed paper as their own. But if today’s students were interested in doing so, it’s a lot easier to download a paper from an online service than it would have been to find someone to create a new paper or pull one out of archived files in pre-internet days. Since I think that borrowing pieces of others’ work without attribution is a much more widespread problem today, though, I’d like to focus on the impact of internet access on this practice.
My impression is that many of our students don’t see a problem with copying and pasting content from websites. Perhaps a comparable percentage of students in previous generations would have lifted complete sentences or ideas from other published sources without proper attribution, but they generally would have had to work harder to locate and reproduce those sources, and the very physical act of re-typing or re-writing the material might cue them to the fact that they were, in fact, plagiarizing. Furthermore, previous generations of students would have relied on print materials from their university library’s reference section, which would have required more effort and likely led them to access higher-quality content than today’s students quickly copy from Wikipedia and Ask.com. Because it doesn’t require them to actually re-type the material, I suspect that ease of copying and pasting material makes it easier for some students to justify inserting another’s words into their papers without proper attribution.
In fact, I would argue that the ease of publishing and reproducing material online has encouraged a culture that encourages the use of sound bytes and borrowing content from others. Many of today’s most popular news web sites (Google News, The Huffington Post, Drudge Report, etc.) are aggregators rather than creators of news content. Meanwhile, network news shows increasingly favor “man on the street” interviews over expert content and analysis. CNN increasingly relies on “I-Reporters” and bloggers who presumably have first-hand knowledge of the topics on which they post, but who often lack not only formal journalistic training, but also appropriate perspective on those topics. If our culture no longer values independent research, verifiable evidence, and thoughtful analysis in news reporting, it’s not surprising that our students fail to value those practices in their class assignments.
Google and anti-cheating services like Turnitin have made it easier for faculty to catch the most blatant offenders. However, I suspect that (not unlike the Transportation Security Administration), faculty intent on catching cheaters will always be a step or two behind the most motivated cheaters. We can institute a variety of safeguards, including closely policing exams and inventing original writing assignments. But I believe the best way to address the problem of cheating is by setting clear ethical standards for our students. Explaining how completing a college research paper is different from compiling a Google News page, and teaching our students that borrowing someone else’s words or ideas is morally equivalent to cheating on a test or shoplifting, could go a long way toward discouraging cheating and motivating our students to be more thoughtful, ethical human beings.
