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Wednesday, Apr 27, 2005

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Opinion - News Analysis

Ethics and plagiarism

John Crace

Jude Carroll, leading authority on plagiarism, speaks on ethics and the Google generation.

AS AN American who has lived in England for the best part of 30 years, Jude Carroll is used to being an outsider. "Africans say that no matter how long a log remains in the river, it never becomes a crocodile," she says. "From time to time I make the mistake of imagining I've become a crocodile. But it's just not true. I'll always be a log."

This feel for difference has served her well professionally, first as an anthropologist and more recently as one of the U.K.'s leading authorities on plagiarism. Her expertise in this field was unplanned. "About five years ago, someone at Oxford Brookes University (England) asked me to give a lecture on plagiarism," she explains, `and I just said yes, because that's my default position for most things — I say yes and then wonder how the hell I'm going to do it."

Up to this point, Ms. Carroll had been a productive, if rather anonymous, teaching fellow at the Oxford Brookes centre for learning and staff development, where she spent much of her time observing colleagues' teaching and communication techniques. She still keeps her hand in, observing about 100 lectures each year, and her office is still curiously sited at the far end of the human resources department, but thanks to plagiarism her reach now extends far beyond the university campus.

"The first thing I did was to check out the available research," she says. "I was amazed to find out there was almost nothing. I knew then that this was a neglected area of study in which I could make a difference."

All Ms. Carroll could find was some 1995 research into student attitudes to cheating. "It made fascinating reading," she says. "It showed that students and academics have remarkably different moral codes: students may have a problem with cheating in exams but they don't see anything wrong with cheating in coursework. For them it's a victimless crime. As interesting, they don't see coursework as part of their learning: rather it's `stuff' to pass on to academics who need to be fed."

Old phenomenon

In this study, plagiarism made only a guest appearance. Ten years on, it dominates the agenda, with many academics estimating that 10 per cent of student essays are so plagiarised they require more action than mere marking down. Even so, Ms. Carroll insists plagiarism is not a new phenomenon.

"Most of the U.S. fraternity houses had essay banks," she argues, "and a great deal of copying went on. But it became a real live issue when the major search engines went live in 1998 and students were able to cut and paste at will."

Ms. Carroll does not shirk the moral issues, but reckons plagiarism is a far more complex problem than a matter of mere right and wrong.

"Academics often don't make it clear what standards they expect in terms of attribution and transformation, and many students have no idea that cutting and pasting amounts to passing someone else's work off as your own," she says.

"I don't want to blame secondary school teachers — most of them are doing the best they can under very difficult circumstances — but many do have a restricted view of learning, a view, incidentally, that is reinforced by the demands of the curriculum. They don't realise that for most students the finding of information is no longer an interesting task: a Google search can turn up answers in a matter of seconds.

"Rather than invite students to recycle all they know about the United Nations, they should ask them to compare how the U.N. dealt with three emergencies in the past six months and say which was the most effective. That way, they virtually rule out the possibility of plagiarism by forcing students to think for themselves."

Prevention the key

Prevention is at the heart of Ms. Carroll's message.

"Current detection schemes tend to be inherently biased against the poor, the not very bright and the overseas students," she says. "Most academics initially rely on gut feeling. If an essay reads unevenly, then it's probably been clunkily cut and pasted. But a well-crafted essay that has had the rough edges smoothed out could just as easily have been copied — it's just that some students are more skilful at concealing the joins.

"What we need is a system where the rules are clearly understood by everyone from the off and where there is some form of consistency in the way cases of plagiarism are dealt with. At present, some academics are reluctant to report their suspicions — not because they are concerned about the university's image if they fail students, but because of the length of time involved. Each case can take several days to resolve. Multiply this by a factor of 10 or 20 and you can see why some academics choose to remain silent. The trouble is that silence implicitly endorses the legality of plagiarism."

- Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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