Post-secondary students starting classes this month will undoubtedly be greeted with the customary academic misconduct talk. There is fear that online access to vast collections of professional essays makes it easier to dupe professors by submitting someone else’s work but professors say they know all the tricks.
“I think what [students] underestimate is the ability to look at something and intuit the level that a person is at…. In one part of the test this is your grammar this is your thinking. And here what’s happened? You’ve become another person. That jumps out at someone who’s marking the test” says University of Calgary drama professor Clem Martini.
Post-secondary institutions typically have strict policies concerning academic misconduct. The U of C says presenting any amount of someone else’s work as one’s own or without proper attribution to the author could earn you a failing grade in the course academic suspension probation or even expulsion.
Professors are required to report cases of plagiarism to their faculty head and say those consequences are applied.
“According to the most recent statistics available there were 148 cases of proven plagiarism from July 2012 through June 2013 at the University of Calgary. During this period the University of Calgary had approximately… 39800 students” a university media spokesperson says.
Only 148 cases out of numerous tests and assignments submitted by nearly 40000 students seems small but a professor in the U of C’s English department who asked not to be identified says many examples of plagiarism or at least playing fast and loose with sources are dealt with directly by the instructors instead of the dean. Instructors hope confronting a student with a zero grade early in their academic career will scare them straight. He also says that if the Internet makes plagiarism harder to detect the university may be more willing to “make an example” of students who are found out.
Instructors say downright cheating such as sharing answers during a test writing them on one’s arm or even using a cellphone to take pictures of other student’s test papers is mainly a concern in very large classes and in the sciences where answers are definite. Plagiarism is a bigger problem in the humanities where students are forced to give their unique interpretations of the course material. The temptation for a student to submit someone else’s work is greater here and professors say they’re aware of all the ways students try to con their way through a tough assignment.
“The students you have to watch more closely are the first-year students because… it’s kind of like our last chance to catch them before they go any further. But I think once the students get a little bit more advanced especially when they’re in their own discipline it’s just easier to write your own essay than it is to plagiarize” says the English instructor.
High school teacher Kelsey Wilson says students can’t say they don’t know what plagiarism is by the time they enter advanced education because senior high school teachers drive the point home before they graduate.
“We go over plagiarism every year with them but I’ve known students — and it’s funny because it’s usually the strong students — who have lifted whole sections of Wikipedia or other sites because they have too much going on or because they desperately want that good mark. I think they sometimes don’t have the tools to quote properly or to paraphrase so some of them are inadvertently stealing ideas. They often ask ‘is this different enough?’ But I don’t feel that they are quite getting the point” she says.
The U of C does not use plagiarism detecting software like the Turn It In program but humanities professors say they hardly need it to spot a problem. It’s important to universities says the English instructor because first-year mistakes can affect a student’s career and their ability to meet challenges in the future.
“We like to think that the people that are cheating are not going to get into positions of responsibility or authority or end up in an operating room or defending someone in court or designing a bridge” he says.
“It’s unlikely an employer’s going to ask you to write a four-page paper on this poem by Shakespeare but they may ask you to do something else that you’re going to have to figure out how to do and not Google how to do this.”
Martini agrees. “The reason that you’re here is to discover things and develop skills. If you cannot answer the questions then you have not yet developed those skills. It doesn’t help you if you have faked your way through” he says.
The U of C is currently revising its misconduct regulations and expects to make an announcement on changes in the near future.
