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Plagiarism draws varying penalties

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Also by Sundeep Malladi:

In-Depth: What's affected by budget cuts? (September 1, 2005)
In-Depth: Letter and the law (October 13, 2005)

by Sundeep Malladi

Monday, December 6, 2004

While the advent of the information age and the Internet has given people greater access to information, it has not helped in deterring plagiarism.

According to Daniel Knauss, a professor at Marquette University and an expert on plagiarism, “[Students] learned to do research papers all on computers and they’ll cut and paste stuff. They know better, but they’ll rip stuff off really easily.”

The presence of plagiarism within classrooms remains very prevalent, according to Knauss.

“It’s extremely, extremely common,” Knauss said. “Not a class would go by without having one or two cases a semester and those are just really obvious ones. There are probably others that we miss.”

While cases of students who have plagiarized are fairly common, a recent New York Times article reported plagiarism occurs even among faculty and researchers at universities, including a specific case at Harvard, and policies concerning plagiarism varied between students and faculty.

However, Knauss disagreed with the idea that professors are treated differently than students when it comes to plagiarism.

“[At] most schools I’ve been at, the faculty are under greater strictures than students,” Knauss said. “Faculty face much worse penalties and are far more likely to be disciplined at a much greater extent.”

Others found there is good reason for why students and faculty may not fall into the same code of ethics.

“I guess that seems reasonable insofar as there are different issues at stake,” Mary Wang, a faculty assistant at the University of Wisconsin, said. Wang has taught for 25 years and said she has experience in giving talks concerning plagiarism.

“I guess I would expect the rules to be different, but I would expect professors to be held up to higher standards than students,” she added.

Wang suggested in many instances, students do not realize what plagiarism really is. However, Wang said she found faculty often has a similar distress when understanding plagiarism.

“You don’t have to cite as carefully because there are certain things that become common knowledge in the field,” Wang said. “When you have shared knowledge, you’re less careful about citing it, just like nobody cites ‘the sun rises in the East’ because I think everybody knows that.”

According to the New York Times, certain scholars believe the increasing reliance of scholars upon research assistants in an effort to publish work has increased the risk of plagiarism. However, Knauss said this probably does not occur often.

“Graduate students and sometimes undergraduates are getting publication credits along with the senior researcher they work with,” Knauss said. “Everyone is all together; they work very closely, and there is a lot of government and outside money that comes in — so there’s a much higher ethical standard in concern and disciplinary system in place.” According to Wang, however, there is a darker issue when faculty or researchers commit to the act of plagiarism.

“So much of their service to society is in the form of setting an example to students,” Wang said.

Because plagiarism is a form of cheating, it can be filed as academic misconduct here at UW.

According to Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC), the consequences of plagiarism include an immediate failing grade in the class as well as being reported to the Director of Composition.

“That’s something that is a problem for young undergrads, and universities have been for a number years been trying to hit that early,” Knauss said.

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Anonymous (December 6, 2004 @ 11:02am):

I am not a professor at Marquette University and did not identify myself as such to the reporter. I am ABD in Marquette's English PhD program, where I have taught Freshman English for a few years but am no longer doing so. Prior to that I was an adjuct at UW Madison and (earlier) at Campbell University in North Carolina. I was also an English writing instructor at NC State for a number of years. In each institution I had at least 1, sometimes 2, cases of out-and-out plagiarism per course.

My comment on students working with faculty researchers were given in the context of writing and research outside the humanities where that kind of work is common. I worked as a secretary in NC State's Chemistry department for a few years and referred to that experience when I spoke with the reporter. The context for plagiarism is totally different in the sciences. There are fewer incentives for it, greater penalties, and more controls against it, so it's far less likely to happen compared to the average undergrad humanities course where you have individual students who are not seeking careers in English or History turning in papers for first and second-year courses in those fields. That was the context for my other comments.