Table of the Elements

There’s always plagiarism in my courses, usually from people who are running out of time, or who anticipate gaps in their knowledge of what they want to cover with their writing, or who don’t believe in their ability to turn a phrase of their own on the topic at hand. I’m more-or-less confident, these days, that I always catch it. Many students expect to get caught, but feel it’s the only chance they’ve got at creating something that might pass.

All but one or two cases I’ve come across have been straightforward cutting and pasting from the internet (the most recent including material from the infuriatingly-named cheathouse dot com). These stand out immediately: the unexplained switch in terminology, or a shift to examples only adjunctly connected to the topic, or the strange hubristic tone with which so many of the copied papers seem to be written, quite against the grain of what I teach about academic style. It strikes me that there’s at least a correlation between the decision to copy and a lack of awareness about the distinctive tone of different writers’ prose, even in essays written for a preparatory course such as mine. Copying and pasting appears to assume that all writing is interchangeable. There’s a certain irony then, that it’s the perceptible jumps and breaks in style by which I identify, easily, plagiarised work.

The individualism (how dare you do this to me!) inherent in the thinking out of which the idea of plagiarism arises means it’s easy–maybe too easy–for markers to take it personally, to see it as an affront, as disrespect, but it’s almost never, in my experience, intended in this fashion. When caught, the student is often mortified by the idea that they’ve shown disrespect, often to a marker whom they wanted to please in the first place, or, less personally, whose expectations they wanted to meet one way or another. I still get mad when it happens, but I don’t put that back on to the student any further than to set the wheels of the system in train, as I am required to do. There’s no pleasure in receiving student apologies, if they come, just the wish that they might have made different decisions well before the perceived need to plagiarise occurred. Usually the causes are as simple as missing a chain of classes, or feeling they don’t understand the material well enough to meet the requirements of the assignment, feeling unable or unwilling to ask for assistance. All these things exist as something like shadow elements, the upside-down mirror of what I mean when I talk about style.

Tagged as: marking, plagiarism, teaching