Combating Intellectual Theft

By Cindy Reitzi

Teaching high school English can be a weighty business. Physically and mentally. This year is the first time I’ve ever ripped a strap on any heavy-duty, carryall bag I’ve owned. From the weight. This year I always have two bags: one for papers and one for the rest of my stuff. And I’m only “part time.” Most full-time English teachers have approximately 130 students, most of whom write and turn in papers. They probably carry three bags. Veteran English teachers develop various paper poundage byproducts like back, neck, and shoulder strain or tendonitis from all the hunching over and lugging. Still, they’ve devised various ingenious solutions to cope: desk podiums for grading and wheeled luggage carts for lugging.

Along with the physical comes the mental weight: pounds and pounds of papers to grade. You grade one batch, and another pile springs up to take its place. It’s like a mental image of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice segment of Fantasia: brooms toting and pouring endless, overflowing buckets of water ... just as English teachers must have the occasional teacher nightmare of drowning in a sea of papers. There is never an empty bag.

While grading is one kind of mental work, more and more, we are dealing with another. Increasingly, the mental strain of English (and other) teachers includes determining whether the name on the paper is really the author of the paper.

I was grading a mound of essays at my favorite bookstore. When I was done with one haystack, I picked an essay off the top of a second pile and read it. Initially, it sounded good. In fact, it sounded much better than the last essay the student wrote. Then, it sounded familiar. A feeling in the pit of my stomach grew to a sinking déjà vu. I dug through the other pile and located its twin, flipped the pages, and compared the two essays, finding an almost exact match. In the same class. Cheating.

At first, I was seething. I thought the two students had lifted the same essay off the Internet. In hindsight, it was such a botched job of copying that it was laughable. To make it a learning experience, I gave all of my students a stern lecture on the serious nature of plagiarism, and the librarian visited to define and discuss plagiarism as well. I gave my “doppelpaper” twins zeroes, and left it at that.

While mine was an old-fashioned case of “borrowing” too extensively between two students, four other teachers in the English department caught more sophisticated operatives who employed cut-and-paste plagiarism off the Internet. In addition, one social studies teacher discovered nine plagiarists in her classes alone. (She gave them all zeroes and put letters in their permanent files).

The situation got so bad that one of our teachers quipped that we should sponsor Plagiarist of the Week alongside Writer of the Week. As we commiserated, we found that no situation is without humor. One teacher mentioned two of his plagiarists got their essays off the “GradeSavers” Web site and ended up with zeroes.

Since we were starting to feel like bloodhounds flushing plagiarists from the brush, English teachers gathered their lathered horses at a department meeting. Our chairperson said we needed a policy on plagiarism and wrote one up. We heartily agreed on the following:
As the Internet becomes more accessible and sophisticated, the incidents of plagiarism in submitted English papers and projects have increased. Most institutions of higher education penalize plagiarism with expulsion. Therefore, in the interest of our students’ future education as well as their personal development, the English department has agreed upon the following policy:

Plagiarism will result in a zero on the assigned paper or project. Teachers will provide written documentation of the plagiarism and will follow this procedure:

• Discussion with the student.
  
• Referral to the grade level principal.
  
• Call to parents by the principal and/or teacher.
  
• Principal’s referral to sports coaches and National Honor Society as applicable.
  

We leafleted our students with the policy and sent it home to be signed by parents. Setting standards is one way to combat cheating. But electronic wizardry is even better. As our society becomes more technologically advanced, high school students have also learned more technically sophisticated ways to cheat.

But just as it’s become easier to plagiarize, it’s become easier to catch plagiarists. Our librarians have been successful nabbing cheaters by using a few key words from a suspect essay to search for the whole essay. Schools can also purchase programs (such as “Turn It In”) to electronically scan documents for plagiaristic possibilities.

Plagiarism is the type of issue that can make teachers feel betrayed. It is a breach of trust, and it is intellectual theft. While acknowledging these realities, we need to keep them in perspective, too. There are some things that remain constant from the time of one-room schoolhouses to today’s megaplex high schools. There will always be students who try to cheat. There will always be students who are focused just on grades. But there will always be some hard-working students who take pride in their own work and genuinely want to learn. Honest.

Posted April 11, 2002