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May 23, 2005
The economics of prosecuting plagiarism
This just in from the Sydney Morning Herald: Teachers can lose their jobs or paychecks for charging students with plagiarism, and institutions can lose the income from student tuition if those students are failed or dismissed. The issues are very real for institutions and for teachers, and they aren't limited to life Down Under. Hmm, let's see: ethics versus economics. Which d'you spose might win? And what might we expect in increasingly corporatized universities?
And those economic issues come into play even when the ethical choice is apparently being made. I'm speaking, of course, of Turnitin.com and other plagiarism-checking programs. These services are incredibly expensive, but not nearly as much as would be the faculty development bucks needed to commit to authentic pedagogy in which students would learn the desired textual practices and would find the educational experience so meaningful that they would want to do their own work. If I sound discouraged, it's because I am—at least sometimes. But I keep jabbering, in SU committee meetings, in my scholarship, in faculty workshops, and on this blog. What I try to do is aid and abet people who are interested in educating, who aren't interested in simplistic property-based representations of textuality, and who aren't willing to stick their heads in the sand and ignore the fact that our ideals of academic integrity are insupportable when it comes to our oh-so-clean definitions of plagiarism.
Posted by senioritis at May 23, 2005 04:53 AM