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October 14, 2005
Bringing plagiarism home—step 1
Last year our vice chancellor appointed a committee to review issues of academic integrity at SU and make recommendations. Since each college and school in the university has its own policy and procedures (or in some cases, an absence thereof) regarding cheating, one question for the committee has been whether the whole university should have a single policy and/or a single procedure. And of course one part of the committee's work—a part that consumed a considerable portion of the first year's work—was to bring in Don McCabe and his survey of students and faculty. (SU folks can fire up their Explorer browser and go here to read the report.)
The VPCAI, now in its second year of work, is comprised of over a dozen students, faculty, and administrators from across the university. The committee meets weekly. For two and three-quarters hours. On Friday mornings. Beginning at 8:15 a.m.
Now, I'm not much when it comes to committees. I get impatient, frustrated, confused, bored. And because I have an hour's commute to my workplace, I'm not keen on getting up before six a.m. and schlepping in for a frickin committee meeting. And because I'm a thoroughly socialized SU faculty member, I am most definitely not a fan of Friday meetings.
Yet I am a fan of good plagiarism policy. So I have hung in there, Fridays at 8 unholy 15 a.m. And today I got my reward: we reached the place where we were ready to discuss how plagiarism should be defined in SU policy. There were two features of the WPA statement that I really hoped to see in the SU policy: the specification that intent to deceive is a necessary condition for plagiarism; and the exclusion of misuse of sources from the realm of plagiarism.
In its initial deliberations today, the committee leaned toward the exclusion of misuse of sources from the realm of plagiarism. Now, the committee has not yet drawn up its recommendations, and those recommendations have not yet gone through the vetting process that will precede any institutional instantiation. But it's a so-far-so-good scenario on the exclusion of misuse of sources. The inclusion of intent is a harder task, and one that I'm not sure can be carried off.
In the weeks and months to come, I'll blog about this process to the extent that I can without violating confidentiality. It's an important process, I think: all the good pedagogy in the world doesn't amount to much if you have a repressive institutional policy that criminalizes bad writing (such as patchwriting and insufficient citation), lumping it together with text messaging during a test, or with downloading a term paper. So I'm thrilled to be part of the institutional deliberations on policy; chances like this don't come along very often. And I'm discovering that I'm not only advancing my own convictions about authorship, but I'm having to listen to and compromise with other, competing ideas. That's why I was at the dread Turnitin workshop yesterday (where I submitted a paper I'd given that was an extension of one that I'd already posted on the web, and sure enough, Turnitin flagged all the block quotations). And I'm compelled to listen with an open mind as people argue for the value of Turnitin or alternative plagiarism-checking programs. Will I be convinced by the arguments? Stay tuned for the next thrilling installment.
Posted by senioritis at October 14, 2005 06:06 PM
Comments
I'm trying to be open-minded about Turn-it in, too, but I feel that it reduces writing to a game of "Gotcha!" Friends who teach Distance Learning courses tell me that it's helpful for them since they don't have the students face-to-face.
Posted by: joanna at October 19, 2005 06:25 PM