Kathy forwarded me a message from one of her fellow librarians on the Kentucky Library Media Specialists Listserve:

I am completely appalled at what just happened to me! A first year teacher was being observed by a college professor and he heard me announce to a class of students in a health class that as we research we do not cut and paste information onto Word documents to use as presentation material, but that we take notes from what we read on the web. This professor turns to me and asks me why they can’t do that? I told him that breaks copyright laws and he says, “How would the person who wrote the information on the web know the student used their work?” How about that?

This, of course, is the ethic of "it's legal as long as I don't get caught." Plagiarism is a huge problem on college campuses these days (and even seminaries--I'm a grader at SBTS and know full well), and it makes one wonder what this particular professor would accept in his own classes.

I went through a period teaching my classes at IWU in which I had about three blatant plagiarism issues one right after another. I've since found that if I address the issue up front on the first day of class, both in discussion and in the syllabus that there's less likelihood of a student trying to steal work from an outside source. I explain to my students (without revealing my secrets) that I'm very good at spotting it, and by the time I speak to them about any incident, I will have already confirmed that it is indeed plagiarism with the dean and it will already be on their records. As I said, I don't have instances of plagiarism nearly as often now that I've taken a proactive approach. But with teachers like the one described in the quote above, encouraging the theft of others' work, it continues to be an uphill battle.

Tags: plagiarism