Plagiaristic Tendencies
One of the things I do in addition to raising twins and helping teachers is online writing tutoring for Smarthinking.com. This company provides a service in which college and high school students can submit papers and request help to improve their writing. It’s not a proofreading service, but prides itself on helping students become better writers by addressing errors in writing and concentrating on techniques that will help those students become better writers, not just pass that paper. Because of the nature of the company and the fact that most of the virtual tutors are educators, plagiarism is a big concern for us.
Although I’m not in the classroom anymore, I still think like an English teacher and through my role in Smarthinking, I still spend time each week thinking about and critiquing writing. This morning I finally picked up an article that I have been meaning to read for about three weeks. The article is entitled “My Year as a High School Student” by Deborah Waldron and was published in Educational Leadership in March 2006. In this article, she outlines a few observations that she had in the year that she reentered the classroom as a student. The one that I found most interesting, and the one that I tried really hard to address in my classroom was “Reinforce ethics and clarify plagiarism.”
We, as educators, expect students to already know what plagiarism is and how to avoid it. In my initial years teaching, I assumed that my students knew that taking someone else’s work was wrong. I don’t know why I thought they knew this, but I was sure that their previous English teachers had been through this and that they just knew it. I think this is especially true of teachers in other subjects. We as English teachers are expected to go over this, but I as she mentioned in the article, she was in a science class and the class didn’t go over it, they were expected to know it. “Use APA style, and cite your sources. If you plagiarize, you will be given a zero.” are words that so many teachers have uttered, but did they explain what, why and how? Maybe, maybe not.
Regardless, in the age of the Internet and digital information, plagiarism has become significantly easier. How do we help students become responsible digital citizens? One of the places it starts is in our classrooms. Making the assumption that students already know about citing sources, even at the college level, is a myth. At Smarthinking and in the classroom we deal with this regularly, let’s stop making assumptions.
