A few words on avoiding plagiarism

The saddest day of my professional life was the day, a few years ago, when I caught three seniors in a small American Literature class plagiarizing on their papers, and had to initiate academic integrity investigations against them. (Interestingly enough, two of the papers were on Poe. But they all did graduate.) Since then, I have done a lot of soul-searching about my own responsibility in this, for plagiarism to me signals a breakdown of the student’s trust that the professor is asking her or him for something worthwhile and meaningful. (It signals other things as well about an individual's ability to respond to performance stress, but I want to focus on those things over which I have some control.)

This contributor to a forum on topics in education best summarizes my feelings about cheating:

It has long been academe’s dirty little secret that bad instructors and bad assignments create cheating. If knowledge of a meaningless list of facts is being assessed, if spelling is being measured, if memorization of equations is the goal of a course, students can and will cheat. Perhaps they should cheat. As a John Jay College instructor, Daniel Newsome, said in a letter about the Times article, “In the real world, we use cheat sheets all the time. Why not in school? Life is too short to fight against the real world and constantly be disappointed with the outcome. Embrace cheating ... but perhaps give it a new name.” If, however, processing information is the issue, if creative solutions are being sought, if students are being asked to develop new syntheses, then cheating will be much rarer, and much more difficult, technology use will become essential, and learning will be far more relevant.

Proper acknowledgment of sources you consult is an essential skill in school and in life. If you are at all unsure about what to document (as opposed to how to document it in MLA format), consult one of these resources:

• UCSC Net Trail, a self-guided "tour" of proper citation practices;
• I also like the page titled "Is It Plagiarism Yet?" at the Online Writing Lab at Purdue University.

For a reminder of the seriousness with which academic integrity violations are taken at UCSC, see the relevant website.