The assumption, supported by a lot of anecdotal evidence, seems to be that the explosion of the Internet over the last 15–20 years has caused a massive increase in plagiarism. The argument is that it’s now easier to cheat—to cut and paste material from a website, or to download a paper from an online paper mill—and so students are doing it more than they ever have. Resisting this claim, Donald L. McCabe and Jason M. Stephens make an argument that the Internet is not the cause of increases in plagiarism but is rather “just a conduit, offering a more expedient means of engaging in a behavior that one is already doing.” In other words, the cheaters were going to cheat anyway, and now they have the convenience of technology and the Internet to help them. A second technological consideration is the rise of plagiarism detection services (PDSs) such as Turnitin. Services like Turnitin require a subscription fee, and universities invest in subscriptions and then urge, if not require, students and faculty to use the services. PDS software’s emergence and popularity on college campuses has a significant impact on composition studies, in scholarly conversations, in teachers’ practice, and in students’ perceptions about writing (see Donnelly, et. al.).
These technological facets of the plagiarism issue bear heavily on scholarly discourse in the field of composition studies. As with many issues relating to writing pedagogy, there is much debate; in the case of plagiarism, however, ethics in teaching are often called into question, which is serious business in composition and rhetoric. PDSs take on a celebration and criticism of their own, and they become the springboard for passionate discussions about best practices in teaching. In his attempts to carefully analyze Turnitin, Bill Marsh points out
that while recoding plagiarism detection as pre-emptive education, Turnitin.com still makes its money by pulling unoriginal work out of a sea of so-called originals. In short, Turnitin.com profits by battling those instances where learning goes wrong but nonetheless must dress its combative strategy in the uniform of pre-emptive educational reform. (“Turnitin.com” 435)
While his words don’t overtly criticize the instructors who use Turnitin’s services, the embedded message in his analysis is that those educators who use it as an anti-plagiarism tool may be contributing to Turnitin’s duplicity, which indirectly challenges their ethics as teachers. On the high school English front, however, Thomas Atkins and Gene Nelson turn to Turnitin as a source of ethics enculturation:
If students are allowed to use others’ words and ideas as their own, they deny themselves the opportunity to develop writing fluency and critical thinking skills. This service is not designed to be punitive; it is meant to be preventive. The main goal of TurnItIn.com is to help students maintain their ethics and academic integrity, while learning the skills that will help them communicate effectively. (101)
With so many scholars in composition studies trying to investigate the values and writing relationships that students bring with them to postsecondary education, the words of Atkins and Nelson become critical to the conversation on plagiarism in college composition. Yet the conversation becomes even more complicated by the pointed criticism of Rebecca Moore Howard, who has studied and written extensively on the issue, and who does not hesitate to write candidly about how she believes PDSs erode the identity of students and the ethos of the teacher:
Type in your credit card number, paste in a student’s paper, press a button, and voila! Plagiarist caught or writer exonerated; anxiety assuaged. Catching plagiarists is just as easy and requires just as little thinking as does the plagiarizing. [. . .] Plagiarism-detecting software also helps teachers describe the issue solely in terms of individual students’ ethics, thereby avoiding the difficult task of constructing pedagogy that engages students in the topic and the learning process and that persuades them not just that they will be punished for plagiarizing but that they will able to and glad to do their own writing. In place of the pedagogy that joins teachers and students in the educational enterprise, plagiarism-detecting software offers a machine that will separate them [. . .]. (“Understanding” 8, 11–12)
In reading these voices, it’s not difficult to hear the tensions. After all, at the heart of this conversation about plagiarism is the teaching of writing; and at the heart of teaching writing are the teachers’ and students’ goals toward clear, well-supported, ethical, authentic communication. Plagiarism seems to undermine those goals, and much of the scholarship in the field of composition and rhetoric on plagiarism reveals the rescue mission that teacher-scholars on all sides of the issue have undertaken.
Likewise, the looming issues of plagiarism influence the relationships between teachers and students as they impact the environment of the composition classroom. Expanded honor codes, plagiarism policies on syllabi, and the use of PDSs can create an “atmosphere of mistrust” that Sean Zwagerman argues “over time, settles in as normal and invisible, [where] statistical justification for acts of vigilance become unnecessary” (678). If composition instructors take for granted that students will cheat if given the chance, the fundamental tenets of composition pedagogy are compromised. At risk is that the atmosphere of the composition classroom can become infected with the fear of getting caught cheating (or wrongly being accused), as well as teachers’ dread of the tiresome and upsetting process of catching and prosecuting cheaters. The normalization of this atmosphere cannot leave the composition classroom unaffected.
As for plagiarism’s marketability, the mere presence of such a large volume of publications—many of them books designed for classroom use—indicates that there is money to be made off of plagiarism, or off of attempts to prevent it. This question of “marketing” and “management” ideologies in a traditionally more theoretical academic environment can be problematic. How can students explore the more abstract complexities of authorship, ethos, and writerly voice under these conditions? Is the “business” of plagiarism and the politics of its construction interfering with pedagogy and inquiry?
One of the problems with all of the discussion around plagiarism is that it assumes that the term “plagiarism” is easily defined and obvious to all. We hope this book will illustrate how this belief is far from true, and how thinking through the various conceptions of “plagiarism” is critical in understanding its origins, manifestations, and prevention. A second and related problem is that classroom and institutional discussions and policies about plagiarism often conflate intentional and unintentional plagiarism. One strain of the books written about plagiarism—like Lathrop and Foss’s Guiding Students from Cheating and Plagiarism to Honesty and Integrity: Strategies for Change—assumes that the issue is a question of cheating versus being honest—again, an issue only about students’ ethics. A second strain, one more typically directed at students, views plagiarism as a kind of trap for unwary students; Linda Stern’s What Every Student Should Know About Avoiding Plagiarism is just one example of a number of books that refer specifically to “avoiding” plagiarism, as if it’s lurking out there, waiting to ensnare you if you’re not careful. These two strains reveal a broad spectrum of plagiarism definition that calls students’ agency into question: Plagiarism can be about the questionable values that students possess, and it can be about their ignorance altogether.
Both sides of the spectrum, of course, have some merit to them. Some students will cheat, but we see no reason to assume most students are cheaters. Many students lack the necessary knowledge about documentation, of course, and students often plagiarize without intending to; however, the set of conventions governing academic writing is complex and sometimes confusing. Learning to navigate those conventions successfully is a long, arduous process, and not something one does by learning a simple list of rules; understanding plagiarism is more than just learning how to cite properly—and the stakes are high. Academic institutions in the United States, and elsewhere, place a high value on particular notions of creativity, originality, and authorship. Adherence to that value constitutes, in the academy’s view, integrity, but those notions of creativity, originality, and authorship are hardly universal. They vary among cultures—and not just cultures according to nationality, race, or ethnicity but also social class, region, religion, and other social groups to which people belong. Students entering academia bring with them a variety of cultural values that sometimes differ from the values of academic institutions. As new members of the academic community, students are in the process of learning a new set of values, and of negotiating between those values