Many in the education world were surprised, and a bit puzzled, to learn last week that dozens of incidents of plagiarism had been reported among students enrolled in the free online courses offered by Coursera. Coursera is the online venture that has partnered with Stanford, Princeton and other elite institutions of higher education to offer web versions of popular courses to the public. The instances of plagiarism, which apparently occurred in at least three Coursera courses, were discovered by fellow students engaged in "peer grading," evaluating their classmates' assignments. The professor teaching one of the courses posted a message imploring his students to stop copying others' work without attribution.
Plagiarism is regrettably common among students enrolled in traditional classes, of course. A survey released last year by the Pew Research Center found that plagiarism among college students is at an all-time high. The motive behind such cheating, one assumes, is to procure a higher grade with less effort. But the Coursera students were not taking their courses for a grade, or even for credit. They were taking the classes only for their own edification -- a fact that unexpectedly illuminates an aspect of plagiarism that is often missed. In addition to cheating professors who expect original work, classmates who toiled over essays of their own, and writers who presume their words will appear under their own names, plagiarists also defraud themselves. Lifting the labor of someone else's mind is the opposite of real learning.
Cognitive science research demonstrates that the acquisition of "deep knowledge" of a subject -- knowledge that is stored in our memories long-term and that can be flexibly applied to new situations as well as familiar ones -- depends on two conditions.
First, we have to think about the meaning of the information. As the University of Virginia psychologist Daniel Willingham has put it, "Memory is the residue of thought." We remember what we think about -- and plagiarists have thought about their topics only long enough to select an appropriate passage to copy. (This first prerequisite of acquiring deep knowledge -- thinking about the meaning of the information -- also helps explain why rote memorization is so ineffective. There's no meaning for our minds to grasp in a dry list of facts, and so these facts often fail to find a hold in memory.)
The second condition for acquiring deep knowledge is making connections among the various pieces of information we're learning, and between this new knowledge and the knowledge we previously possessed. Here again, plagiarists have given themselves little opportunity to discover connections or to bind the new information to their memories by tying to things they already know. Students who plagiarize in an ungraded course are getting away with nothing at all: no lasting memories, no profound understanding.
Like a thief who steals an empty safe, they make for easy objects of derision. But while many of us know better than to pass off another person's work as our own, we think little of engaging in the intellectual equivalent of cutting and pasting. How many times have you borrowed the opinion of a political pundit? How often have you retailed the wisdom of a best-selling book or an expert on TV? The ethical infraction is minor, but the crime against our intellectual lives is great. Every time we mentally skim the surface, every time we allow someone else to do thinking, we miss a chance to develop deep knowledge. Even without a grade, it counts.
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On the subject of "cheating" and this is a cheat in reverse, a few years ago The Chronicle of Higher Education cited a Dartmouth (!) professor who prepared his/her class notes and presentations from Wikipedia. That is a cheat. How would you like to be the parents of a student in that class paying Ivy League tuition!! The students wouldn't mind or know the difference as long as they get a good grade.
Plagarism is the ultimate compliment.
If music or pros were a religion or propaganda, plagarism would be encouraged.
Actually passing off someone else's thoughts and ideas as your own is a HUGE ethical infraction.
Then again, I'm not sure how I feel about the various states of plagiarism. Copying word for word is wrong. However, sharing and borrowing ideas happens all the time. In fact, isn't that how we first learn, by mimicking? There can be a fine line between taking an idea and making it your own and circumventing that idea through copying.
When I wrote my dissertation, I was charged with conducting and reporting completely original work. I managed the task to the satisfaction of my reviewers, but the product did not reach new literary heights. The best I could say for it is that it would not have been likely to inspire plagiarism.
Many institutions now recognize even "paraphrased" or idea based plagarism. That the idea behind what you've written must be attributed if someone else has used it in the past. This makes the concept of plagarism into a certainty. Even if we are unaware that our idea is not new, we can still be accused of plagarism just because we reached the same conclusions that someone else did. This is dangerous considering many schools now have a zero tollerance policy and will remove us from the class if not pursue suspension.
Very rarely do students have truly unique ideas on a subject. Even when they do, it is often not acceptable because it doesn't fit with the accepted body of work.
Irrelevant for grading? Nope.
Though it's a bit more complicated than that, in that the act of organizing what you know in order to express it causes you to understand it better, you're apparently missing the point that schools and teachers serve multiple purposes. They're supposed to teach you, yes, and that function is (mostly) fulfilled before you write a paper. But they're also supposed to assess what you've learned and certify that you know what you should, and that requires you to prove it.