Teaching and Learning > DISCOURSE

Plagiarism in Philosophy: Prevention Better than Cure

Author: George MacDonald Ross

Journal Title: Discourse

ISSN:

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Volume: 3

Number: 2

Start page: 23

End page: 57

Return to vol. 3 no. 2 index page

1. Introduction

‘Plagiarism more common than thought in student essays’ would make a good headline.2 Recent research suggests that students admit to much more plagiarism and other forms of cheating than teachers generally suspect3 and it is widely believed that the problem is increasing as a result of the internet. The solution is to use a range of techniques to get the thought back into student essay writing, and to take more active steps to spot when this has not happened.

2. Definition of plagiarism

If action is to be taken against students who plagiarise, it is essential for there to be a robust definition of plagiarism, and for it to be thoroughly understood and owned by both staff and students. Each university has its own definition of plagiarism and its own procedures for dealing with it. Since these differ to a greater or lesser extent, any advice I give must be adapted to local circumstances4. However, the burden of my advice is to tackle plagiarism at source, so that only an irreducible minimum number of cases need to be sent through official channels.

Most definitions of plagiarism include the following elements:

Before going any further, I shall comment briefly on each of these.

Deliberate intention

Although definitions usually include a reference to a deliberate intention to cheat, plagiarism is plagiarism whether deliberate or not, and accidental plagiarism can (in theory at least) attract the same penalty. I shall argue that deliberate and unintentional plagiarism should be kept as separate from each other as possible, since the latter is no more than poor academic practice, and it needs to be addressed in a non-punitive way.

Copying or paraphrasing

Paraphrasing is sometimes regarded as less of a sin than straight copying, on the grounds that it requires independent intellectual effort to digest6a text, and to put it into your own words. Nevertheless, it still involves the unacknowledged use of someone else’s work, and I think it is correct to treat it as hardly less objectionable than straight copying.

I therefore find it odd that students are sometimes positively encouraged to paraphrase. For example, Indiana University has a web page giving students advice on how not to plagiarise, and it provides examples of acceptable and unacceptable paraphrasing. One of the criteria it gives for unacceptable paraphrasing is that ‘only a few words or phrases’ have been changed.7 However, paraphrasing without acknowledgement is still plagiarism, whether it is superficial or radical. Radical paraphrasing might be useful as an occasional exercise for testing comprehension, but it should not form the basis of essay writing, whether acknowledged or not. The ability to summarise what an author says in one’s own words is a more useful skill; but most important of all, in the context of philosophy, is the ability to quote a passage verbatim, and to analyse how an interpretation can be derived from the actual wording. This way students will demonstrate that they are thinking for themselves.

Adopting the ideas of others

It would obviously be absurd to expect students to give a source for every idea or fact they use in writing an essay. For example, if a student writes ‘René Descartes (1596–1650) was a dualist,’ no-one is going to accuse them of plagiarism, even though knowledge of Descartes’ name, dates, and his dualism will hardly have been the fruits of the student’s own independent thought. We all accept that there is ‘common knowledge’, which students can use without giving a reference. But it is impossible to say precisely what is or is not common knowledge, since this will depend on the topic of the essay, and the level of the student. For example, if the essay is about Descartes’ dualism, it would be appropriate to discuss different interpretations, duly acknowledged; and a PhD thesis might take more common knowledge for granted than a first-year essay. Even experienced scholars will disagree where the line should be drawn, and it would be unfair to take a penal approach to undergraduates who happen to overstep it.

More significantly, while we do expect philosophy undergraduates to think for themselves, we do not expect them to come up with ideas no-one has ever thought of before. Even at PhD level, most universities have abandoned or at least diluted the originality requirement, given the difficulty of finding something absolutely new to say.8 The main difference between undergraduates and postgraduates is that we expect postgraduates to trawl the literature to find precedents for what they themselves may have thought of already. But time is too short for undergraduates to do this (and it is questionable how far it is a productive use of anyone’s time). I don’t think we would wish to penalise an undergraduate for failing to know that their ideas had already been published by others, unless the relevant texts were contained in the compulsory reading for the course. On the contrary, we would reward them for being able to come up with the same ideas as published academics, rather than unpublishably bad ideas. In short, what we are looking for is not original, but independent thinking—and this distinction needs to be made clear to students9.

By default, if students express ideas in their own words without an acknowledgment, they are claiming them as their own. However, it is hard to establish whether they have arrived at them through their own thinking, or have been inspired by extra-curricular reading. The ideal is that students should acknowledge all their sources of help, as junior members of an academic community in which this is standard practice. We should be pleased if some of them do more reading than is required, and use their brains to digest the material and make it their own. While falling short of complete independence of thought, breadth of reading and the ability to digest the ideas of others are academic virtues to be encouraged. The advice I give my students is that if they merely quote and paraphrase, whether acknowledging the fact or not, they are failing to demonstrate any specifically philosophical ability. If they can digest the sophisticated philosophical ideas of others, and express them succinctly in their own words, they will get some credit for philosophical understanding. But what I am really looking for is the ability to engage with the ideas of others, which students can demonstrate by criticising them, setting one against another, confronting a commentator’s interpretation with a primary text, and so on. If students are operating at this level, they cannot possibly conceal their sources.

Nevertheless, it remains the case that, when students have borrowed ideas and thoroughly digested them, it will be virtually impossible to establish that this is what they have done, rather than thinking up the ideas for themselves—and it is bad practice to make something illegal if it is unpoliceable. So to include the copying of ideas in a university definition of plagiarism merely complicates an issue which is difficult enough already. At Leeds, it is included in the definition , and I asked the head of our Office of Academic Appeals and Regulation (who has had many years of experience in the role) whether there had ever been any plagiarism cases involving the copying of ideas. He said never. It always turned on copying from or paraphrasing texts. So why include this particular cog in the machine, if it never does any work? Indeed it can actually do harm to conscientious students, who will be worried about expressing their own ideas in case the same ideas could be found in books they haven’t read, thus leaving them open to a charge of unintentional plagiarism.

3. Crime11 versus bad practice

If we eliminate the copying of ideas from the definition of plagiarism, we are left with a contrast between the deliberate intention to cheat, and copying or paraphrasing the words of others without acknowledgment. Everyone will agree that the deliberate intention to cheat is criminal, whereas failure to acknowledge sources is less obviously so. It may just be an instance of bad academic practice.

The trouble is that it is often difficult to discriminate between criminal intent, and mere bad practice on the part of students who are insufficiently initiated into academic culture. When confronted with accusations of plagiarism, students usually have plausible stories to tell:

Most cases fall within a grey area, where what the student has actually done is captured by the definition of plagiarism, but it is difficult to prove deliberate intent to commit fraud.

It is the criminal aspect which makes plagiarism such a fraught issue for academics, for a number of reasons:

Institutions must have policies and procedures for dealing with fraud when it does occur; but it is clearly better to find ways of minimising the occurrence of plagiarism in the first place. The focus should be on:

What is the crime?

Unacknowledged copying is a crime in two respects:

1. First, it involves breaching the intellectual property rights of the author. Students are often unaware that copying is a form of theft, and that copyright legislation applies in all walks of life. The problem has been exacerbated by the internet, since students tend to assume that they can do what they like with material that is made available without charge.14 It is important that they should be made aware of the legal implications of making illicit use of copyright material.

2. Second, and more importantly in the academic context, it involves gaining a qualification under false pretences. A degree is a passport to a high-status and well-paid career (outside academia, at least). If we certificate students as having knowledge and abilities which they have not in fact demonstrated, then this particular function of the university system loses its raison d’être and its credibility.15

Some of what I am going to say may be interpreted as too lenient on plagiarism. So let me make it absolutely clear that, when it can be shown beyond reasonable doubt that students have fraudulently passed off the work of others as their own, they should be severely punished. The punishment should not be merely a reduction in marks at the discretion of the examiners, but it should involve a quasi-judicial process, in which the ultimate sanction is the failure to award a degree.

Causes of the crime

Sometimes the reason for plagiarism lies with the students. There are many circumstances which can interfere with their work, and tempt them to resort to a quick fix as deadlines loom. For example:

Alternatively, there may be some students who register for a philosophy module without the necessary motivation. For example:

Apriori, one might expect philosophy students (especially single-honours students) to be more committed to the subject for its own sake than students of other disciplines, for the following reasons:

If we lived in an ideal world in which all our students arrived with an enthusiastic commitment to learning philosophy for its own sake, then something would have gone seriously wrong if any of them resorted to cheating when assessed. Everyone understands that if you genuinely want to learn something—such as a foreign language, or playing a musical instrument—then cheating is entirely irrelevant to the purpose.17 Unfortunately we do not live in an ideal word, and a significant number of philosophy students arrive without a strong commitment to learning philosophy, at least as we teach it. It would be worthwhile conducting an empirical investigation into why such students opt for philosophy in the first place.

Given that students won’t cheat if they want to learn, the key to preventing criminal behaviour is to foster a culture in which learning is valued for its own sake—in which those who arrive with enthusiasm don’t lose it, and the others acquire it. This involves both eliminating structural factors for which we ourselves are responsible, and paying more attention to developing good practice.

Structural causes of the crime

Common structural causes are the following:

1. Failure to make the rules clear
It is difficult enough for us as teachers to articulate the distinction between cheating and mere bad academic practice, and it is hardly surprising if students fail to understand it, even if they are given a definition. As I shall explain below, it is much better to focus on educating students into good academic practice, since written work which conforms to good practice cannot be plagiarised. Of course, there needs to be a clear warning about all forms of cheating, and about the penalties and procedures applied within the institution. But our primary purpose is to produce good philosophers, and it is perverse to keep harping on about one particular form of bad practice at the expense of inculcating good practice. Cheating is something students do, but unintentional plagiarising is something they fail to do, namely acknowledge their sources. So it is odd to give advice on avoiding plagiarism, when we should be advising students on what to do right. You won’t train anyone to be a good footballer by concentrating on how they should avoid being off-side; and the same goes for philosophy, or any other academic discipline.

Russ Hunt makes the interesting point that when we as academics cite the work of colleagues, our primary motive is not to avoid accusations of plagiarism, but to establish our bona fides, advertise allegiances, bring work to the reader’s attention, exemplify contending positions, and so on. These are all positive motives, and it is wrong to give students the idea that the sole purpose of referencing is the negative one of defending oneself against charges of cheating. We should give them an apprenticeship in academic culture as it actually is.18

2. Over-assessment
It is a tautology that over-assessment is a bad thing. It is bad for teachers, since more time than necessary is spent accrediting student performance rather than improving it. It is bad for students, since it creates an atmosphere in which they devote all their energies to what is assessed, at the expense of exploring more deeply or more widely than is strictly required by the syllabus. In extreme cases, the sheer volume of assessment means that weaker students simply cannot fulfil assessment requirements without taking short cuts—in particular, by plagiarising.

In most universities, the problem has become acute because of a variety of factors (none of them necessarily bad developments in themselves):

A more intangible factor is a growing perception that students have become more strategic in their approach to learning. Instead of following the whole syllabus, they work only on the minimum necessary to get them a good grade; and research has shown that students who take a strategic approach perform significantly better in their assessment19. Given that students are accredited as having covered the whole of the syllabus, there is a natural tendency on the part of teachers to ensure that everything is assessed. Without very careful planning, this will bring about an increase in the total burden of assessment. Still worse, if students are assessed on everything, this will be at the expense of deep learning, unless they have the rare good fortune to be taught by someone who has pared the syllabus down to an amount compatible with deep learning.

There is no simple answer to the question of how much students should be assessed. It is generally agreed that there is too much summative assessment (giving grades to students without feed-back to improve future performance), and too little formative assessment (giving feed-back, whether or not with a grade which counts towards the degree classification). In some universities, philosophy departments have very little discretion over the quantity and form of summative assessment; in others, they have almost complete freedom. I would recommend keeping purely summative assessment to the absolute minimum necessary for ensuring the reliability of the degree class awarded to students,20 and focussing on methods of assessment which help the students to improve, whether or not the assessment counts towards the degree classification. Students need regular formative feedback on their written work throughout their programme if they are to master the subtle and complicated conventions of academic writing. Only then can we be certain that plagiarism, if it still occurs, is deliberate rather than the outcome of ignorance.

3. Bunching of assignments
Even more important than the total quantity of assessment is the question of how it is timed. It is not uncommon for students to be taking up to six modules simultaneously, and to find that the deadlines for the submission of coursework are around the same time. It is easy for us to say that the students know the timetable well in advance, and that it is up to them to manage their time so as to work evenly on all their assignments up to the deadline. However, this is not how we work—if we have six things to do by a deadline, we will probably tackle them one-by-one (and probably also miss some deadlines with impunity). But these options are not open to students, however well they manage their time, since assignments presuppose the learning that will have taken place up until shortly before the assignment is due.

There are two serious problems here:

These are not problems for departments which operate a tutorial system, in which students submit one or more formative essays each week, across the range of courses they are taking. Since such essays are only formative, they avoid the difficulty that some students might be assessed on work submitted at the very beginning of a course, and others at a much later stage. On the other hand, the tutorial system has the disadvantage that students are assessed by a single terminal examination, and that tutors are unlikely to be experts in all the courses taken by their students.

In a modular system, one can at least mitigate the problem by setting a number of short assignments at different dates, and ensuring that the submission dates are not the same for every module. It might be objected that students will be assessed on work done very early in the module; but this problem can also be overcome by making only the best of the assignments count towards the module mark. Unless a student has done spectacularly well on the first assignment, they have a motivation to improve.

4. Setting of impossible tasks
In philosophy, we expect students to think for themselves about the texts they read. But sometimes they cannot understand the texts, and don’t know how to set about making sense of them. And even if they do understand them, they don’t know what sort of criticisms to make, given that they are mere undergraduates dealing with famous living academics, or geniuses of the past. It is hardly surprising if students faced with an incomprehensible text and a looming deadline take the short cut of reproducing the thoughts of others (whether acknowledged or not).

It is important to remember how new an experience it is for many fresh undergraduates to be assessed on their own thinking, rather than on their ability to recall what they have been told by their teacher, or what they have read in textbooks. Although academics in all disciplines stress the importance of independent thought, the reality falls short of the rhetoric, and students can often get by without it. What makes philosophy different is the centrality of autonomous thinking and argumentation, and the low premium placed on the ability to remember facts.

Later, I shall give some advice about how to ensure that students can fulfil the tasks we set them. For the present, it is enough to say that failure to prepare them adequately for what we expect of them can leave them with the feeling that there is little alternative but to cheat.

5. Allowing an antagonistic culture to develop
As I have already said, most philosophy students don’t come to university primarily for the paper qualification, but because they want to become philosophers (not necessarily in the sense of professional philosophers). They can lose this initial motivation if the structures we impose on them turn their experience into a game in which they are rewarded for obeying the letter of the rule, and severely punished for going against it. In most universities, there are managerial pressures to be ever more explicit about criteria for success and failure; and I personally have no objection to the idea that we should be more explicit about our assessment criteria. However, an obsession with plagiarism is likely to be counter-productive, since students will perceive us as policing their work rather than facilitating it. It is difficult enough for us to maintain a co-operative relationship with our students when we are assessors as well as teachers; but if we are also perceived as trying to catch them out, the relationship is liable to collapse. The last thing we want is a culture in which staff and students vie with each other to devise ever more sophisticated means of detecting plagiarism and avoiding detection. In such a culture, only the stupidest will get caught, and the cleverer criminals will get off scot-free—and these are the very students whose cleverness we should be encouraging in a positive direction.

The existence of university-wide disciplinary procedures does at least mean that we are not both judge and prosecutor. Nevertheless, it is still up to the individual teacher to detect plagiarism and produce the evidence—the policing role will always be there, if only in the background. At my own institution, there is a commendable rule that teachers are not allowed to confront students with accusations of plagiarism. If there is evidence of plagiarism, it must be handed over to an impartial departmental committee, which will decide whether or not the student has a case to answer. All the same, it is still possible to have a dialogue with the student before that stage is reached. For example, you can ask them tactful questions about how they wrote the essay and what sources they used, provided the dreaded p-word is never mentioned, and it is clear that you are exploring rather than confirming a case.

My advice is that, while there must be a document which makes clear the penalties for cheating, much more stress should be laid on positive encouragement to adopt good practice.

6. Making cheating too easy
I know it is rather like saying that it is your fault for being burgled if you leave your property in full view, and your doors and windows unlocked. Nevertheless, there will be much less stealing of other people’s words if it is made more difficult. I shall deal with this in the next section.

Making cheating less easy

The general principle is to set assessment tasks which cannot be carried out satisfactorily simply by copying or paraphrasing any previously available material. Whether or not a student can be proved to have done so, they will fail anyway, because they have not satisfied the assessment criteria. Here are some tips for making cheating less easy:21

1. Set tasks which focus on process as well as on product
If you merely ask students to produce an essay, then there is no obvious means of telling how it was produced—it isn’t like watching an art student in a studio, or a science student conducting an experiment. There are a number of ways round this:

2. Ask very specific questions, to which there are no published answers
The more general and open-ended the question, the more likely there is to be a relevant answer to it in the published literature. For example, to ask a question like ‘Is scepticism self-defeating?’ is positively inviting students to go to the nearest dictionary of philosophy or textbook on epistemology. A question like ‘How far does Sextus Empiricus’s formulation of scepticism succeed in circumventing the charge that scepticism is self-defeating?’ would be much more difficult to find an answer to. Indeed, the effort required to find a ready-made answer would almost constitute a respectable piece of philosophical research.

3. Relate questions to recent events, or the students’ own experience
Most philosophical publications are relatively context-free. If you tie a question down to a specific context, students will not be able to use them (or at least not as they stand). A question like ‘What are the strengths and weaknesses of utilitarianism?’ can easily be answered from available sources. But this will not be the case if you ask ‘What are the strengths and weaknesses of a utilitarian approach to a moral dilemma you have come across in the news during the past month?’ or ‘. . . to a moral dilemma you yourself have faced as a student?’

4. Force students to be analytical and critical
One thing plagiarists are good at is finding sources to copy from. You can capitalise on this virtue by telling them to identify, say, three sources which provide an answer to a particular question, and then to compare them, and explain which they consider to be the best answer, and why. This is particularly appropriate for students who use the web, since it requires intelligent use of a search engine.

More generally, building a specific piece of analysis and criticism into an essay question, and making sure that students know that they will be assessed on their analytic and critical skills, makes it much more difficult for them to find ready-made answers. 5. Don’t ask the same question or set the same task twice Students can often get hold of essays written by a previous cohort, and the word gets around if the assessment on a particular module remains much the same from one year to the next. It is important to make sure you set substantially different questions or tasks each year. This is much easier to do if your questions are highly specific (otherwise you are likely to run out of appropriate questions for a course taught over many years). 22

Collusion

Students sometimes copy from each other; and this can be difficult to detect in a large pile of scripts. Although copying can be by mutual consent, it occasionally involves actual theft of a script or a computer file. It is good practice to warn students to look after their work carefully, and to have robust departmental procedures for the submission of essays—telling students to place essays in an open box or pigeonhole makes life much too easy for a potential thief.

If two students have submitted substantially the same essay, and neither confesses to stealing from the other, it should be relatively easy to establish which was the author by questioning them about its contents, or comparing it with their other work. However, I have had quite heated discussions about what to do in the unlikely event of neither being proved guilty. My personal view is that, as in a court of law, both should be found innocent, and that it would be absurd to compromise by imposing a 50% penalty on each, proportional to the 50% probability of guilt.23 But I have come across the view that both should be found fully guilty, on the grounds that it is as much of a crime to let another student see your work as it is to copy the work of others. One colleague was even surprised that there was no Leeds University regulation to this effect.24

Although such a case is purely hypothetical, it does raise the important question of how far students should be permitted, or even positively encouraged to collaborate. I believe that collaboration should be encouraged, for a number of reasons:

Nevertheless, we are still left with the problem of drawing the line beyond which honest collaboration turns into deceitful collusion. Part of the solution is to make it a plus point if students acknowledge the help they have received, with the proviso that excessively derivative work will receive a low mark. This is no different from our own practice as academics. We ask colleagues to comment on drafts of books or articles before submission for publication, and we acknowledge their contributions (as I have done in the present document).

Where students have co-operated in the preparation of an essay, but done the final writing-up independently, there will no doubt be similarities in what they say—but I do not see this as a problem. They have worked together, and learned together, and each has come up with their own, individual literary product. The problem arises only when substantial sections have more-or-less identical wording. This would indicate that one student has copied from or paraphrased the other, and it should be treated as a case of cheating.

Of course, the situation is very different if the point of the exercise is that a group of students should write a single product collaboratively. Here there need to be sticks and carrots to ensure that each student makes a solid contribution to the final result; but failure to do so is laziness rather than cheating (though it still might warrant punishment).

Unseen examinations

It is often assumed that, provided they are properly invigilated, unseen examinations are a fool-proof method of ensuring that what students write is their own work.25 One of the consequences of increased worries about cheating is that some institutions have expanded the quantity of unseen examinations at the expense of written coursework.26 This tendency is to be regretted, not merely for the standard reasons against unseen examinations as the main mode of assessment, but because they actually encourage the bad study habits of which plagiarism is an extreme example.

Consider the following case27: a philosophy student with a photographic memory reproduces a published article in an unseen examination, and fails to acknowledge it. Is it plagiarism or not? I should say it is, because the means of storing the text (in the head rather than on paper) is irrelevant. But what if she had acknowledged the source? Even though it would not be plagiarism, I think we would very unhappy about giving her any marks for her work, since it was wholly derivative. To move a little further down this slippery slope, what would we say if she had memorised her course notes, and reproduced the relevant part in her exam script? Here, much would depend on whether her notes represented her own thinking, or were extracts or paraphrases from secondary literature, lecture notes, etc. But, even if the former, I think we philosophers would still feel uncomfortable about what she was doing, since she was treating the exam as a memory test, rather than as an opportunity to display her philosophical ability.

The upshot is that, if we are mainly assessing our students’ ability to write philosophically, it is as important in unseen exams as in coursework to make sure that they understand the criteria by which they will be assessed, and that questions are asked in a way which forces them to apply their own philosophical thinking, rather than regurgitate what they have memorised. For example, they might be asked to apply a general theory to a particular case, or to comment on a passage not included in the required reading for the course.

In short, unseen exams are no panacea for plagiarism, and they encourage undesirable work habits. If properly designed, they can have a useful role to play in assessment, by forcing students to work at the whole of a course, and testing their ability to extemporise under pressure. However, it is much better that sat examinations should constitute just one element of an array of assessment methods, with suitable safeguards against cheating. Oral assessment is particularly useful for establishing whether students have really digested what they have learned, and it is largely immune to cheating. 28

4. Good practice
Proper acknowledgment of sources is one of the key features of academic good practice. Indeed, it is almost definitive of academic practice, since it is so rare outside academia. Consider the following examples:

Only a small minority of philosophy graduates go on to further study and then an academic career. The fact that academic practice on referencing is so out of tune with the rest of the world raises the question of whether we should continue to set such high standards for our undergraduates. Why, for example, should a student bent on a career in journalism nearly fail to get a degree at all because his practice is journalistic rather than academic? Might it not be better to set more realistic standards, such as minimum compliance with copyright law? The full rigour of academic practice is relevant only to those who are likely to become academics themselves, and this can be left to the postgraduate stage.

My response is that, while academic practice is sometimes over-fussy (especially in disciplines other than philosophy, where even common sense seems to need a supporting reference), it is nevertheless good practice. Rather than accommodating ourselves to the sloppiness and even downright dishonesty of the outside world, we should raise its standards by populating it with graduates who have a clear sense of the need to acknowledge debts to others. Good journalists can and do refer to their sources in ways which do not involve footnotes and bibliographies in the classic academic style.

Again, the academic essay is becoming increasingly restricted to undergraduate work. Many philosophy students have had no previous experience of writing essays (some A-levels do not require them, and an increasing proportion of entrants have had no post-compulsory education), and very few of our graduates will ever have to write an essay in the future. So why do we lay so much stress on a form of writing which is of little use, and which is most open to plagiarism?

Here I would recommend encouraging students to use different literary styles. For example, the dialogue form has a distinguished history in philosophy, because it allows an argument to be pursued in depth. One of my students submitted an imaginary dialogue between Jeremy Paxman30 and Kant as a substitute for a traditional essay. I thought it was very good, but short of a first, because Kant should have been subjected to more penetrating criticism. Another possible style would be a report with an executive summary—just the sort of thing employers are looking for.

A post-modern challenge31

An alternative view is that the whole idea of intellectual property has been made obsolete by the denial of the primacy of the authorial voice. A text is what its readers make of it, and different readings are potentially infinite. Ownership lies as much in the reader as in the author.

This tendency has been accelerated by increasingly open access to texts. In the old days, students were confined to a limited diet of materials, closely controlled by librarians and academics. But in the digital age, students can access almost anything they like. What matters is not ownership of material (which is freely available anyway), but the use that students make of it. Employers want graduates who can ransack the web and other resources, and apply the materials they find to the project in hand. This requires high-level skills, such as assessing the reliability of sources, selecting what is relevant, analysing what is meant, debating the pros and cons of different positions, and synthesising everything into a clearly comprehensible whole. Who said what is hardly relevant, and a requirement that students should think original thoughts will simply deflect them from cultivating these more important skills. The world will be a better place if there are no barriers to the sharing of ideas.

My reply is that, although I agree with much of the above, I do not see why students should be relieved of the minor chore of giving proper references to their sources. Even outside academia, it matters what sources have been used, since some are more authoritative than others.

Philosophical academic literacy

The expression ‘academic literacy’ has been coined to denote the family of features that distinguish academic from non-academic writing—of which the rigorous citation of sources is just one. However, different disciplines have different sets of conventions, and the expression ‘academic literacies’ in the plural is used to reflect these internal differences. Thus ‘philosophical academic literacy’ is the sum of the rules we expect philosophical writings to observe if they are to be published in a form acceptable to the philosophical community. Some of these rules are common to other disciplines, but others are not. For example, in philosophy:

Little has been published on the analysis and articulation of specifically philosophical academic literacy, and it is a topic worthy of further investigation.33 As a preliminary, the most striking difference between analytic philosophy and just about every other discipline is the deliberate avoidance of acknowledging sources—which presents our students with very bad role models if they are to avoid accusations of plagiarism. To give just two examples, in the preface to the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein writes:

I do not wish to judge how far my efforts coincide with those of other philosophers. Indeed, what I have written here makes no claim to novelty in detail, and the reason why I give no sources is that it is a matter of indifference to me whether the thoughts that I have had have been anticipated by someone else.

I will only mention that I am indebted to Frege’s great works and to the writings of my friend Mr Bertrand Russell for much of the stimulation of my thoughts. 34

Similarly, Ryle’s Concept of Mind 35 discusses the views of many historical philosophers, but without any bibliography or page references to the texts. There are many other examples of 20th-century classics in analytical philosophy which completely contravene the requirements we impose on our students. Going further back into the history of philosophy, there are almost no major philosophers who reference their sources properly until we get back to the scholastics (Leibniz is an exception). It is a major question how we can get our students to conform to 21st-century good practice, when earlier writings held up as a model would be failed for lack of referencing (and there were indeed problems over getting Wittgenstein’s Tractatus accepted as a doctoral thesis, so that he would be qualified to practise as a teacher at Cambridge).

It should be immediately obvious that, since different disciplines have different literacies, students on joint degrees, or taking only a few elective modules in philosophy, are likely to have difficulty adapting to conflicting expectations.36 For example, an engineering student might be marked down for questioning established safety standards in an engineering course, but equally for failing to criticise received wisdom in a philosophy course. This can even be a problem when the disciplines are quite similar. I once caught a History/Philosophy student plagiarising in an essay on Kant. When I confronted her with what she had done, she burst into tears, and said ‘But this is how we are expected to write essays in history. The trouble with you philosophers is that you expect us to think.’ No doubt my history colleagues would reject her analysis; but it is telling that a final-year student had failed to notice that thought was required in history as well as in philosophy—and, more worryingly, that she hadn’t yet acquired the ability to think independently in philosophy, even though she knew it was expected of her.

Although definitions of plagiarism are usually institution-wide, they may be applied differently in different disciplines. As I hinted earlier, students on journalism courses might be allowed to get away with what would be stamped on as plagiarism in philosophy. It is unfair on the students if we punish them severely for failing to adhere to philosophical good practice, unless we have made every effort to educate them into that good practice.

Promoting philosophical literacy

More generally, there is the problem of initiating students into academic and specifically philosophical literacy, when they are unlikely to have had any previous experience of either. I am not in a position to generalise about how students are taught at school, or how they are assessed across the whole spectrum of A-levels. However, there are widespread complaints that, despite the rhetoric to the contrary, the emphasis is on regurgitation of pre-digested course materials. This is a criticism which has even been directed against Philosophy A-level. A-level students have little (or sometimes no) experience of working through primary texts, seeking help from secondary sources and acknowledging that help, or articulating their own thoughts and reasonings about what they have read. It is quite unrealistic to expect incoming students to know what to do with the reading lists, lectures, tutorials, and essay questions we throw at them, unless we make this a central focus of our educational programme. The situation is not helped by the fact that, in many institutions, students are given the least individual attention in their first year when they most need it, and the most in their final year when they ought to be becoming autonomous learners.

Quite apart from UK A-level entrants, we have an increasing number of international students. Many of these come from cultures where rote learning is the explicit educational aim, and where it is unthinkable to question the authority of teachers or set texts. I was once advisor to a Chinese philosophy lecturer on a study visit, who referred to me as ‘father professor’ (and my wife as ‘mother professor’), with all the deference to authority this implies. In the light of such cultural differences, it is an uphill struggle to convince students that their traditional practices are liable to be treated as plagiarism, and that they are expected to be critical of established authorities. 37

Over the past few years, it has become standard practice to issue students with handbooks including advice on how to read, take notes, write essays, avoid plagiarism, and so on. This is certainly a step in the right direction. However, handbooks in themselves are not enough, because:

The message will get home only if the advice is fully integrated into methods of teaching and assessment. If the handbook describes what a good philosophy essay will look like, then there should be clearly formulated assessment criteria, such that essays which do not conform to them will fail, or get low marks. Comments on essays should focus at least as much on helping students to conform to the criteria next time, as on correcting errors of fact or interpretation. And teaching methods should be directed towards helping students to produce high-quality assessed work—a goal unlikely to be achieved by a narrow diet of stand-up lectures and group discussions.

In short, an integrated programme of teaching and assessment which focuses on helping students to produce work which conforms to the criteria for philosophical academic literacy should make cheating much less likely. Even if it does occur, derivative work will probably be failed anyway as not conforming to the criteria—which takes much of the anxiety out of the issue of plagiarism.

 

Do we practise what we preach?

As teachers, we are our students’ primary role models. We tell them about the importance of giving references in their essays. But are we equally fastidious in our lectures and course hand-outs? If we lecture to them off the tops of our heads without attribution, and write hand-outs which are a pure distillation of what we have thought for ourselves and learned from others, it is hardly surprising if students do the same in their essays. It is unfair if we crack down on them for doing what we do ourselves—yet it is no mean challenge to ensure that our own teaching conforms to the standards we expect of our students. There should be a greater convergence between our actual practice, and what we tell our students to do.

Another issue which is likely to confuse students is whether their teachers’ written and oral pronouncements are to be treated as a secondary source like any other, or as having a special, privileged status. After all, at school they were expected to reproduce what they were taught; and now that they are charged fees, they may feel that their teachers’ knowledge and wisdom is what they have paid for. It’s an old joke that students mustn’t plagiarise—except from their lecturers. On the other hand, our teaching materials are as much our intellectual property as our publications;38 and we are sending mixed signals to our students if we expect them to acknowledge one type of source and not the other. For some years now I have told my students to acknowledge my notes, email answers to queries, and the such like, as secondary sources like any other. Although there is still a tendency to under-acknowledge my hand-outs and notes taken in class, in general the requirement works very well, and the better students produce extremely well referenced essays.

 

5. Detection of cheating

Prevention is better than cure. But however much we design out opportunities for cheating, we must still be on our guard.

Some forms of cheating are very difficult to detect:

The problem is made worse by the fact that few of us know our students well enough to spot an essay written in an uncharacteristic style—and even if we did, the growing pressure to anonymise all marking would make this inapplicable. Nevertheless, there are procedures which should flush out otherwise undetected cases:

However, when cheating is from published sources (as it usually is), it is likely that only parts of an essay will be plagiarised, which makes the cheating easier to spot. It can be detected by:

It need not take much time to convince yourself that a passage is plagiarised. What does take a lot of time is trying to identify the source. From a legal point of view, it is unnecessary to do so, provided you have sufficient grounds (such as the above) for the balance of probability to be that the student has copied something without acknowledgement. However, some universities require the actual source to be produced, because they are scared of losing the case if the student appeals.

Electronic detection

There are a number of software packages for detecting plagiarism electronically.43 In the UK context, the most relevant is the plagiarism detection service currently provided free of charge by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)—though in fact the software is supplied by Turnitin.com in the USA.44 The service cannot be accessed directly, but only through your institution (assuming it has registered). It has a number of advantages and limitations:

Advantages
The advantages of the JISC service are that:

Limitations
The limitations of the JISC service are that:

I tested the Service on a batch of about 110 essays, after I had marked and returned them. I wasn’t expecting to detect any plagiarism from the internet, since I had warned the students what I was going to do, and had received a signed consent form from each of them. To my surprise, it revealed that one essay was largely copied from a single web page, and it took very little time to establish that the rest was paraphrased from the same page (I have, of course, reported the culprit for disciplinary action). I was, however, relieved to note that I had already failed the essay for lack of referencing or reasoned argumentation, and failure to address the question. A fuller report on my experience is available at http://www.philosophy.leeds.ac.uk/GMR/PlagDetec.doc.

If essays have been submitted in hard copy only, and if your suspicions are aroused, you may detect plagiarism very quickly by performing an advanced Google search on distinctive words or phrases—or even better by using a number of different search engines, since none of them cover everything.

6. Conclusion

Improving detection techniques and issuing dire warnings of punishment will not put an end to plagiarism, any more than jails and a police force have eliminated crime. If anything, a punitive approach makes it more difficult to build an academic community in which good practice is internalised by our students. In order to reduce the occurrence of plagiarism to a minimum, the emphasis should be on positively developing and rewarding good practice, and on restructuring assessment tasks so as to eliminate the temptation and opportunity to cheat. Much of the anxiety aroused by suspicion of plagiarism will be dissipated if plagiarised work will fail anyway, as not conforming to clearly stated assessment criteria.

7. Sources and Resources

Plagiarism in UK higher education has become a subject of published discussion only since 1995.46 Since then there has been a rapidly expanding literature, with a large degree of consensus about how plagiarism should be dealt with. Much of the advice I have passed on is in the realm of ‘common knowledge’ (at least as far as concerns plagiaronomists), and I have not attempted to identify the first originator of each individual item.47 My main sources are Jude Carroll of Oxford Brookes University, and Phil Race of the University of Leeds, both for their published writings, and for workshops they have conducted at the University of Leeds—though I know they do not agree with everything I have suggested here. Anything philosophy-specific is my own, unless otherwise acknowledged.

As far as I am aware, virtually nothing has been published specifically relating to plagiarism in philosophy, apart from advice issued to students by individual departments in handbooks and on websites. However, there are many resources which discuss the general issues in greater detail than I have here, and provide extensive bibliographies. The following is a selection, in no particular order:

Carroll, Jude, and Appleton, Jon, Plagiarism: A Good Practice Guide (Oxford: Oxford Brookes University and Joint Information Systems Committee, 2001), 43pp. This can be downloaded from: http://online.northumbria.ac.uk/faculties/art/ information_studies/Imri/Jiscpas/docs/brookes/brookes.pdf

Stefani, Lorraine, and Carroll, Jude, A Briefing on Plagiarism (York: LTSN Generic Centre, Assessment Series No. 10, 2001), 14pp. Although the Assessment Series was distributed in hard copy to all HE institutions, it can also be downloaded from: http://www.ltsn.ac.uk/application.asp?app=resources.asp& section=generic&process=filter_fields&type=all&id=1&history. This is significantly less detailed than Carroll and Appleton 2001.

Carroll, Jude, A Handbook for Deterring Plagiarism in Higher Education (Oxford: Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development, Oxford Brookes University, 2002), 96pp. This book costs £14.95, and it can be ordered from: http://www.brookes.ac.uk/services/ocsd/publications. It goes into greater detail than Carroll’s other writings on plagiarism, including useful advice on disciplinary procedures and punishment. There is an extensive bibliography and list of resources. The book is supported by a very useful and informative website: http://www.brookes.ac.uk/services/ocsd/4_resource/plagiarism .html.

The Council of Writing Program Administrators, Defining and Avoiding Plagiarism: The WPA Statement of Best Practices, at http://www.wpacouncil.org/positions/WPAplagiarism.pdf .

Bone, Alison, Plagiarism: a guide for law lecturers, UK Centre for Legal Education, updated December 2003, at http://www.ukcle.ac.uk/resources/plagiarism.html . This brief guide includes many useful links, and an extensive bibliography.

Franklyn-Stokes, A. and Newstead, S.E., ‘Undergraduate Cheating: who does what and why?’, Studies in Higher Education 20.2, 1995, 159-172. This claims to be the first published study of plagiarism in UK higher education.

Ashworth, P., Bannister, P., and Thorne, P., ‘Guilty in Whose Eyes? University students’ perceptions of cheating and plagiarism in academic work and assessment’, Studies in Higher Education 22/2, 1997, pp.187–203. This is the outcome of extensive interviews with students, and, as the title implies, it provides very revealing insights into students’ understanding of and attitudes towards cheating and plagiarism.

Levin, Peter, Beat the Witch-hunt! Peter Levin’s Guide to Avoiding and Rebutting Accusations of Plagiarism, for Conscientious Students, November 2003, available at http://www.study-skills.net . Levin is a long-standing teacher at LSE, who has latterly been involved in mentoring students from a range of disciplines. His guide is primarily directed towards students, and some academics may find some of his remarks overly critical of traditional academic practice. Nevertheless, the Guide is packed with good advice of benefit to teachers.

Hunt, Russell, ‘Four Reasons to be Happy about Internet Plagiarism’ Teaching Perspectives (St. Thomas University) 5, December 2002, pp.1-5, available at: http://www.stu.ca/~hunt/4reasons.htm . This is an excerpt from a longer, draft article, ‘In Praise of Plagiarism’, available at: http://www.stu.ca/~hunt/plagiary.htm . It seems clear that Hunt and I have been thinking on similar lines for many years. However, I would be more cautious about flagging internet plagiarism as a blessing in disguise, since this devalues the sincere and justified concern that most academics feel about the criminal aspect of plagiarism.

There is much useful information and advice on the website of the Joint Information Systems Committee’s Plagiarism Advisory Service, including a link to its Plagiarism Detection Service: http://online.northumbria.ac.uk/faculties/art/ information_studies/Imri/Jiscpas/site/jiscpas.asp .

The PRS-LTSN has a web-page devoted to plagiarism, which we hope to populate with more subject-specific materials in due course: http://www.prs-ltsn.ac.uk/links/#plagiarism .

A good site with many links is: http://kerlins.net/bobbi/education/writing/plagiarism.html .

8 Acknowledgments

I sent a draft of the present document to a number of people, some of whom provided detailed and constructive comments, for which I am very grateful. Although I have incorporated most of their suggestions, ultimate responsibility for the text is mine, and none of those listed below should be taken as necessarily approving everything in it:

Peter Ashworth, Martin Benjamin, Andrew Brooks, Jude Carroll, Fiona Duggan, Donna Engelmann, Graham Gibbs, Russ Hunt, Danni Lamb, Peter Levin, David Mossley, Clare Saunders, Pat Scanlon.

Endnotes

  1. Although I swear I thought up this subtitle myself, I have subsequently learned that it has become almost a cliché among writers on plagiarism.
  2. Paraphrased from the headline: ‘Sex more common than thought in US campuses.’ I have no record of the source.
  3. A UK study in 1995, before the internet explosion, found that over half a sample of students admitted to some form of cheating, and 54% to plagiarism; and that staff estimates were much lower: see Franklin-Stokes and Newstead 1995, pp.169-170. According to Carroll and Appleton 2001, a figure of 80% is to be found in Walker, J., ‘Student Plagiarism in Universities: What are we going to do about it?’, Higher Education Research and Development 17, 1998, pp.89-106. However, as Peter Levin has pointed out in a personal communication, these and other such surveys are often vitiated by students’ poor understanding of what plagiarism is. They may have admitted to plagiarism ‘on the basis of practices that many academics would in fact find acceptable.’ More recent studies have been careful to ask students questions about clearly defined acts of copying or paraphrasing.
  4. This is one reason why I don’t offer my own definition of plagiarism. But more importantly, I want to sharpen the distinction between deliberate plagiarism as cheating, and unintentional plagiarism as poor academic practice, which is obscured by the use of a single term covering both. I have even advocated avoiding the term ‘plagiarism’ altogether. At one extreme, Peter Levin goes as far as to say that even good academic practice is plagiarism, since it essentially involves appropriating the ideas of others: ‘Cheating has given plagiarism a bad name’ (Levin 2003, p.2). A thoughtful and philosophical discussion of the differences between the concepts of plagiarism, cheating, and collusion is to be found in Johnston, W., ‘The Concept of Plagiarism’, http://www.ilthe.ac.uk/1228.asp (ILTHE members only) (accessed 15.12.03).
  5.  
  6. The metaphor of digestion is an important one for explaining the difference between surface and deep reading; but it needs unpacking if students are to understand it. I tell them that it involves more than just translating someone else’s words into your own words (paraphrasing), but extracting what is essential, incorporating it into your own being as a thinker, and rejecting the rest. This is why I believe that summarising is a higher-order intellectual activity than paraphrasing. However, Peter Levin might be right that paraphrasing is an important first step in developing the skill of deep reading (personal communication).
  7. http://www.indiana.edu/~wts/plagiarism.html (accessed 10.08.03).
  8. For example, the University of Leeds Regulations state that ‘To qualify for the award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy the candidate must . . . present a thesis which shall be written in English on the subject of his/her advanced study and research, and satisfy the examiners that it contains evidence of originality and independent critical ability and matter suitable for publication, and that it is of a sufficient merit to qualify for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.’ Leaving aside the tautologous nature of the last phrase, there is no further guidance as to what ‘evidence of originality’ means, and it is left to the examiners to specify what evidence there is in their report.
  9. I point out to my students that, if they were doing maths and were asked to prove Pythagoras’s theorem, their proof wouldn’t be original (because Pythagoras has already done it), but as long as they thought it out for themselves rather than copying it out of a book, their work would be independent. Obviously they need help; but the help given should be like the help Socrates gave to Meno (though perhaps less leading at HE level). cf. Levin 2003, p.4.
  10. The University of Leeds distinguishes between ‘cheating in University Examinations’ and ‘plagiarism in University assessments and the presentation of fraudulent or fabricated coursework’. Its definition of the latter is: ‘Plagiarism is defined as the copying of ideas, text, data or other work (or any combination thereof) without permission and/or due acknowledgment. Fraudulent or fabricated coursework is the production and submission of such work, particularly reports of laboratory or practical work, to satisfy the requirements of a University Assessment in whole or in part.’ Among the oddities of this definition is the reference to ‘without permission’. Do we ever expect students to obtain the permission of authors they quote from, and would they escape censure if they had obtained an author’s permission to plagiarise? (Since I wrote the initial draft of the present document, ‘with permission’ has been dropped from the definition of plagiarism in the University Regulations. I have also been told that the Leeds regulations have been ‘shamelessly plagiarised by several universities’—but in this case, as in many others, those who are professionally concerned with plagiarism take a remarkably relaxed view about the appropriation of their own ideas. They are more concerned that the situation should be improved than that their individual contribution should be publicly recognised.)
  11. Some may feel that ‘crime’ is too strong a word. I use it in order to maintain as sharp a distinction as possible between deliberate fraud and bad academic practice. I should also acknowledge my debt to the spin doctors of New Labour, since what I am recommending is that we should be ‘tough on crime, and tough on the causes of crime.’
  12. Clare Saunders, in a personal communication, makes the valid point that being caught plagiarising can be a valuable learning experience—and I myself know of at least one student who was severely reprimanded for plagiarism in his first year, but went on to get a well-deserved first-class degree. Nevertheless, it remains the case that the time involved is disproportionate, and it is far better to prevent plagiarism from occurring in the first place.
  13. I am assured that, at Leeds at least, any bias in favour of the student is due solely to the judicial principle that ‘a poorly supported and ill-financed individual is allowed more latitude than a well-financed and professionally supported organisation.’ However, Carroll 2002, p.72, notes an increasing tendency for students to be represented by solicitors, whose ‘adversarial and aggressive manner’ is another source of stress for teachers who discover plagiarism.
  14. There is a nice story of the American student who sent an email to his tutor, saying ‘I’ve found what I need for the essay. To save the trouble of printing it out, can I just send you the URL?’ At least that way he would have avoided breach of copyright. Nevertheless, we need to preserve a clear distinction between plagiarism and breach of copyright. Breach of copyright involves potential financial loss to the owner of the copyright, whereas plagiarism involves the owner’s moral right to be acknowledged. Besides, no-one would be acquitted of a charge of plagiarism on the grounds that the source was out of copyright.
  15. I have confined myself to reasons why deliberate plagiarism is a crime. There are many more reasons why it is immoral, not least that it puts honest students at a relative disadvantage. Valerie Powell makes the interesting suggestion that students should choose the punishment: ‘There is nothing like a bit of peer pressure and believe it or not the punishments decided by the students are usually more inventive and much harsher than any we could devise. They know exactly where to “kick where it hurts”.’ (http://listserv.unb.ca/bin/wa?A2=ind0312&L=stlhe-l&O=D&F=&S=&P=10536, accessed 27.12.03). But much though I applaud the idea that students should be subject to peer pressure as members of a co-operative community of learners, I don’t think we should abandon the ancient Athenian principle that actual retribution should be in the hands of some higher authority than the victims themselves. Again on the moral front, many US institutions attempt to discourage plagiarism through an ‘honor code’ which students sign up to. However I have seen no evidence that plagiarism is less prevalent in the US than elsewhere, and I am convinced that trying to introduce honour codes into the UK would go down like a lead balloon. For more on honour codes and plagiarism, see Larry Hinman’s site on academic integrity: http://ethics.acusd.edu/Resources/AcademicIntegrity/Index.html (accessed 28.12.03) Also interesting is an article by Paul Robinson, called ‘Code comfort’, in The Spectator of 27 September 2003, though its focus is on honour codes in US military academies.
  16. And, one might add, there is a small minority who want to get a degree with little or no work at all.
  17. Hunt 2002 makes some incisive points about how university structures deflect students away from wanting to learn, and towards being motivated solely by grades counting towards their certification.
  18. Hunt 2002, Reason 4.
  19. Gibbs, G. and Simpson, C., ‘How assessment influences student learning—a literature review’, Draft, September 2002, at http://www.ncteam.ac.uk/projects/fdtl/fdtl4/ assessment/literature_review.doc, pp.1-2 (accessed 11.08.03). A final version is now in press as ‘Does your assessment support your students’ learning?’, Journal of Learning and Teaching in Higher Education.
  20. It would be an interesting exercise to take a large cohort of students, and see whether omitting alternate marks made any difference to their overall degree classifications.
  21. All these tips are relevant to assessed coursework and exams; but only some of them apply to dissertations and theses, which are necessarily more open-ended.
  22. In a personal communication, Martin Benjamin has raised the question, which arises especially in the history of philosophy, of what to do about ‘old chestnut’ questions which have proved successful at eliciting good work from students in the past. My answer is that I have suggested a whole battery of techniques for reducing the likelihood of plagiarism, without implying that every single one should be applied to every assessment. If it is felt educationally desirable to recycle old questions, then other means should be used to counteract the increased scope for plagiarism. For example, you might ask students to evaluate papers on the same topic from previous years, or to show you a draft outlining work in progress.
  23. In a personal communication, Martin Benjamin has suggested an interesting variant: that the essay should be treated as having a single author, with each student being given half the mark.
  24. The official position at Leeds is that there is no ban on letting students see each other’s work, but that if two essays are substantially the same, both students will be found guilty of plagiarism in the unlikely event that one doesn’t confess.
  25. However, cheating is becoming ever more sophisticated with modern technology. See Cole, S. and Kiss, E., ‘What can we do about student cheating?’, About Campus, May/June 2000, pp. 5-12, quoted in Carroll and Appleton 2001, p.6.
  26. The pressure to revert to sat examinations is well described by David Punter in ‘The Death of the Essay’, English Subject Centre Newsletter Online, 1, May 2001, at http://www.english.ltsn.ac.uk/resources/general/publications/newsletters/ newsissue1/index.htm (accessed 11.08.03).
  27. I owe this example to Dudley Knowles of the University of Glasgow in a private conversation.
  28. But not completely so. In Italy, most assessment is oral, and there was a recent case where students had bribed staff to ask questions they were warned about in advance. See the Times Higher, 25.07.03, p.13.
  29. Unfortunately, I cannot refer to my sources without revealing the identity of the plagiarist, which would be unethical.
  30. A UK TV interviewer famous/notorious for the ferocity of his questioning.
  31. For this section, I am indebted to a deliberately contentious piece by my colleague David Mossley. The piece was removed from the PRS-LTSN website because too many readers thought it represented PRS-LTSN policy rather than a stimulus to debate. I shall re-visit the whole issue in much greater detail in my forthcoming ‘Plagiarism Really Is A Crime: A Counterblast to Anarchists and Postmodernists’, which will be somewhat more sympathetic to anarchism and postmodernism than the title suggests.
  32. Almost from day one students are introduced to Descartes’ ego cogito—even though it is a common criticism in the philosophical literature that all he was entitled to say was ‘a thought was observed.’
  33. The classic text is Geisler, C., Academic Literacy and the Nature of Expertise: Reading, Writing, and Knowing in Academic Philosophy (Hillsdale, New Jersey, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1994), xvii+354pp. It is surprising that this seminal work does not seem to have given rise to further publications on the topic.
  34. Wittgenstein, L., Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, tr. Pears, D.F. and McGuinness, B.F. (London, Routledge, 1961, repr. 1974), p.3. Laurence Goldstein, ‘Wittgenstein’s Ph.D. Viva—a Re-Creation’, Philosophy, 74, 1999, 499–513, discusses the extent to which Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, submitted as a PhD thesis, was plagiarised from the ideas of others. He comes to the conclusion that ‘had the dissertation been judged by normal standards of originality and quality of philosophical argumentation, it would have failed.’ My thanks to Peter Simons for drawing my attention to this witty and scholarly article.
  35. Ryle, G., The Concept of Mind (London, Hutchinson, 1949).
  36. The different expectations in different disciplines are emphasised by Lea, M.R. and Street, B.V., ‘Student Writing in Higher Education: an academic literacies approach’, Studies in Higher Education 23.2, 1998, pp.157-172.
  37. Hunt 2002 makes the point that emphasis on original thought is peculiar to modern Western culture.
  38. Or as little, given that technically our employers own everything we produce as academics.
  39. Though some essay banks are free. Here, for example, is a bank of philosophy essays: http://www.revise.it/reviseit/EssayLab/Undergraduate/Philosophy/ (accessed 09/08/03). For an example of a subscription service, see [next page] http://www.ukessays.com/philosophy.html (accessed 30.12.03). It charges £70.00 per 500 words for a 2.1-standard essay, and £52.50 extra per 500 words for a first-class one; and I like the fact that it retains the copyright of the essays, so that students won’t submit them for assessment as their own work.
  40. Like the classics master who caught a pupil reading from his own translation of a text, and said to him ‘As it says in the Bible, “The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s crib”‘ (Isaiah i.3).
  41. If you have the essay in digital form, you can compare selected passages using the Flesch-Kincaid index and other measures in MS-Word: Tools, Spelling and Grammar, Options, check Show Readability Statistics.
  42. See Carroll and Appleton 2001, p.29, who go into considerable detail as to the legal aspects of disciplinary committees.
  43. For some comparisons of different software packages, see Alsop, G. and Thompsett, C., Plagiarism: Online Tools to Relieve the Tedium of Detection,August 2001, at http://www.seda.ac.uk/ed_devs/vol2/plagiarism.htm (accessed 28.12.03); Culwin, F. and Lancaster, T., A Review of Electronic Services for Plagiarism Detection in Student Submissions (2000), at http://www.ics.ltsn.ac.uk/pub/conf2000/Papers/culwin.htm (accessed 28.12.03); and a more recent article ‘Plagiarism, Prevention, Deterrence and Detection’ at http://www.ilthe.ac.uk/1108.asp (ILTHE members only) (accessed 20.12.03). However, the technology is developing so fast that comparative reviews are out of date by the time they are published.
  44. More recently, UK-based CFL Software Development has made its CopyCatch Gold software available free of charge to institutions, and apparently it is able to detect paraphrasing. See Times Higher, 08.09.03, p.7. Further details are available at http://www.copycatchgold.com/ (accessed 09.08.03).
  45. It is likely that, within the near future, all institutions will require students to sign their consent at registration. However, as with all registration material, a signature does not mean that students have absorbed the information. As and when their work is submitted to the plagiarism detection service, they should be given a clear explanation of what plagiarism consists in, and why the detection service is being used. On a separate point, Levin 2003, p.18, encourages students to claim copyright for their work using the © symbol. I think this an excellent idea—not so much for the reason Levin gives (to discourage teachers from stealing their work), but because it will encourage students to see their work as a polished, original product, in the same league as published academic writing.
  46. Franklyn-Stokes and Newstead 1995, p.159.
  47. Carroll and Appleton 2001, p.8, and Carroll 2002, p.5, make the same point. They also draw attention to the irony that a work on plagiarism might itself count as partly plagiarised.

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