plaqgiarism for fun and profit

[theteach <theteach@theteachonline.net>]

Since plagiarism comes up for discussion from time to time, I thought I 
would pass this article on.

alex

Jon Carroll's columns are archived at:
http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/carroll/

Jon Carroll

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

As every schoolteacher knows, the Internet has made plagiarism a real 
growth industry. No longer must students pay someone's older sister to 
write their term papers, or send away to illicit essay mills run by 
disgraced English lecturers -- now they can just go to a Web site, plug in 
their specifications (including level of sophistication) and, voila, an 
easily downloadable essay-like document will appear in no time.

Some might say that students buying term papers circumvents the whole 
purpose of education, which is to teach people how to do stuff, like write 
essays, that they could not do before. Let's hold that thought and come 
back to it.

Teachers are not without resources. There is, for instance, Turnitin.com, 
which boasts a database of 4.5 billion pages from newspapers, academic 
journals, books and student reports. It allows teachers to search for word 
strings that match those in the papers they are grading. That way, when 
the inevitable awkward conversation happens, the teacher will have 
hard-copy proof as opposed to well-grounded suspicions.

In Canada, though, students are fighting back. The students say that 
Turnitin.com and similar institutions breed a "culture of distrust." 
Chantal Brushett, president of the student union at the College of Mt. 
Saint Vincent in Nova Scotia, was outraged on behalf of first-year 
students: "All of a sudden they're being accused of plagiarism when they 
don't even know what the word plagiarism means."

I bet you think I'm making that up, but I'm not. And indeed, Mt. Saint 
Vincent, apparently swayed by the idea that its students are too stupid to 
be guilty of anything, has in fact banned teachers from using 
Turnitin.com.

The students have also come up with a rather more interesting argument. 
The student papers used as part of the database are, they say, the 
intellectual property of the students who wrote them. Turnitin.com is 
illegally profiting from their work, and the university is culpable in 
uploading their work without permission.

Of course, universities routinely claim the rights to the fruits of work 
conducted by people under contract to them. (Is a student "under 
contract"? The student is not being paid; quite the reverse. Interesting.) 
Universities profit from patents all the time; indeed, they hire faculty 
members partly based on their perceived or actual ability to generate 
revenue for the campus.

And, as we have seen, schools like the University of California use those 
profits to provide insanely lucrative employment contracts for their top 
administrators. UC is paying $410,000 over two years to a woman named 
Celeste Rose for not being vice chancellor of UC Davis. I would agree to 
refrain from being chancellor of any campus -- or, indeed, of all campuses 
-- for a bargain-basement $100,000. Why is there no competitive bidding 
for these jobs?

Apparently Rose was thinking of filing a discrimination lawsuit, and that 
is perhaps what she's really being paid not to do. In the real world, 
that's called extortion.

UC Berkeley is in the process of accepting $500 million from British 
Petroleum in order to rip up a bunch more oak trees and study new ways of 
creating ethanol, ways that include genetically engineered insects. 
Science fiction: more than a genre. There are those who say that ethanol 
is pretty much a scam, and the money is a way of reverse-repectabilitating 
the fraud.

(If you'd care to learn about the ethanol thing and so much more, there's 
a panel discussion at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Wheeler Auditorium on the Cal 
campus about the 2007 Farm Bill, currently before Congress. Of course, you 
don't really care about the Farm Bill, because it's just about the food 
you eat, but it starts early and afterward you can go to the Smokehouse 
for a double cheeseburger. The panel will be moderated by Michael Pollan 
and will feature not-famous smart people.)

So suddenly the pro-plagiarism arguments become a bit more meaty. Let us 
think of the student body as a thin veil of virtue covering the face of a 
rapacious beast. The students pay good money in the expectation that it 
will be returned to them down the line in the form of higher salaries. 
Even if these students are subsequently hired by the university, that's a 
decade-long float the university enjoys.

So if students are merely the cosmetic branch of a large corporate engine, 
much like those sweet little conservation ads that Chevron runs, then why 
should they be abused as cheaters? The nature of the interaction is clear; 
no one is under any illusions. Give them a little faculty face time, a 
little football and some great places to hold parties, and pass them on to 
the real world in four years. Everybody wins! I wrote this whole thing 
myself. I got the quotes from a Canadian Broadcasting Corp. report, and of 
course I learned the words in English class, but still.