Plagiarism on the rise.

Today’s New York Times reports that 38% of undergraduates have plagiarised works that they’ve found on-line. Appallingly, half of these cheaters don’t consider it cheating. This just confirms my long-held belief that the vast majority of college students ought not be going to college. If they’re cheating, they’re plainly not in school to learn. They should be in the workforce, and they should have been encouraged to join the workforce when they were in high school, and not to waste their time in college.

I suspect that the problem may be worse at Virginia Tech, if my teachers’ admonitions are any indicator. Having grown up with UVa’s honor code, I find Virginia Tech’s honor code absolutely pathetic.

At UVa, the only punishment is expulsion. It is, consequently, taken pretty seriously by many students. At VT, there are a series of punishments, ranging from a “recommended zero grade on the assignment” to “permanent dismissal from the university,” with four classes of punishments in between. My teachers’ warnings thus far haven’t even involved expulsion — the best that they can muster is “you’ll get a zero on the assignment!” VT’s honor system statistics indicate that the majority of students are found guilty, but doesn’t record the punishments that are meted out. It just doesn’t seem like VT’s system has teeth.

But the difference between the two that really bothers me is student enforcement. At UVa, students are obliged to report other students for honor offenses. It is an honor offense to know that a student has cheated and to fail to report them. At VT, there is no such obligation. It is presumably socially unacceptable to report others for cheating, and so I suspect that the majority of accusations come from teachers and not from students. Students are in a far better position to know if their peers are cheating than teachers. I believe that VT’s failure to integrate the obligation of student enforcement is folly.

Professor Lou Bloomfield, well known at UVa for turning in 158 students for cheating in May of 2001, has created a Plagiarism Resource Site for professors. He’s created a software product, available for Windows and Linux, called “Copyfind.” Copyfind compares any number of documents and determines how many of them contain strikingly-similar passages. It can be fed every paper submitted for a class — which must be submitted in an electronic format, of course — and compare each of them to each of the other papers, flagging any paper that raises concern. That was how he caught those 158 students. (48 were ultimately found guilty. 90 had their cases dismissed, with the remainder simply dropping out of school or coming up with a viable excuse.)

It seems unlikely that many parents are likely to realize that they’re wasting their time by sending their kids to college. And it also seems unlikely that VT will beef up their honor code anytime soon, either. So I hope that professors are at least using something like Copyfind to help catch cheaters. The less of the university’s time, the professors’ time, and my time that’s wasted by unwilling and incapable students, the better off that we’ll all be.

Published by Waldo Jaquith

Waldo Jaquith (JAKE-with) is an open government technologist who lives near Char­lottes­­ville, VA, USA. more »