This story showed up on TechDirt the other day and it dovetails nicely with another “hot button” topic in academia we’ve been discussing in class: Plagiarism. Over the past several years, the academic world has worked itself into a bit of a frenzy over these issues, turning to anti-plagiarism tools like Turnitin.com and, in my case, a whole class on “Biomedical Communication and Integrity.” But if we try to look at these situations objectively, is it really that big of a problem?
Reputation is one of the big currencies of the academic world, so it makes sense that universities and research institutions want to do everything they can to preserve it. Nothing harms your credibility more than discovering that published papers were based on fake data or that somebody cut-and-paste another’s work and passed it off, uncredited, as their own.
And then there’s situations that seem like overkill, or that aren’t quite as clear-cut as some might have you believe. In undergrad, I had a professor explicitly tell us that studying from previous exams was cheating, and that if we were found doing it he would do UMBC’s equivalent of “prosecuting to the fullest extent of the law.” What I gathered from such a statement is that the professor wanted to be able to reuse similar test questions from year to year, a strategy that can more or less be taken advantage of by studying previous exams.
Something similar seems to have happened at the University of Central Florida, where a professor claimed that he wrote his own test questions, but in actuality cut and paste the ones he liked from a question bank. Some students got a hold of that bank and used it as a study aid. When the professor found out, he accused everybody of cheating. In my class this quarter we were told that using old data in a new paper was academically dishonest; that it was, in fact, possible to plagiarize yourself.
In a way, these situations strike me as the kind of illogical moral panicking we’ve seen extensively from the entertainment industries, where normal actions are reclassified as bad and the way in which these behaviors are now unethical are aggressively taught. The goal of classes is to learn the material, the common assessment of this being a test. Old tests are an excellent way to study, as they get students thinking about how the information will be tested and help them determine which areas they need to review further. It is the professor’s job to generate an exam that will actually test the students’ knowledge of the material, either by tweaking and rearranging old questions or writing new ones. The goal of research is to contribute something useful to the field. Referencing previous data is often important to establish a background for a new study, and since you are the one who did the work, it should always be impossible to “plagiarize” yourself.
To me, cheating and plagiarism are methods of circumventing doing the required work and lying that you did, so while they may be helpful in the short term, it ultimately harms the person doing it. These terms seem to have been co-opted to mean, “doing work in a way somebody doesn’t like.” Memorizing the exact question and answer combination for a test, or sneaking in study aids? Cheating. Learning the answers to a 250-question test bank so you’re prepared for the 50 questions on the test? That’s studying. Copy-pasting somebody else’s paper and submitting it as your own? Plagiarism. Tweaking a paper you spent hours writing in another class for a new class? Not plagiarism. Forging data or submitting the same thing multiple times to inflate your list of publications? Dishonest. Building on your previous work? Not dishonest.
It’s important for academic institutions to not get caught up in a kind of “there are cheaters among us” witch hunt in their quest to improve the overall integrity of the community. Somebody who cheats their way through school will be unprepared for when that knowledge is demanded of them. Researchers simply repackaging old data or copying others aren’t going to make a name for themselves as leaders in their field. Because they cause people to assume that you’re this kind of person, accusations of cheating and plagiarism are already reputation-destroying—they aren’t something to be handed out lightly.
3 responses to “Is “Academic Integrity” a Significant Issue or Just Another Moral Panic?”
The simplest solution, to plagiarism, I think, is the oldest: a mutually-enforced Honor Code. It’s shocking how little cheating happens when everybody agrees not to do it. This eliminates the issue of draconian professors expecting students to be cheating, as well. My college has been operating under this system quite smashingly since 1775.
As for the seriousness of plagiarism itself, I concur with your assessment that those who publish faulty and plagiarized research academically will, as the adage goes, not prosper – and they’ll lose their reputation once this all is revealed. What is more problematic to me, though, is how many people will be ensnared by the false publication before it is found to be plagiarized or based on faulty information; how many ears will hear the misinformation and not hear the correcting denouement?
As for ‘plagiarizing yourself’ by building upon your own previous thoughts and ideas, I’ve long agreed that the entire notion is ridiculous. Do these academians expect us to have all our potential thoughts on a subject at once? Isn’t knowledge something cumulative, that expands as time goes on? Goodness.
Great comments.
As to the point about people being misled, one would hope that the peer review process can help prevent much of it from happening. If reviewers are critically examining their colleague’s papers, plagiarism should make itself known relatively quickly. Faked data is perhaps more difficult to catch (and correct), especially once things make it into general public knowledge. I’m not sure if there’s an easy solution to that, or that draconian “enforcement” at universities will do anything to reduce it.
Honestly, the same problem exists with legitimate research as well, when something significant has been disproved or replaced. The best we can do is try to get the correct information out there.
I agree that the “honor code” works quite well in these communities. I don’t believe that academic dishonesty is as widespread as some might have you believe – unless, of course, you’re relying on these new and expanded definitions of what such dishonesty entails.
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