The other most frequent
occasion for academic dishonesty, after examination-room copying and small
homework exercises, is the term paper (and often the smaller mid-term papers)
in a course in the humanities. Sometimes one of the social sciences, too. If we
could imitate the Oxbridge system of simply not basing grades on exercises of
this sort, using only the annual proctored examinations, there would by
definition be no possibility of plagiarism for academic preferment among undergraduates. But the American system, which is
increasingly copied in other countries as ever larger fractions of their
populations head for colleges, requires grading to be distributed over many
courses and, in each course, based on many exercises.
Even at the most elementary
level, departments of English, history, and so on are agreed that our style of
education requires us to ask students to perform substantial amounts of work
that culminates in a document produced out of our sight; and at an advanced
level almost all disciplines do so.
Students must learn to use the library, they must have exercise in
writing, they must learn to document the sources and results of their
researches. This cannot be done in an
examination room, and we professors absolutely cannot watch them as they do
it. If we then grade the student on the
result, the temptation to plagiarism is as strong as would be the temptation
to cheat during an unproctored examination.
More, perhaps, since even their fellow-students will not be an
embarrassing presence, as they might be in an examination room. Apart from policing, is there anything to be
done?
The answer is yes, and the
form of the answer is perhaps the most cheerful news there is to be found in
this entire essay on the melancholy subject of student dishonesty. In essence it is this: The device that holds the best promise of
reducing the incidence of plagiarism is exactly the device that best fosters
good teaching and good learning. It
lies in the manner in which the assignment itself is given to the student. A vague or banal assignment will not only
teach nothing to the honest student, but it will of its very nature make
dishonest responses easy to come by; while a focused, trenchant question will
elicit searching work from the student and at the same time make cheating practically
impossible.
To take an extreme example of
a bad assignment, suppose one were to say, as I recall was said to me somewhere
in the 10th Grade, "Write a Report on termites." This was for a class in --- I can hardly
remember --- English? Social
Studies? It was not biology, I am
certain, because I never had a high school class in biology. I do know that about a thousand words were
expected. I also know that my friend
Joe Frein and I (our whole class had received the same assignment) went to a
small Funk and Wagnall's encyclopedia my parents had bought in furtherance of
their children's education, found the article "Termites," and counted
the words. There being about two
thousand, our only problem was to remove half of them; we did this with such
success that our paper was praised.
I cannot recall whether we
submitted our report jointly or severally; probably that was not the
point. It was one of my early lessons
in editing, though the teacher may not have intended it as such. To this day I
cannot recall what the point in fact was.
At that stage of school, one did "reports"; that's all. "Plagiarism" and
"research" were simply not part of the high school lexicon.
Whatever the purpose may have
been then, such an assignment cannot be suited to any purpose we have in
college. Yet there are those who give
out assignments not much different, and then grow indignant when they receive a
paper they construe as having been plagiarized. The fact that the assignment, even if "honestly" accomplished,
teaches nothing worthwhile goes hand-in-hand with the fact that plagiarism will
be all but inevitable in some of the papers turned in.
Suppose, for example, that
the professor of History 236, "Recent America, 1914-1970," wishes to
assign to each student a term paper focusing on some special but significant
part of the period studied during the term.
He does not say to the class, "Each of you is to write a
term paper, 3000 words due April 29, on some special but significant part of
the period studied during the term," and then collect the results on April
29. To do this is to court receiving a
host of "reports" taken from various textbooks, treatises or
encyclopedias, some of them second-hand from a fraternity file of old term
papers. The professor can have little
idea, when he reads the results, whether they represent learning at all; the library
and the files are full of documents of the sort he has asked for, and even an
original one, carefully done by his best student, will not look much different
from the others.
A slightly improved procedure
is to hand out to the class a sheet containing thirty topics, and ask each
student to choose one of them, but seeing to it that no two students choose the
same topic. In this way the professor
can encourage students to talk to each other about what they are doing, and how
they are going about it, something professors often foolishly discourage by
giving the "same" assignment to all the class with the injunction to
"do your own work without help from anyone else."
One student chooses
"Franklin D. Roosevelt's First Hundred Days"; what now? The assignment is still incomplete. The files and libraries are crowded with
papers and chapters on even this particular three-month period on Capitol
Hill. Is the student entitled to go to
a file and find a paper on the subject, copy out the bibliography, then go to
the library and, consulting no more and no less than that bibliography (page
references and all), write out an "original" report in half the time
it would take an ordinary person? His
paper might not be exactly a plagiarism, but it would certainly resemble the
one in the files, and its writing would have taught him only a part of what the
professor intended him to learn from the exercise.
What is the student really
being asked to do? Inform the professor
of what went on in the spring of 1933?
Of course not; the professor already knows. Improve on the analysis given by a hundred historical studies
done by professional historians and biographers, not to mention the newspapers
of the time and the memoirs of the principals?
Again, certainly not. Condense
everything known to a thousand original, well-chosen, apt phrases never before
used? Impossible. It is likely the student is really being
asked something like this:
"I want you to learn to
use the library, and to learn to read and to write. In this assignment I am asking you to submit to me a document
which will be partial evidence of your present state of accomplishment along
these lines. I have given you a topic
as a focus for this exercise, and of course you'll learn something about 1933
as you go, but that is only part of it.
I want you to read at least ten different views of the era you are
studying (there are hundreds), and I want you to find those ten by the same
method you would use to find the hundreds if you wished to, just so
you'll get used to the method. I want
you to put the main points down on index cards, and classify them thus and so,
and to do it in such richness that the classification you make will have some
bearing on the ease with which you will be able to use the material when it is
time to write. Then I want you to
outline your argument, write it down in good English sentences, and provide
enough footnotes so that the reader will know which statements are your
syntheses and evaluations (if any), which are "facts" reported in
newspapers, etc., and which are syntheses and evaluations of other people. Finally, I want you to remember what you've
done, so that if you have to do something a little more elaborate next time
you'll have a practiced hand, and maybe an idea of how to do it more efficiently
than you did it this time.
"The actual document you
submit is thus only part of what I want from you. It is traditional that I give you a grade on the basis of that
paper, and not follow you around the library and dormitory as you do your work
--- more than traditional, it is convenient.
This means I have to infer from your paper how well you've done what I
am asking. Please make your work of
such a nature that the inferences I draw from that paper are correct. If I find I am deceived by it, I shall want
to explore with you the errors you have made which led to my deception. If I find that the deception is deliberate,
I shall be angry."
This is an abbreviated
version of the assignment as it should be given, printed here as if it were a
three-minute lecture delivered in class on the day the topics are handed
out. As a matter of pedagogy this is
not entirely the way it should be done.
Every professor knows that any given three-minute segment of his
lectures will, whatever the subject, pass right by a large part of the
class. The message contained in the
two quoted paragraphs should be delivered more than once, both orally and in
writing --- on the same paper that contains the list of suggested topics. (It should of course be made clear that a
corresponding instruction applies, mutatis mutandis, to papers
on topics other than Roosevelt's Hundred Days.)
An instruction of this sort
should be repeated in many ways, and expanded.
That place where I had the professor explaining that the notes should be
"classified thus and so..." is, in particular, an enormous
abbreviation: honest scholarship and
its apparatus must be taught in detail, with examples and with counterexamples,
and not only on the day the official assignment is given out, but throughout
the course. If the students are
supposed to know not only American history from 1914 to 1970, but how to find
out more about it than the required reading supplies, and how to write about
it, then the duty of the professor is to teach not only American
history from 1914 to 1970, but also how to find out more about it than the
required reading supplies, and how to write about it.
Not only is the quoted
assignment an abbreviation, it is a simplification as well, compared with what
should be done. I would not give that
assignment verbatim even if I were sure the student understood
every word, because the topic, "Roosevelt's Hundred Days," is really
insufficiently focused to teach what it should or to discourage plagiarism (or
some lesser form of shoddy work). The
dormitory and fraternity files, however loaded they might be with papers on
various topics in American history, probably contain only a few papers that can
be harvested for the Roosevelt Hundred Day story, but those few are
there. And then, what about the
hundred days? It won't teach a student
much about politics, economics or Roosevelt to have him merely run through the
list of legislation generated by the Brain Trust, duly named, described and
arranged in chronological order of their passage through Congress. History (and not only history) is a matter
of questions, not a list of facts.
How much support, how much opposition, did the Roosevelt program muster, and why? Did it accomplish its purpose? Were European countries a source of any of these ideas? How did it happen that Roosevelt subscribed to this particular program and not some other? If he had tried something different (find an example, something in a newspaper or a speech of a Congressman), would it have passed Congress? Would it have stood a better chance with the Supreme Court than the NRA? And so on; there is no end to questions, but students often do not realize this, and simply believe any explanation given by an authoritative looking book or professor, and write it down. There is no use in a professor's demanding scholarly apparatus in a term paper if he does not first demonstrate the necessity for that apparatus, if he does not make it plain --- at every turn ---that for everything we think we know, we must be prepared to explain how it was that we came to know it. Or believe it.
This must go on all
term. The "assignment" is not
something handed out during a Wednesday in January, to be forgotten by the
professor until a Wednesday in April; it is the essence of what he and the
students are doing. On the printed
assignment sheet, the item about the Hundred Days must contain enough specific
questions to be addressed by the term paper to make it impossible that any student
paper written in previous years can serve an illegitimate purpose, or that any
scholarly work will contain enough consecutive pages addressed to those
particular questions to serve as a crib.
Of course, a true academic
felon can still hire someone to write a paper for him; there are even mail-order
services for this sort of thing. But
that is mere academic crime. We are
talking here about more ordinary students, who can be taught better by such
assignments, steered towards understanding by exactly the mechanism that
steers them away from temptation. Not
only is help from "outside sources" not forbidden, it is
demanded. Students are required
to ask help from the scholarly community, from the newspapers, from their
fraternity brothers, exactly as the rest of us ask. They need only be sure to tell us where that help came from, how
trustworthy they think those sources are, how controversial, and so on. That's what footnotes and bibliographies
are for. Who would plagiarize, when he
has all this, when he is downright entitled to use all the help he can get, and
when telling the professor how he got it earns him nothing but praise?
Temptation sometimes arises
from contempt. A silly or pointless
assignment will sometimes generate in the student an anger that translates,
especially as the deadline approaches, into a feeling of righteousness about
evading it. Why waste time pleasing the
old fool; why not just get something down on paper and the hell with it? A good assignment is, on the other hand, an
encouragement. It is thrilling to track
down an answer, boring to copy it down predigested.
But the professor must not
make the assignment too difficult; that, too, can lead to contempt. Who does he think we are? Doesn't he know we have three other classes,
and final exams coming up? He hasn't
got the right to ask me to spend two weeks in the library, as if I were
writing a PhD thesis or something.
The detailing of the
assignment should be as much helpful as it is demanding. For younger students there is no harm in
suggesting some answers, and leading them through the steps needed to defend
the thesis in question, where for older and more experienced students there are
more subtleties of historical interpretation to be considered than the
professor will have time or desire to mention.
Even Beethoven was not initiated with The Well-Tempered Clavier;
he began with scales and minuets, and was told to get them right. Then, little by little, he was permitted to
explore.
Permitted! If only we could induce in our students the
realization that our assignments are a privilege, that now, at long last, we
are putting them on their own, that they can now find out for themselves the
real truth, where before they had to believe "what teacher
said." Wouldn't they be proud to
come back and tell us how they did it?