Plagiarism - a crisis? or a crisi-tunity?

I love plagiarists - all teachers should love plagiarists! We need them the way cops need thieves. Police only can improve their tactics when thieves become more adept at what they do. So it goes with us. Thirty years ago if you wanted to cheat, options were pretty limited: you could buy essays through the mail or more dangerously, from others who had already taken the course. Teachers were smart then as well: they would change topics slightly to catch up would-be edu-felons. Teachers (especially English teachers) have notoriously good memories for writing styles, so that frequently didn't work.

Fast forward to now, we have the new wave of cyber-cheats. They have unlimited resources and scads of people who are just like them: they want a free ride on the backs of those kids who work hard and want to improve their skills. Like cops, we have to think like the criminals, but revert to some very old-fashioned techniques:

• if they use the Internet to get fake work, we'll use the Internet to check the validity of work
• let them know that we watch out for cheaters, don't keep this a secret
• impress upon them that effective research and citation is just legalized plagiarism, we just want to know the origin of the information
• demanding in-class work, paper and pen notes and keeping clear check-lists of students' process writing
• post-writing interviews
• not using worn-out, over-used essay topics
• not over-using the essay as a piece of assessment

We place a lot of pressure on young people to achieve the highest possible standard so that they can earn the best marks and go to the best school. Parents are sometimes culpable in this growing problem. Many parents believe that the only route for their child is through university - anything else is second best and second rate. Parents have asked me in front of their child on Parents' Night: What can my daughter do to get 90 percent? She needs to get into (insert name of elite-sounding university here)! This kind of pressure can cause smart kids to do stupid things. They sometimes express this stress through plagiarising work.

ENG 4U is the one course that many kids who are bound for UW Engineering or Mac Health Sciences hate because it always drops their average. ENG 4U teachers are seen as gate-keepers by 1st-year profs. The pressure they feel to assess rigidly and to a high standard is enormous; this pressure is felt by these stressed-out 17 year-olds.

Of course some students still cheat because they are lazy. But by and large, I have found that panic, desperation and apathy are the biggest causes of cheating. When caught, frequently students have no moral conflict with what they did. Plagiarism was just something they had to do to get the mark they needed. Car theft is just something some people have to do to get what they need. Cheating is often just a matter of course.