Writing off plagiarism

By The Daily Progress

Published: August 13, 2008

This newspaper backs the University of Virginia’s efforts to combat plagiarism.
We also respect the university’s single-sanction honor code.

Still, it’s hard not to feel sympathy for the two students expelled from the university’s Semester at Sea program, put ashore in Greece after being found guilty of plagiarism by a university panel.
Plagiarism is a growing problem in academia. A generation of young people who think nothing of illegally copying music or video files also fails to understand why it is wrong to use someone else’s words. The idea of intellectual property and ownership of property seems lost on them.
Also at issue in these two cases is the university’s single sanction for honor code violations — expulsion. Some criticize the sanction as both harsh and simplistic. We think it is important in this age of relativism to maintain high standards and absolute standards for some line-in-the-sand issues. UVa has said this is one of those issues.

Students were told about the single sanction before joining the program. The two students who were expelled were from other universities. Not having lived with UVa’s single-sanction policy, as do full-time students from the day they set foot on grounds, the pair probably understood the policy intellectually but had not internalized it.
Meanwhile, the policy is handled differently away from campus. At the university, justice is meted out by a student-run committee; student control of the process is one of the ways the harsh sanction can be administered fairly and be accepted by other students. At sea, professors made the expulsion decision.

Critics of the ruling have also raised issues of deliberate intent vs. ignorance. One student says he simply forgot to footnote a quote. Another says she didn’t anticipate that phrases cited by her professor as plagiarism were specific enough to deserve that designation.
“No one had ever defined paraphrasing for me,” said Ohio University senior Allison Routman. “It was one of those things I’d kind of heard; I didn’t think of what it was.”

By the time a student has reached the levels of excellence necessary to earn a spot at a University of Virginia program, her or she should have learned about paraphrasing vs. plagiarism. Somebody failed somewhere, whether the student or her previous teachers.
However, the three phrases cited by the professor as plagiarism do seem to be non-specific and inconsequential. One phrase was simply: “who had been released from a concentration camp.”
If every student or professional writer who has ever used that phrase is guilty of plagiarism, we’d probably have a line of culprits that could reach the moon.

The two cases may in truth be plagiarism. But they also raise questions that UVa should deal with, including:

—Ensuring that students — the university’s own or those from other schools — and professors share the same understanding of what plagiarism.

—Ensuring fairness — or the perception of fairness — when professors de-cide a case in an honor system that touts student control as one of its strengths.

Oh, and by the way: The phrase “said Ohio University senior Allison Routman” was borrowed from an Associated Press story.