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Here’s the third post in a series on cheating/academic dis­hon­esty in col­lege (first post, sec­ond post).

A year and a half ago, I taught an intro­duc­tion to phi­los­o­phy course inde­pen­dently. The lec­tures were in per­son, but the tests were online because the class only met once per week and I didn’t want to use up a whole week’s worth of lec­ture for each test. The stu­dents were repeat­edly instructed, both in class and on the test itself, not to use any sources other than their notes and textbooks.

Upon grad­ing the first test, I dis­cov­ered that a few stu­dents had copied and pasted answers or parts of answers directly from Wikipedia and Yahoo! answers. This was very dis­ap­point­ing, and I dreaded hav­ing to deal with the sit­u­a­tion. I arranged times to speak with the stu­dents, plan­ning to deal with them pretty harshly.

How­ever, when I spoke to them, I was sur­prised by what I heard. At least two of them seemed kind of baf­fled that what they had done was wrong, as if they didn’t know that it con­sti­tuted pla­gia­rism and/or as if they had done the copy­ing and past­ing totally unthink­ingly. This fit with the fact that the rest of their tests were quite good — there was no need for these stu­dents to cheat out of fear of fail­ing. It seems that, in today’s inter­net cul­ture, it didn’t even occur to them that there could be any­thing wrong with the casual, undoc­u­mented use of online sources.

I was, and con­tinue to be, torn about what to do in these cases. On the one hand, I did plainly for­bid the use of other sources in the test’s instruc­tions. Tak­ing a test con­sti­tutes tacit con­sent to its terms, and I would have been well within my rights to give the stu­dents a zero on the test, or worse.

On the other hand, though, I’m sym­pa­thetic to these stu­dents on account of the fact that they appear not ever to have had a respect for aca­d­e­mic hon­esty and a crip­pling fear of acci­den­tal pla­gia­rism instilled into them. Babies don’t pop out know­ing about pla­gia­rism, after all. Given the sorry state of edu­ca­tion, many of my stu­dents prob­a­bly never learned about pla­gia­rism — what counts as pla­gia­rism, how to cite things prop­erly, what the con­se­quences of com­mit­ting it can be. And if they didn’t have the rel­e­vant knowl­edge, then there is a case to be made that they are less than fully respon­si­ble for their acts of plagiarism.

On the other hand (you have three hands, right?), a lack of knowl­edge con­cern­ing pla­gia­rism doesn’t imme­di­ately imply that these stu­dents have no respon­si­bil­ity for their acts. They could be respon­si­ble for not tak­ing the ini­tia­tive to learn about pla­gia­rism on their own, such as by read­ing the whole stu­dent hand­book or the mate­ri­als made avail­able on the school’s library’s web­site. This is a kind of second-order respon­si­bil­ity; fail­ing to take these steps reveals a blame­wor­thy deficit of con­cern for the aca­d­e­mic terms to which one has agreed and amounts to a form of negligence.

Fur­ther­more, a lack of knowl­edge con­cern­ing pla­gia­rism also doesn’t imme­di­ately imply that the stu­dents ought not to be pun­ished for acts of pla­gia­rism. Pun­ish­ments, blame­wor­thi­ness, and respon­si­bil­ity are inter­re­lated in com­pli­cated and con­tro­ver­sial ways. Some­times there are pru­den­tial or moral rea­sons not to pun­ish some­one who is respon­si­ble for a bad act and blame­wor­thy for it (pun­ish­ment would be too expen­sive, or the per­son is now old and sickly, or not pun­ish­ing the per­son would some­how or other max­i­mize util­ity). And some­times there are pru­den­tial or moral rea­sons to pun­ish some­one who was not fully respon­si­ble for a bad act, and/or who is not prop­erly blame­wor­thy for it. In the pla­gia­rism case, it’s very dif­fi­cult to tell who did or didn’t know what con­sti­tutes pla­gia­rism or that pla­gia­rism is wrong. Maybe it is bet­ter to send a mes­sage that there is “zero tol­er­ance” for pla­gia­rism of any kind — will­ful, igno­rant, or will­fully igno­rant. This has the added ben­e­fit of sav­ing teach­ers all the time and trou­ble of delib­er­at­ing end­lessly about the par­tic­u­lars of a pla­gia­rism incident.

Yet, I remain unde­cided on this kind of case. Pla­gia­rism is obvi­ously unac­cept­able, but the cir­cum­stances sur­round­ing can dif­fer widely and seem to mat­ter. I hope that in the future, I either never encounter pla­gia­rism again (fat chance) or that it is so egre­gious that I can pun­ish it with­out qualms (but isn’t that kind of a weird thing to hope for?)