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Introduction
Plagiarism is a hot topic these days on college and university campuses. In response to what they see as a raging epidemic, many colleges and universities have written or rewritten “Honor Codes”; others have turned to plagiarism detection software, which compares student writing to a database of other writing, usually including other student work and anything available on the Internet; and some schools have begun to use or require texts like Charles Lipson’s Doing Honest Work in College: How to Prepare Citations, Avoid Plagiarism, and Achieve Real Academic Success. In their book Student Cheating and Plagiarism in the Internet Era: A Wake-Up Call Ann Lathrop and Kathleen Foss assert that it’s agreed upon by academics that (1) cheating is rampant, made easy by new electronic technologies, and (2) plagiarism is a deliberate, malicious attempt on the part of students to get by with doing less. One solution they offer is character education, including the teaching of ethics (5). All of these efforts, and others, are intended to curb “rampant plagiarism,” or what author David Callahan calls a “culture of cheating” (xvi) on campus.
Whether there really is an “epidemic” of cheating is still open to debate. At least one study claims that “serious cheating on tests [. . .] increased from 39 percent [of students] in 1963 to 64 percent in 1993,” but “serious cheating on written work remained stable [. . .] at 65 percent in 1963 and 66 percent in 1993” (McCabe, Trevino, and Butterfield, qtd. in Blum 2). What such a study doesn’t do well is distinguish between schools or types of schools, or between subjects, or kinds of assignments. Nor does it consider plagiarism as anything other than a form of cheating. It also relies on students’ self-reporting—and as the same authors suggest elsewhere, and one author shows in this volume, students may not consider certain acts as “cheating,” even though their teachers might view the same practices as plagiarism.
How did we get here? Concern about academic integrity is an old story, of course. Indeed, the fear of cheating in general has plagued education for decades. Longwood University, for example, has had an Honor Code in place since 1910. The code was re-ratified in 1930 and includes the Twelve Points of the Honor Code (virtues that define honor), the Honor Pledge, the Academic Pledge, and the Honor Creed. Longwood’s website boasts: “As one of the most respected traditions at Longwood University, the Honor System promotes an atmosphere of trust, where students are presumed honorable unless their actions prove them otherwise” (“The Honor Code”). In a matriculation tradition, first-year students traditionally attend an Honor Code signing ceremony where they read and sign a promise to adhere to the Honor Code. Elsewhere, The College of William & Mary’s honor code proudly boasts a history that goes back to 1736; new students are “administered” the honor code by other students (“Honor Code & Councils”).
Obviously, an honor code would not be deemed necessary were there no fear of plagiarism; thus, it is important to consider the history of plagiarism on campus and what impact the recent perception of its massive growth has had on the composition classroom. In writing specifically, plagiarism has been on the radar of teachers and students for quite some time. In his 1944 College English article “Let’s Teach Composition!” Edward Hamilton, in a partial defense of college students’ inability to engage outside ideas without being taught how, criticizes the instructor who does not offer students enough training in research:
Never having been trained to search out assumptions, interpretations, or conclusions in the essays contained in their anthology, [the students] turn in papers that are reminiscent of Literary Digest articles—mere chains of quotations joined by platitudinous links that reveal their incomprehension rather than represent their efforts to be unbiased. It is not surprising, furthermore, that almost every paper contains instances of innocent plagiarism. (160)
Only fifteen years later, however, in a 1959 issue of College Composition and Communication, Leo Hamalian turns the blame on the students themselves as he bemoans the problem of plagiarism in the composition classroom, and cites an Ohio State University survey that found that two thirds of students surveyed “said they would cheat if they had the chance” (50). His position sounds oddly familiar to today’s academics who complain about the effort involved in catching cheaters and in the prevalence of plagiarism: “teachers whom the author queried [. . .] admitted that plagiarism was fast becoming the collegiate counterpart of juvenile delinquency” (50). According to Hamalian, it is a student’s lack of time management, inability to engage
