Herpes for the Information Age: Plagiarism and the Infection of Universities

It is always disconcerting to see our former employers featured in local newspapers. It is worse when their name is mentioned under the headline, “Unis crack down on student cheats” (Hiatt 2006:2). In the article, Murdoch University reported 157 cases of “cheating” in assignments, and “most students caught cheating were studying social sciences or humanities courses.” The Pro Vice Chancellor (Academic) Jan Thomas stated that, “Most of our cases occur in first semester with new students ... Once they learn it’s not the right thing to do, and [they have] sufficient writing and management skills, they don’t do it again” (Thomas in Hiatt 2006a:2). As I sat reading this article on an otherwise peaceful Saturday morning, I pondered why no cases of plagiarism, cheating or collusion had emerged in my first year courses—located in the social sciences and humanities—through my eight years at the same University mentioned in the article. It was not good luck. Considered curricula planning, intense contact with students and the annual updating of materials to avoid the resubmission of older papers are proactive and positive strategies. Yet these strategies, that require professional development, time and teacher reflexivity, are not validated methods for educational managers to counter plagiarism. Instead, “mandatory electronic screening of student assignments” is the future of curricula planning (Hiatt 2006a:2). There is an alternative trajectory to ponder. It is very easy to blame students for plagiarism. It is much more difficult to recognize how staff and academic managers are both implicated in—and facilitating—this behavior. Uploading PowerPoint slides to the internet, i-lectures and the use of textbooks rather than wider reading of scholarly monographs all encourage simple and rehearsed answers to difficult questions. The decline in the reading of scholarly monographs and refereed articles—and the reduction in our expectations and hopes for students—has created a context requiring minimal reading, poor writing and sloppy standards of scholarship. It is too convenient for academic managers to administratively slap students for plagiarism, rather than proactively encourage higher standards in teaching and learning. J.V. Bolkan revealed the importance of this positive, proactive and interventionist agenda.