Plagiarism...

Being accused as a school pupil messed me up for years

Terry and Mr MooMoo, by Elaine Freedman. Mr MooMoo and I often discussed matters of consequence.

I like to think that had there been anti-plagiarism software around when I was at school, and had my English teacher used it, I’d have been saved years of wasting time looking for ways to make money. I’d have enjoyed more sleep too.

Let’s start at the end. In 1990 I earned my very first payment for an article I’d submitted to a magazine, after ages (about a year, I think) of trying, being turned down, trying again and so on. (In fact, I was sure at the time that the editor eventually accepted an article because she felt sorry for me!)

After a couple of years of being able to supplement my income with earnings from writing, Elaine finally managed to persuade me to bite the bullet and give up all the other jobs I’d “collected” – initially to help me pay the mortgage, and then because of a fear of letting go.

So what were these other jobs? Well just to give you an idea, at one time, apart from my full-time job as teacher and Head of Department, I was teaching four evening classes a week and running a small business with a friend in the USA. That was apart from being involved in a couple of professional associations.

So what did all this have to do with my English teacher?

When I was 14 (and yes, before you say anything, it was a long time ago), he told us to write a piece of fiction for homework. I was very interested in cinematography at the time, a hobby that I pursued through a youth club. So I decided that rather than try to write a short story,  I’d write the minutes of the AGM of a fictional film society. I handed it in, and it came back unmarked. In the English teacher’s words:

If you wrote that yourself it’s very good, but I think you copied it from an actual Report.”

I suppose I should have been flattered that my work of fiction was so convincing that my teacher thought I’d copied it. But I think it probably made me feel that in his opinion I was usually so useless that I couldn’t possibly have done it myself. Perhaps also I was unhappy that he would think I’d stoop so low as to cheat, on the basis of no evidence of ever previously having done so. To be honest, I don’t remember. All I know is that I think it had the knock-on effect of not encouraging me to feel I could write.

Had my teacher been more interested and less distrustful, he might have asked me how I apparently knew enough about the subject to write such a convincing fictitious report. Then he would have discovered that:

• I’d joined a cinematography club when I was 13 years old.

• In the school holidays, aged 14, I organised a visit for a few friends and myself to the Kodak factory located around 25 miles away.

• Every month I bought a magazine called 8mm Magazine.

• When I could afford it, I bought another monthly periodical called Movie Maker.

• I saved every spare penny from a Saturday job, and birthday present money, until I had enough to buy a cine camera, projector, editor and splicer.

This is all fantasy, of course, as he evidently couldn’t be bothered to find out anything about his pupils’ out-of-school interests. However, had anti-plagiarism software, or even just the internet, been available in those days, perhaps my English teacher would have done a quick search (possibly without even telling me: why make me feel bad for no reason?). Then, upon discovering that my work really was original, perhaps he would have encouraged me in my writing. He might have pointed me to the works of Borges, who, amongst other things, delighted in writing reviews of of non-existent books.

The cine camera I bought aged 15

As a consequence, I might have discovered much earlier that I could write well enough to be paid for it. I’d have had more evenings at home watching TV or reading. I wouldn’t have tried to run a business with a partner based several thousand miles away, before email or Skype had been invented, and when transatlantic phone calls cost £1 a minute.

I’d have got more sleep.

I don’t regret the way things turned out, because I enjoyed everything I did, and because it is as it is.

But I can’t help thinking that had anti-plagiarism software been around (or had my English teacher been more trusting), it could all have been so different.

But…

Having said that, I have my doubts about anti-plagiarism software.

How come teachers or tutors need software to tell them if their students are cheating? If you read your students’ essays over the year, and listen to them debating in seminars, how could you fail to notice if their writing suddenly used different language, different sentence structures or just seemed different?

Well, maybe university tutors deal with hundreds of (to them) faceless students these days. But schools?  I mean, why should any school need a computer to tell that their kids are “cheating”?

And are they even cheating? There’s an old maxim that if you steal from one writer it’s called plagiarism, but if you steal from lots of writers it’s called research¹. Do youngsters actually know the difference between plagiarism and research unless they’re taught?

This is nothing new either. In my very first teaching job, when I taught Economics, I set an essay to answer the question, “What are the causes of unemployment?”. When I had marked the essays I gave the class feedback as follows:

That essay you did for me was tackled really well. The only thing I would say, though, to save us all a lot of a bother next time, is that instead of copying several pages straight out of a textbook, just hand me in a sheet of paper with your name on, together with the title of the textbook you’d like to copy from, and the relevant page numbers, and I’ll mark the book instead.

So how did I know thay’d copied large swathes of textbooks? First of all, I possessed all the main textbooks and knew them quite well. I knew the way their authors expressed things. But more importantly, I knew my students, so when the lad who would usually come out with such gems as “My granddad wouldn’t of got any work if he hadn’t gone out looking for it” handed in an essay which was full of sentences like “Indeed, we can surmise from observation of the effects of tax incentives on industry in regional development areas …”, something told me that he may not have written it all by himself.

You don’t need technology to detect plagiarism, cheating, copying or whatever you wish to call it. What you need is teachers who know their students, and common sense – and time by the powers-that-be for teachers to get to know their students, and freedom to trust and rely on their own professional judgement (because that, when it becomes subconscious, is actually “common sense”).

Moreover, if students really are cheating, we need to ask ourselves some questions, such as:

• Are they really cheating, or have they simply not understood that that isn’t real research, or don’t have the literary skills to summarise or reword passages they read in articles and books?

• If it turns out that they are cheating, is that because we seem to be living in a society in which it increasingly appears to be the case that the end is regarded as justifying the means?

If there is any truth in that latter suggestion, perhaps we would agree with Cassius in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

1. See Felson’s Law.