TL;DR: "Most international students who plagiarize aren't trying to pull one over on their teachers."

I've been dealing with a lot of plagiarism lately (well, actually, I deal with plagiarism in my upper level writing classes all the time). There are a couple of issues that I have seen develop out of my many meetings with students, but for this entry, I'm only going to talk about intentionality.

The often knee-jerk reaction to finding out a student copied several sentences or even a paragraph word-for-word is to become insulted, indignant, even wounded. I went through this a lot in my first years of teaching. I got really upset, and it took a lot out of me.

And then it kept happening.

I had to know why. I revisited my teaching on paraphrase and citation, I looked for better teaching materials, I gossiped around water coolers and read stuff online. Eventually I came across the concept of the word "plagiarism" being too broad. Basically, it includes both the malicious plagiarizers and the clueless/accidental/misunderstanding ones. It really exists more on a continuum:

Obviously, egregious stuff like essay purchasing is clearly malicious, and most students couldn't not know that this would upset their teacher. The trouble is that even stuff that is on the far end (deleting one word out of a sentence or leaving material unquoted) can be committed by very sincere and well-meaning students. Let me share how I know this.

Back in 2009, I remember the Director of Composition requiring students to purchase They Say / I Say with Readings. Her rationale was that ENG 101 was a writing course, and so many students were getting bogged down by having to find good sources for the bibliographic essay that it lead to poorly written papers based on sources that very often were not that good to begin with. By giving them a set of sources to start using, it opened up possibilities I had never thought of:

• Students had more time to read, understand, and write
• Students had easy access to some quality sources
• Since we had access to the source texts, we could better gauge reading comprehension and also paraphrasing ability
  

This last point was very useful to me when I started teaching ESL. What better way to assess students' paraphrasing skills than to have access to all of their sources before they even started writing?

This all ties into a conversation I had on Monday with a coworker who has the same strategy with assigning source texts. She had her students writing annotated bibliographies, and surprise, surprise, some of them were plagiarized.

"It's obviously not malicious. They know that I know all of the sources--so it's not like they're trying to pull one over on me!"

This is the crux of the matter: The high rate of international students plagiarizing cannot all be attributed to deception, especially since it happens even when students are well-meaning and know their teachers cannot be tricked.

-Bill

I'm teaching a group of intermediate student writers as opposed to the advanced class I usually cover, and truth be told, I'm a little nervous. I'm okay with the focus on sentences and paragraphs as opposed to essays and longer works, but I know I won't be able to focus so much on critical thinking skills like questioning one's own assumptions and claims. Those, to me, are some of the most rewarding things to teach: I'm not just teaching them how to be better writers, but also better thinkers! I love seeing the "ah-ha!" moment in their eyes as they realize the complexity of an issue.

As I thought about this, I started getting reminiscent about a course I created for graduate students who needed familiarity with graduate school writing genres, so I did a needs analysis and found an incredibly useful textbook for them: John Swales and Christine Feak's Academic Writing for Graduate Students. The book has chapters on writing summaries, data commentaries, critiques, problem-process-solution texts, and general-specific texts, as well as an introduction to writing IMRAD articles. Most of all though, I appreciate the first unit, which is "an approach to academic writing" (after we got through the introduction, I would revisit the unit's title and point out how even the title displays the cautious tone of academic writing since it is not "Academic Writing" but "An Approach to Academic Writing" (emphasis added)).

There is an invaluable activity in the first unit called "Gene's Conclusion" (which is renamed "Sam's Conclusion" in the third edition for some reason). The activity describes a student who writes up an effective conclusion, but then realizes that there are limitations and weaknesses in his data set that he has not described anywhere else in his paper. Should he acknowledge these in the conclusion or should he sweep them under the rug? I love this activity because in the four semesters I taught this class, it never failed to generate a lot of discussion. After a short time, students usually broke into three schools of thought:

These students appreciate this point and make a mental note to write cautiously and quickly see the value in hedging their statements.

These students cannot accept failure. And they're also big fans of time travel:

"If you find problems, you must go back and fix it."
"But you don't have any money. You used up all your funding to get the data you have."
"Um... well, you need to get more money."
"You can't do that. The publishing deadline is coming up soon. You're under the gun."
"..."

The silence becomes too uncomfortable and usually leads students to defect to...

For these students, transparency of this kind is a tough sell:

"Don't do it. You should never talk about your weaknesses or problems."
"Never?"
"Yes. It will be bad. It's better not to mention it."
"But don't you think it will look more thoughtful and meticulous to note the limitations of your data?"
"No. It's better not to mention it. Maybe no one will notice."
"But suppose someone does notice, what then?"
"So I should point out my own mistakes? Then what will I look like? People will see me and think, 'He is stupid!'"
"No, no, they won't think you're stupid. It will be the opposite effect, actually."
"What? How?"

Then I tell them a story about a AAAL conference I attended back in 2011 in Chicago. There was a man who presented an experimental treatment that his data seemed to support as effective. He finished his presentation and began fielding questions.

"Could you go back to the slide with the results on it?" an astute woman in the back asked. He flipped back in the PowerPoint to a slide that looked like this:

Can you see the problem?