Cheating scandals, especially in the high stakes/high pressure world of No Child left Behind and state assessments, have become perennial news stories, whether engaged in by students at the university level or by teachers and administrators at the elementary, middle, and high school level.
Copied in below is a research and reflection paper I completed in one of my administrative law classes a few years ago. I use the ideas in it as a starting point for discussions with students about copyright, citing work, use of others' work, and doing one's own work. Even in a 2nd grade classroom these issues can be addressed and, indeed, must be, as I have several avenues of independent research that students undertake as regular classroom learning as well as enrichment choices for students set off on personalized learning journeys.
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Professor Michael Pragman
MAS 5060
15 April 2010
When confronted with recurring academic requirements to create original pieces of work as evidence of classroom learning or as products to demonstrate completion of assigned tasks, students’ temptation to misappropriate another’s work and present it as their own can be overwhelming and deceptively consequence-free. This perspective is further exasperated by the full recognition that the scope of one’s current efforts has surely been previously (and possibly exhaustively) researched and fully realized by others and the pervasive and instantaneous nature of the Internet seemingly mocks the personal initiation of the long road ahead. “Beauty is easily imagined but its realization requires long yards of golden toil (Moore 13).” Complicating the issue of plagiarism is the reality that the foundation and advancement of human communication, community, and civilization is given form and substance by the back and forth of thought, speech, and work from person to person – refined, debated, torn apart, synthesized, rediscovered and reinterpreted. Wise administrators, aware that schools provide the environment for children to explore and learn the cumulative culture of their parents, must provide guidance to teachers and students in regard to legal and ethical issues of plagiarism as students are confused or purposely obtuse about what constitutes plagiarism, teachers are unaware of how to recognize plagiarism, and the school has often neglected to provide clear repercussions for instances of plagiarism. The experiences of administrators and school districts, especially those represented in applicable case law, provide a clear framework to prepare, identify, and provide consequences for plagiarism in today’s schools.
Plagiarism is a violation of copyright law in that it takes a protected piece of work (a literary text, a play, a song, etc) and presents it as the work of someone else without giving proper credit to the original author(s). “The history of American copyright law originated with the introduction of the printing press to England in the late fifteenth century … [where] in 1710 Parliament enacted the Statute of Anne to address the concerns of English booksellers and printers. The 1710 act established the principles of authors' ownership of copyright and a fixed term of protection of copyrighted works (A.R.L.).” In the United States there has been a continual progression of copyright law that tackles each successive device or media that technology introduces and which ultimately intersects with authors’ rights. Of course, from an administrator’s perspective it is not just a student’s final work that is of value but the process itself, the work predicated on intent of providing a learning experience. Students may often plagiarize part of preexisting pieces and believe they have done nothing wrong as part of the finished piece contains their own efforts and the copied sections are reworded. Here administrators may provide a historical and well reasoned appreciation of how plagiarism takes form as well as some of the excuses, justifications, and other relevant considerations that courts have taken under consideration and provided legal guidance for. In Nichols v. Universal Pictures Corp., 45 F.2d 119, 121 (2d Cir. 1930), the court found, “It is of course essential to any protection of literary property ... that the right cannot be limited literally to the text, else a plagiarist would escape by immaterial variations" (Hollaar). Ironically, a case from 1930 is just as relevant in the copy, paste, and reword world of the computer processor student who looks to take another’s work and change words, phrasing, or other semantic structural elements to hide its origins. Similarly, the common practice of using only a portion of another’s work and then sprinkling about one’s own ideas as filler is addressed in Sheldon v. Metro-Goldwyn Pictures Corp., 81 F.2d 49, 56 (2d Cir. 1936) in which the court said that the wrong of plagiarism is not removed or mitigated by showing “how much of his work he did not pirate” (Sheldon). Schools would be wise to adopt on-going plagiarism guidelines that make similar distinctions and delineations.
Recognizing plagiarism from an educator or administrator’s perspective has always been hedged against the advent of new technologies. However, the courts and applicable case law were nearly in-step through the advancing history of hard print, until the digital revolution of the last few decades – exemplified by the Internet where information on nearly any conceivable topic is readily available with no hindrances against misappropriation. Teachers accustomed to paper/project repositories of older siblings, college fraternity files, cribbed encyclopedia entries, and even the occasional ghost writing by peer students seemed a quaint group when lead into the bewildering world of Internet plagiarism that included fully searchable databases of completed research papers, countless sources of copy/paste information that teachers were unfamiliar with and therefore could never check, and entire websites devoted to the most insidious breach of author rights – group support, strategies, and communities of like-minded people around the world giving credence and validity to the act of plagiarism. Recognizing the fluidity of all new digital media, “amendments to the U.S. Copyright statutes in 1998 included a new section making it wrongful to ‘intentionally remove or alter’ any one or more of the following items: the notice of copyright, the title of the work, the author's name and other identifying information about the author, the copyright owner's name and other identifying information about the copyright owner, or terms and conditions for the use of the work (Standler).” This change in the scope of source material being plagiarized means that school districts need to take broad initiatives as well. Heyward Ehrlich, of the Department of English of Rutgers University provides a well-reasoned detection spectrum based upon years of experience. It includes using search-engines for unique wording of the student’s work, checking on-line encyclopedias, browsing commercial term paper suppliers, replicating the research the student was likely to have performed, and checking “homework helpers” of AOL, Scholastic, and other comparable sites (Ehrlich).
Much of the scandal, stigma, and frustration of plagiarism could be significantly reduced in regards to the role of administrators and teachers of a school district if there were a greater emphasis on teaching students what plagiarism is, how to avoid it, how to properly cite materials, and what the consequences are for plagiarism. Again, the suggestions of Heyward Enrlich are practical and reasoned: “1) Don't merely assign an isolated term paper at the start of the semester and then collect it at the end. Increasingly students do not know how to do the planning, research, and revision required in such papers, … 2) Provide a continuing context for student work, including shorter papers, research proposals, and oral reports, …4) In larger classes, insist on a research trail which becomes part of the submitted paper, … [and] 5) If you receive a paper you suspect to be plagiarized, move cautiously (Enrlich).” Although the courts will likely be wading through an ever-expanding quagmire of legal nuances in terms of copyright protection in the Internet and digital age through such laws as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) for the foreseeable future, educators are wise to consider firm footing in the case law and legal guidelines that–though further refined through hundreds of years of change and challenge–are never completely abandoned nor substantially changed. Though the technology has made nearly incomprehensible leaps and bounds in the last few decades, the principles of copyright and plagiarism, just as so many of our core beliefs, are well established and unlikely to change less our entire society is likewise revolutionized. School districts, administrators, and especially classroom teachers will note a familiar theme in all of this wrangling – no matter how elaborate or broad the particular events of the day, the fundamental position of education is to provide the orientation of time-tested thought as a tool to engage whatever may come.
Even without the legal concept and application of copyright law, plagiarism would still persist as a problem in schools as it devalues the core of education. Copyright, which assigns certain rights to the creator or creators of a work, is a legal protection that signifies an understanding that creating a work is a substantial and valued undertaking. Plagiarism has the potent potential to severely devalue the process of learning, open the education system up to doubt and distrust, and may very well call into question the legitimacy of students’ education and their preparedness to utilize the education they were to receive. Administrators must be actively charged with the role of understanding plagiarism, being able to recognize it, and having consequences for the act. Wise administrators know to avoid personal whims or hodgepodge assemblages of policy and instead act upon law and rulings from the courts, especially courts within the area of the school district and the Supreme Court. Such a stance not only protects the school district from actually becoming a case law to be studied and referenced by others for some currently unforeseen transgression, but also furthers the mission of school districts to provide students with an educational experience and not a misappropriated educational experience that rightfully belongs to someone else.
Works Cited
“Copyright Timeline: A History of Copyright in the United States.” www.arl.org. 12 July 2007.
Association of Research Libraries. 24 April 2010.
http://www.arl.org/pp/ppcopyright/copyresources/copytimeline.shtml
Hollaar Lee A. “Legal Protection of Digital Information.” Chapter 2, Copyright of Computer
Programs. 2002. Digital Law Online. 17 April 2010.
http://digital-law-online.info/lpdi1.0/treatise21.html
Moore, Alan and Campbell. Snakes and Ladders. New York: Eddie Campbell Comics, 2001.
“Sheldon v. Metro-Goldwyn Pictures Corp., 309 U. S. 390 (1940).” Justia.com;U.S.
Supreme Court Center. 17 April 2010.
http://supreme.justia.com/us/309/390/case.html
Standler, Ronald B. “Some Observations on Copyright Law.” Plagiarism. 2009. 20 April 2010.
http://www.rbs2.com/copyr.htm
Ehrlich, Heyward. “Plagiarism and Anti-Plagiarism.” The Solution: Possible Countermeasures.
August 2009. Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey, USA. 24 April 2010. http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~ehrlich/plagiarism598.html
http://supreme.justia.com/us/309/390/case.html
Standler, Ronald B. “Some Observations on Copyright Law.” Plagiarism. 2009. 20 April 2010.
http://www.rbs2.com/copyr.htm
Ehrlich, Heyward. “Plagiarism and Anti-Plagiarism.” The Solution: Possible Countermeasures.
August 2009. Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey, USA. 24 April 2010. http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~ehrlich/plagiarism598.html
