The first year I was teaching, I had a student ask if they could use a paper for my class (Intro) that they were writing for their Anth of Religion class (taught by my chair). I told them that they could use the same *research*, but needed to write separate papers — and that the paper for my class needed to take into account the range of topics we’d covered.

When the time came, they handed in a paper that had nothing to do with religion, so I guessed at first that it was too much trouble. Then I realized the paper was plagiarized — a quick Google, print the paper out, staple it together, and head to the chair’s office. My chair wasn’t inclined to take very strong action, which was a little disappointing. He wasn’t inclined, that is, until I mentioned that the student was also in his class and had probably handed in a plagiarized paper there, too.

*Then* it was a serious matter!

I also have some basic rules for acceptable projects, have to be submitted and approved early in the semester, such as: it’s urban anthropology, not the suburbs; you can’t write about your job; you can’t write about other college students; it has to be an enduring community (not shoppers on the Magnificent Mile/north Michigan Ave., for instance). I also help them massage their topics so that they are not about “a” social problem, but about a community.

Plagiarism is a big problem, despite all my warnings, the writing of mini-reports throughout the semester, etc.

Sadly, the highest proportion of plagiarists have been writers, either journalists or fiction writers.

The most egregious, however, was a male returning student who wanted to do ‘illiteracy,’ based on his observations of troubled children on the school bus he drove in the suburbs each morning. He had big conflicts with these kids, and that in itself made it an inappropriate project. And he just would not accept that I would not accept his project. I refused his project, again and again and again throughout the semester. Finally, 2 weeks before the final report was due, he told me he’d met a man at his church who was willing to talk to him about his illiteracy. Not great, but something.

Then I got his paper — a lovely piece of work with his extended interviews with this one man. The man lived in Cabrini Green. He was illiterate. He spoke eloquently about how illiteracy affected him; he talked about what adaptations he made to survive; poignantly described the pains and beauties of life in Cabrini Green.

And there were no references at all to what we had read in class — a requirement of the papers (relate your experience to what we studied in class!).

So I googled several phrases and found all of his ‘ethnography’ online. Evocative writing, poignant memories — all in a web site entitled “Getto Gurl,” the memoirs of a woman who had grown up in Cabrini Green (http://www.gettogurl.com/). My male student had taken her writing, changed the gender, and bracketed it with his ‘questions,’ as if all of this was in response to his questions.

The man was highly dismissive of women — I rarely dealt with this in class, as the young women who were my students were quite willing to argue with him — so his appropriation of a woman’s voice really irked me.

I flunked the paper, which meant he flunked the class. Never got a response from him.

My favorite response was from a student who did the classic cut-and-paste from a web site (including different type face, references to writings by a Swedish Lutheran theologist, etc.). I emailed her to say I knew she had plagiarized major sections of her paper and giving her the option to re-write within a few days. Nothing. Paper flunked, course flunked. Then I get a plaintive email from her — why did she fail? Did she do really, really bad on the final for some reason?

And here’s a random irony that came to me while reading Morally Deficient’s comment: almost all of the free essay websites have copyright notices! E.g. Freeessays.com says “Copyright © 2006 freeessays.com. All rights reserved.” I wonder who among their target audience they think really cares?

The company covers itself by making you sign a contract saying you understand that all your work will only be research for students writing their assignments. You know that type of research… The type which you write with an essay title, word count, and expected grade (if your research failed to get the desired grade – as assessed by the student rather than the professor – you would lose up to 50% of your fee).

What astonished me was the range of assignments. The pick of the anthropology had to be writing an ethnography of a homeless hostel – an assignment which had so many references to the fiction that is ethnographic writing that any professor worth his salt would have picked up on it.

But it was not just BA students – most of the well paying work was writing MA theses, and there was even the rare doctoral student who wanted a part of their PhD writing for them.

It seems it is not just the students who are cheating.

I told that story recently because a friend in grad school knew that one of her classmates took her paper straight from a foreign language source – down to the footnotes – and just translated it to English. (Add that to the how-to-get-away-with-it list). Now, sure “being a dick” is the moral obligation from the professor prospective. What about fellow students? Is “ratting” on another student ratting? Is cheating an infraction not only against self and professor, but also against the community of learning? – and what do you professors think of students who rat? Are you happy to get the anonymous typed note slipped under the door or not?

Here’s my “been caught plagiarizing, once, when I was 25” story (spoiler alert: don’t worry, kids, I was innocent). I was taking art history at community college and received an F on the Big Paper, which I thought’d been an A for sure. I asked the professor about it, and she pointed to a long section in the middle where I didn’t have any references, saying that I’d obviously stolen those ideas from someone else. When I explained that there were no references becuase I’d thought that stuff all by myself, she agreed to re-grade the paper and I got the A I so deserved.

The irony is that I was actually one of the rare dream cases where a student takes a class and is profoundly changed by it. I’d had virtually no interest in art before taking her class, and came out of it with a very deep interest — and have since worked in art museums, written about art, and even proposed an art-based project in my grad school applications. The project she gave me an F on was a big part of this “awakening”, when I realized that there was some pretty deep stuff going on in even the apparently whimsical.

Of course, that was back before Google, when profs had to guess whether or not their students were plagiarizing.