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Volume 8, Number 5: February 15, 2002

Editor's eMailbag:
Two Responses to Last Month's Article on Internet Plagiarism

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Thoughts on Cheating and Technology in the Language Classroom

As a language teacher and as a humanities teacher, I deal with separate sets of issues: generally speaking, plagiarism is easier to handle in advanced language, literature, and culture classes than in upper-level humanities. Having to write in French makes students realize that they need to compose in their own voice, since a misappropriated quotation is bound to stick out like a sore thumb. General ideas taken from a variety of sources may, of course, find their way into the student's paper without citation, but I believe that to be more frequently a lack of understanding rather than a deliberate attempt to hide the source.

One new source of "academic corner cutting" (is it plagiarism?) that language teachers have to understand and come to grips with is electronic translation. How much easier it would be for a student to write her paper in English, then have it translated into French by one of the many free online translation services. As far as I am concerned, even advanced undergraduate literature courses continue to be language courses, in addition to whatever else they are. Therefore, the language composition is not at all an unimportant part of the process.

Many of us in the language teaching profession haven't given sufficient thought to this issue. One of the reasons is the inferiority of machine translation (e.g., Babelfish and other online services). Students who use these services injudiciously end up submitting written work that, in addition to being immediately recognizable as machine translation, is worse than what they are capable of doing when left to their own abilities--although it is much faster (which is what plagiarism is all about, after all). I have found it helpful in classes from intermediate composition to advanced content courses in French to teach students what machine translation can and cannot yet do (the "yet" is admittedly something of considerable concern for language learning in the future). When a student sees what English translations of good French look like, they finally understand what translation software does to their English when turning it into French.

Frankly, I think translation software has much potential for good, and it need not be feared, as long as we educate ourselves and our students as the technology becomes more and more powerful and accurate. Technology becomes one more tool at our disposal--along with libraries, books, videotape, television, dictionaries and spell-checkers--to assist learning. There is little difference between a student "stealing" a synonym from a thesaurus and "lifting" a translation of a particularly difficult phrase from a machine translation or an electronic dictionary. I try to make clear to my students that two things are important to me as the person who reads their work: that they learn something from the assignment, and that I feel I can grade them fairly with respect to others completing the asignment. They can try to pull the proverbial wool over my eyes about what they have learned, and that is sad and ultimately counterproductive in a way that effects their own future. They are adults, however. They will assume the consequences of their actions. It is our concern for fair standards that leads us to be concerned about those we grade playing by the same rules. But no one can play unless the rules are clear.

When assigning the kind of topic that is susceptible to plagiarism, I find it useful to discuss my expectations and acceptable academic practice. When most people read such a sentence as that, they expect to hear something about expectations and practice. But the manner in which we frame assignments needs some thought, for it can be a proximate cause of the problem. Assignments that are open-ended, where the student is free to select her own topic--as long as it is vaguely applicable to the course--are also more open to plagiarism, since there is so much available on just about anything on the Internet. After several years of offering the same course, there is also an accumulation of papers from former students. Few of us recall all of the papers we have read in the past three or four years; there is only so much that we can do, and students have always tried to cut corners under pressure. They do need to hear that we are concerned about their learning, their intellectual development, and their future. This is a more meaningful approach in my book, than to approach writing as a set of rules. It is possible to give assignments which reduce, if not eliminate altogether, the likelihood that material will be readily available for "lifting." This is, of course, more time-consuming and challenging for us, especially from semester to semester in the same large course. But it is something within our control.

Academics today are partially at fault for the situation because we continue to put so much stock in demonstrating our complete command of the literature that creativity takes a back seat to literature search and citation. One thing I always tell students when I assign an essay is that their work really must show something of themselves and should not simply be a summary of what others think. They need to be assured that as undergraduates they don't need to know everything about the topic or have exhausted all the sources before setting pen to paper. Students who aren't just collecting ideas from others are less likely to feel compelled to use the essay as an exercise in gluing phrases together.

Who knows whether any of these ideas might have come from something I read or heard in the past forty years? At least I'm fairly certain they don't come from something I read yesterday, although as I age I can't even be sure of that. But I have tried to make them all mine, and that's what I like to encourage my students to do.

Ken Fleurant

Professor of French and Humanistic Studies
UW-Green Bay


Turnitin.com's Turnaround: Recent Developments at UW-Green Bay

We at UW-Green Bay have been working with TurnItIn.com for the past eleven months. The responses from the faculty who participated were consistently positive: all of them thought it was wonderful and planned on using it again. The problem we had was that relatively few faculty participated. Combined we had eight faculty who submitted a total of 210 student writings. And this was after repeated attempts to generate faculty interest.

The greatest advantage to TurnItIn.com is its ability to head off plagiarism before it takes place. This assumes that faculty tell students about it before they assign a writing. (Like the Doomsday machine in Dr. Strangelove, it's not effective if you keep it a secret.) Interestingly, the only student who definitely plagiarized his report was absent the day TurnItIn.com was described.

After our success with TurnItIn.com, we probably will NOT renew our license when it expires in a month--for purely financial reasons. The decision to non-renew was based on cost and the limited number of faculty who participated. Briefly, TurnItIn.com insisted that we purchase a campus-wide license for $3250 or a department-only license for $750. Both these are large increases from the $563 it cost us for the entire campus this last year. (Last year they allowed the Learning Technology Center to purchase a department license to service the entire campus with the department limit of 500 reports per year.) I was bitterly disappointed when our sales rep made her call and told me the news. I don't want to suggest bait-and-switch, but a jump from $563 to $3250 for about 250 student reports a year is tough to justify.

In summary: We tried it for almost a year, the faculty who tried it were extremely pleased, not many faculty participated, and the new cost structure makes it impractical for our campus.

Andrew Speth

Learning Technology Center
UW-Green Bay

Editors note: Andy Speth recently updated TTT on UW-Green Bay's negotiation's with Turnitin.com. Turnitin finally offered his campus the department-only license for $750. The new quote is a considerable decrease from the originally quoted price of $3250, and UW-Green Bay will probably renew their contract, according to Speth. Still, he says, "This whole situation--raising the price, refusing to negotiate, offering no viable option, and then making a reasonable offer at the last minute--is very problematic in an academic environment. Faculty need to plan, students need to be told, and all these things need to be done well in advance ... I'll always be wary of them."


TTT welcomes your feedback! We will occasionally post letters from UW System faculty and academic staff that address issues appearing on our pages. Email your letters to Tammy Kempfert, or send them to Editor, Teaching with Technology Today, 1633 Van Hise Hall, 1220 Linden Drive, Madison, WI 53706.

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