Plagiarism

"Plagiarism" comes from the Latin word plagiarius, which means "plunder."  When I was a magazine editor, I hated plagiarism because it was stealing something precious. Now that I am a teacher, I hate it because when students plagiarize, they give away something even more precious - their pride in a hard job well done.

The internet makes plagiarism a lot easier for kids these days. It also makes it easier to catch. If a student can find a website offering somebody else's work to copy, so can the teacher who smells a cyber-rat. I try to explain that to my students, adding that I don't need the internet to tell me they're cheating -- I only need it to supply the proof. When a poor writer suddenly sounds like Graham Greene, it sticks out like a moose in a bathtub.

But that doesn't stop them from trying. Last year, I caught three. The easiest was a student who handed in a review of a new hip-hop CD. I'm automatically alert on movie or music reviews, because there are so many of them on the Web. When I went over this one, I called the student up and congratulated him on a flawless paper.

He looked nervous. "Actually, I've been writing reviews for websites," he told me.

"That's great," I said. "Give me the addresses. I'd love to see more."

He couldn't remember any. I went down to the computer lab and fed a few of his lines into a search engine, which took me directly to the website he'd plundered. He flunked the course.

Another student pirated an essay, but changed a number of the words, using his computer's thesaurus. I never found the source, but he flunked the paper because his substitutions had turned it into gibberish.

The hardest case involved a student who was a good writer. I didn't notice anything until she used the word "eschew." That caught my attention. Even I don't use "eschew."

Last week, I was afraid I'd found another. The language was too sharp, the thinking too sophisticated for a freshman. I started searching. No hits. I spoke to the student. She said her mother had helped edit her paper, but insisted the words were her own. I called her mother. She was calm and helpful. She said she hadn't written the paper and suggested I call one of the student's teachers from last year. She also told me how her daughter had felt about my questioning her. "I was mad, but I was also really flattered," she told her mother. "He said no freshman could write like that!"