One often hears about students being penalised or expelled from universities for plagiarising, but these students are confounded by this word, having never heard about the concept or its consequences before.
Plagiarism is using information from journal articles, books, or websites without acknowledging the source. According to Jonathan Bailey (2011), plagiarism was first publicly condemned by Latin poet Martial who lived between 40 AD and 102/104 AD, when he launched a tirade against people who recited his poetry as if it was theirs.
This practice is just more prevalent today than in the past, aided by the ease of access to information. For instance, traces of plagiarism were found in Dr. Martin Luther King’s doctoral dissertation as reported by Stephen Moss in The Guardian (2005). In U.K. universities, 9,229 students were identified for plagiarism as cited by Rebecca Attwood in The Times Higher Education dated June 12, 2008. Most of the 17,000 students in over 80 British universities found guilty of academic dishonesty were cases of plagiarism, according to David Barrett’s report in The Telegraph dated March 5, 2011.
Academia and beyond
Plagiarism is not limited to academia. Almost all genres meant for public attention — such as public speaking, music, art, journalism, and novels — have come under fire for plagiarism, unwittingly or otherwise. George Harrison of the Beatles fame had to pay the Chiffons $5,87,000 for subconscious plagiarism, according to Moriarty (2012). According to The New York Times issue dated April 28, 2006, Kaavya Viswanathan, a Harvard student was accused of plagiarism in her book How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life, following which the book was taken off the shelves.
When it comes to academia, students helping themselves to other writers’ information and passing it off as their own is tantamount to stealing. Why do intelligent, hard working students commit such an offence? If anything, the school tradition is to blame.
With Indian students, the problem probably has its roots in the traditional Indian educational system. The inclination to reproduce information as in the original might be a vestige from the ancient oral tradition of reciting the Vedas from memory, in the Indian Gurukul system. Probably, the English-medium educational system introduced by the British in colonial times is to blame. Perhaps, with English as a second language, students found it easier to memorise and reproduce information rather than understand and rephrase information, due to fear of losing marks for distortion of meaning or errors in language — and the habit has stuck.
Even today, it is not uncommon to see some old-school Indian teachers emphasising blind respect for information presented by authority figures; published information as in textbooks is not to be misquoted or misinterpreted; it is to be reverently reproduced verbatim in a test or examination, if a student were to get full marks. Raised under such an educational milieu, when these students progress to higher education, copying information off other sources and pasting it into their assignments would not seem erroneous, as they are only showing their respect for the borrowed information by presenting it as written.
For the contemporary Indian as well as other students for whom English is a second language, this practice has been made more possible and ironically more detectable today, both functions facilitated by the double-edged sword of the Internet.
Information literacy and ethical use of information should be explicitly taught in school and reviewed in the freshman year at universities. Teachers should encourage students to rephrase and not to memorise and regurgitate information gathered from textbooks. Students should be given adequate practice in proper ways of citing the original sources. They should be reminded about the expected percentage of original information and the acceptable percentage of quoted information in assignments. Schools should insist that students submit their assignments to plagiarism checkers such as turnitin.com or grammarly.com and make necessary changes. Thus, the onus is on schools to help students avoid plagiarism.
The author has worked as a professor of English for over two decades in Bahrain.
