Man Accused Of Duping Harvard Pleads Not Guilty

One important topic not addressed on your show about student cheating and plagiarism is how the issue of student privacy facilitates both cheating and plagiarism.

I am an adjunct instructor in English at several local colleges in Cambridge, MA. Naturally, I see cases of plagiarism every semester. The plagiarism policy at every college for which I have taught is this: if I catch a student plagiarizing, and I document it and report it to my coordinator, no other professors in the school will be told that that student has plagiarized. This policy protects student privacy; however, it also allows that student to plagiarize in another class where he or she might or might not be caught. The chances of being caught at plagiarism are low because English faculty members do not have the time to run down suspicious entries from every paper, and the students know this. Other instructors have told me that students make fun of colleges for not catching them at plagiarism. This issue of student privacy may have played a role in the case of the Harvard student before the courts now. Perhaps, MIT and Harvard were not allowed to tell Yale or Brown of this student’s past record because of privacy concerns.

Additionally, the penalties for plagiarism are so minimum that they don’t deter repeat offenses–especially when other faculty are not informed about previous offenses.
When I went to college in the 1960s, if one was caught plagiarizing, one was thrown out–no questions asked. I didn’t know anyone who plagiarized. True, we didn’t have the Internet, but the Internet facilitates plagiarism—it doesn’t cause it.

One of your callers–I think her name was Jen–a high school English teacher said that school administrators often cave in to parents. This is a big part of the problem. Today, school officials are afraid of parents. In college, the fear of expelling a student for plagiarism is more insidious and never spoken out loud: colleges do no want to lose tuition money from students. Administrators will never admit this as a motive for not treating plagiarism more harshly, but that is the truth. Each college is afraid the student will simply take his or her business elsewhere where the rules are less enforced, and that brings me to my last point.

Colleges today are being run like businesses, and students know it. Students, in turn, approach college like a store at the mall. They come, pay their money, and want a product that they have paid for–a product with a capital A attached to it.

In contrast to the other academics on your show today, I have a more old-fashioned remedy for deterring plagiarism–expulsion. Of course, all colleges would have to adopt this policy or it wouldn’t work, but If they did, I guarantee that plagiarism would practically disappear. Instead academics talk of trying to impart to students the idea that education is more than just getting high marks–that it is the process and the exploration of subject material that is important. Of course, these are all worthy aims, but this message is likely to fall on deaf ears as long as students see others getting away with taking dishonest shortcuts.

You really need to do another show on this topic. You have merely scratched the surface of a huge issue that has roots in almost every sector of our society–as many of your guests have pointed out. I hope you will follow up with another show and invite on academics with more diverse points of view as to both the causes and the remedies of these problems. Thank you.

Good luck with your new show.

Carolyn