Academic Spring is Cancelled.

By and large I like and respect my students. They come from a wide range of backgrounds and appear in class with very different aims and motivations. Some are quiet, some are loud. Some are very committed, others less so. Some find what we do easy, other struggle. Some enjoy it, others less so (and not necessarily because they find it difficult or easy). I get glimpses into their lives and I presume they get insights into mine. Whether we're amused or horrified most, I couldn't say.

Because we're a relatively democratic institution, and most of the students are local, I see them around a lot. They call in to my office just to say hello, or they serve me fine ales and pork scratchings in the pubs. I even meet (scare) their children when we meet on the street.

Basically - there isn't a gulf between most of us teachers and most of the students, though this is of course my perception. Perhaps loads of them are terrified and rush for the exits whenever I walk into their pub. Perhaps they spit in my food. Let's not think about that. Ideally, however, they get the idea that we're relatively normal people to whose lives and profession they can and should aspire. I don't like the idea that we're aliens from another planet landed to tease, look down upon or baffle the restless natives.

And yet… it's the start of the year and my hackles are raised already. I've been back in the office for just over ten days. I've met a lot of the students who've been working on essays and really enjoyed chatting to them outside the classroom environment. I'm looking forward to being back in the classroom and catching up with the others. I'm refreshed and ready to go… or I was until today. I'm marking a set of essays about ethics. Most of them are OK to good, or not good enough but the product of honest effort. However, a small minority are simply stolen goods. Some are cut-and-pasted from the internet, others show signs of attempts to disguise their origins. A few essays have clearly been worked on: their sources are legitimate academic work and I just don't understand why the authors don't add quotation marks, stick in a footnote and get full credit for research rather than try to pass it off as their own work by changing a few words.

We expect a degree of plagiarism these days. The motivations are much-debated. Some people are lazy. Others panic. Some are motivated by the acquisition of a degree certificate and have no desire to learn anything along the way. Some come from cultures in which the reproduction of other thinkers' material is seen as legitimate. We make considerable efforts to explain that plagiarism offends the intellectual community, isn't educationally productive and is morally wrong. And yet still they do it. I guess it's particularly galling at this time every year because it's always these essays on this subject. Anyone who plagiarises work about ethics either has no sense of irony or a highly-developed sense of humour. I always hope that after 15 weeks of talking about the philosophical frameworks which inform our decisions about what's right and wrong, they might be a little more self-conscious about stealing other people's work and claiming it as their own. And I'm always proved wrong.

Update: edited because the local excuse for a newspaper is sniffing around trying to make this general piece into a news story. 

What's additionally annoying is that plagiarised work takes an age to deal with. You read it. Then you note the bits that don't sound right. Then you look for them. First on the web. Then on Turnitin. Then in the course texts and others which sound right. Then you have to print out the sources and annotate them and the essay. Is there any point to all this? If I thought that I could induce an epiphany or even a moment of shame, I'd say yes. It happens sometimes, but you'd be surprised how often the same names appear on the Naughty List time after time. An honest essay is a breeze in comparison: some comments on the good bits and the weaker elements, a few lines on how the student did and how s/he can do better next time and you're done. I always hope that the honest students aren't watching cheats prosper or escape relatively unscathed, and that I can bring them some pleasure by talking to them seriously about their deserved successes and progress, whether its slow and gradual or triumphant.

I should make a confession at this point. No, I've never plagiarised. But I could if I wanted to: I took part in some research into plagiarism tactics. We all had to take a paragraph from a text and alter it until it conveyed the exact same ideas while seeming like original work. I did so well that the researcher congratulated me on my skills!

I do wish I could get further than two weeks into the year before I have to deploy my spider-suspicion though. I like my students. Why must a minority…



or the longer version:

From the highest of horses: a sermon to a plagiarist.

I got an email this morning from a student who failed her first assignment and partially plagiarised the re-sit. Because I'm in a preachy mood, I sent her a long, personal and emotional email about the value of education and in particular, of doing an English literature degree.

Obviously now I'm cringing at the thought of it being passed round for the cynical amusement of my students, but there's always the possibility of my words striking a chord. Embarrassing as it is, here's what I said to her, lightly edited to avoid identification.

I really want you to think about why you're here. Nobody's making you take a degree, and we operate under the assumption that you're enthusiastic about studying literature, even if individual texts aren't your favourites. If you see modules as obstacles to get over (or around), then trying to cheat or take shortcuts makes perfect sense, but we will catch you. We don't want you to treat your time here like that. We want to help you widen your intellectual horizons, to enjoy the process of learning more and thinking more. Cheating doesn't help with any of this. It might get you a degree certificate if you evade detection, but you won't come out of it educated. We aren't your judges: you should be your own judge. Ask yourself these questions:

• Am I here for the right reasons?
• Have I fulfilled my own potential?
• Am I thinking about study in the right way? 
• Are reading and writing changing me? 

At the risk of being extremely boring, let me tell you about my first degree. I got to university (not this one) on the Clearing system. I'd done well at English but never felt I was particularly good at anything and assumed everyone else was better than me. But I was lucky in one regard: all I ever wanted to do was read and think about books. Before long, I decided that to get anything out of my time at university, I had to talk about books too, in lectures and seminars and tutorials: a horrible thing for someone naturally very quiet. But enthusiasm and determination got me through: a good degree, an MA, a PhD and finally a job in academia. 

But all these things are far less important than one fact. Doing an English degree changed me in every way possible. I read more. I thought about what I'd read in lots of different ways. That meant that in a sense I knew less – because the things I assumed were totally true were revealed to be contingent on context and background. Finding new ways to think about poems and plays and novels soon meant that I had new ways to think about people, ideas, politics, belief, love, hate, sex, death, the past and the future, communities, and everything in the world about me. The world was revealed to be a much more interesting place: more difficult, sometimes terrible, always hard to understand and always changing, but definitely more interesting.  

Perhaps this sounds ridiculous to you, and on the screen maybe it is. But I know one thing for sure: if I'd copied and pasted from the web on an essay, I'd still be the idiot I was when I started my degree. So what I'm saying is: it's OK to find a lot of it difficult. It's OK to struggle, it's OK to absolutely hate some of the texts we ask you to read. It's OK to find it hard to balance academic work with all the other things in your life. We understand all that and we can help. But it's not OK to treat your time here – an opportunity to transform yourself into someone even more wonderful than you might already be – as a game with a prize at the end. Forget the degree certificate: that's just a piece of paper. It's what happens to you in-between that really matters. Give yourself a chance to be changed and amazing things will happen. I know: it happened to me, and that's why I'm in this job.  

I know this sounds really preachy and heavy-handed: you just caught me on a day when all these things are on my mind. But I and all my colleagues really want you and all the others on the course to grasp the opportunity. The worst thing for me is sitting on stage at Graduation Day and not recognising some of the people who are collecting their degrees, because they've never made an impression on us, or seeing students who could have done really well but chose not to make the effort. Don't be one of those people. You've failed this module, but you have every chance of fulfilling your potential. 

You just have to want to. 

Wonder what the Employability and Retention units will make of that? They're probably tying a noose as we speak…

Marking mayhem

OK, the vast majority of essays I mark are honestly and carefully written. Some are excellent, many are good, too many aren't very good, from which I can learn a lot about my own teaching practice as well as about the students.

But I'm not talking about them today. Instead, I offer you a few very basic tips to help you avoid falling into the trap of PLAGIARISM - or at least how not to get caught.

1. If you cut and paste somebody else's work from the internet, try to change the typeface to match the one you're using.

2. Leaving in the hyperlinks is often a giveaway. The same goes for the source's footnote numbers, especially if you haven't used any footnotes of your own.

3. Don't cite the first editions of Kant, Gramsci, Kierkegaard, Hegel or Marx. Most of them weren't written in a language you read. We don't have them in the library.

4. Do cite books we actually have. Very few things annoy me than references which in fact hide a Google search leading to a single sentence lifted from Google Books. It's really obvious that you haven't read any more of the book than that, and therefore don't understand it. If I haven't read it, or have read it but not understood it (looking at you, Deleuze), I'm going to be a teensy bit suspicious if you're rattling it off with casual abandon.

5. Unless you're a very special individual indeed, turning in work which is instantly publishable in journals which wouldn't accept a bunch of flowers from me, let alone a paper, will raise my suspicions. First-years who discuss Irigaray's theory of phallogocentrism in an essay on media representation are going to have to work rather hard to persuade me that they haven't nicked it.

6. Make sure the bibliography matches the essay.

7. Try not to start essays with (as a colleague recently read) 'In my previous paper on this subject (University of Oxford, 2007)…'.

8. If your English and punctuation is a little bit shaky, throwing in paragraphs of Judith Butler-style sophistication is always going to look a bit dubious. If you don't use capital letters in book titles and don't know that 'media' is a plural, adding post- or neo- to words, or scattering your text with 'discursive' tends to seem slightly suspicious.

9. If your web sources are things like 'megacheat', 'essaycheat' and 'freeessays.com': you've probably cheated. If you're happily nicking AS-level students coursework, you should reassess the level of your abilities. If it says AS on the tin, it's unlikely to be adequate for university, leaving aside issues of honesty. It was very nice of Kelly Brown to put her coursework on the internet, but you shouldn't be handing it in as your own university essay.

10. There's an incredibly simple way to avoid being accused of plagiarism. If you didn't write that sentence, use these things: ' '. Alternatively, you could add 'As X asserts…' at the head of sentences you've paraphrased. Bingo: instant credit for doing research.

The other way to fail an essay is to say things like 'women who have worked in pornography deserve no sympathy if they are subsequently raped'. Despite the correct use of 'subsequent'.

Back to the good essays. We know that you aren't professional academics. We know that academic writing is hard, and that ideas aren't always easy to grasp. We appreciate a clear statement of what you think and how it applies to texts. We don't expect you to have read everything in the field. We can tell when you've put the effort in and we look kindly on you even if you're not quite there.

Tips for success: if you're struggling, talk to us. Talk in the seminars, which is where we try to identify the chewy bits of a subject, talk to us in our office hours, stop us in the corridors. We love enthusiasm and we're always happy to explain things further. That's what we're here for.

Plagiarists tend to split into a few categories: those who don't quite understand that education isn't data-mining information; those who panic because they haven't attended, or managed their time properly; and those who are cynically ready to cut any corners because the qualification is far more important than the process. For the first two groups, the failure is partly ours: we need to explain why academic honesty and effort is worthwhile. For the latter, you're not only cheating us and your colleagues: you're gaining nothing from your time here.

Surviving BA English the easy way

I've just read a very interesting website, curated by a group of English literature students at some university. Despite not being able to differentiate between 'cannon' and 'canon', they've got some interesting things to say about the texts they're studying, and they say it in lively ways too.

Take, for instance, this entry on Milton's Paradise Lost, which was so interesting that one of my students decided that - with a few cosmetic changes and grammatical errors - it should form the majority of 'his' own essay.

Be warned, kiddies: I am the Plagiarism Plenipotentiary and I will never be deceived!

Plagiarists take heed

You may think that you've got away with it. If you've graduated without being caught, you're probably feeling pretty smug.

Think again. The forces of justice move slowly, but they keep moving. Just look to Germany, where the aristocratic Minister of Defence has just been stripped of his Ph.D for plagiarism. Public humiliation awaits!

This could be you! Personally, I spend my leisure hours going through essays from past cohorts, hunting for cheats.

The Small Room

I started reading May Sarton's The Small Room on Friday. It's a 1961 novel following the fortunes of a passionate young literature teacher as she takes her first job, in a women's university in the US.

After the first page, I thought I'd hate it. It promised to be one of those novels by an author who didn't trust her readers to spot symbolism or imagery: Sarton follows any description with a long explanation of why it's significant, which annoys me hugely.

Like this, the opening paragraph:

Lucy Winter sat in the train, swaying and rocking its way north from New York City, with a sense of achievement; the journey set a seal on the depressing limbo of the last months, the stifling summer in New York with her mother'; already she sensed the change of air, the lift of autumn. There, out the window, she saw a streak of bright red through a maple. It flashed by like a sign or a symbol, the end of mourning, her broken engagement, the actual vivid turn of a leaf toward her first teaching job. 

Infuriating. I only kept reading because I have a weakness for campus novels. However, the style relaxes a little, and the story becomes fascinating. There are a range of impossibly intellectual academics (they don't bitch about the photocopiers, they read Simone Weil essays to each other over decorous sips of martini) and devoted, passionate students. The core of the novel is the search for balance in one's relationship with students, between teaching, caring, leading and listening: becoming a professional in the truest sense of the word.

The terror and joy of being a university lecturer is beautifully sketched, though the institution is rather less bureaucratic, stressed and last-resort than The Hegemon.

"The hell of teaching is that one is never prepared. I often think that before every class I feel the same sort of terror I used to experience before an examination… and always I imagine that next year it will be different… Is there a life more riddle with self-doubt than that of a woman professor, I wonder?"

Spot on. Most of the colleagues I've discussed it with have problems sleeping on Sunday evenings, and we all intend to refresh our lectures every year… I can't speak to the last bit, but I assure you it's pretty stressful being a muscle-bound macho male professor too!

She had imagined that… preparation for these first lectures would be easy, but she soon discovered that knowing something and teaching it are as different as dreaming and waking. Things she had never noticed before sprang up at her out of the text; questions pounced upon her from the class, and the familiar words and ideas startled her as if she had not spent hours already examining them. She met a surprising resistance to Thoreau and it unnerved her; the students were not delighted by his pungent style (style did not touch them yet). 

I'm a fan of Thoreau, though I've never had a chance to teach any. I must confess too that question do not often pounce upon me - that's a real shame - but it's true that the hardest and most important part of teaching is to convey some of the thrill of engaging with texts. We don't always enjoy what we're asked to teach of course, but when we do, it's sometimes difficult to explain to others exactly what it is we're enthusiastic about. There are some wonderful descriptions of classes in which teacher and students become entranced by the texts, but more often, there's disappointment, such as when Lucy marks some dull essays on the Iliad:

"This was the material before you, and this is how you honored it… Here is one of the great mysterious works of man, as great and mysterious as a cathedral. And what did you do? You gave it so little of your real selves that you actually achieved boredom. You stood in Chartres cathedral unmoved. For the ancients this book was very much what a cathedral became for the people of the Middle Ages, a storehouse of myth, legend, and belief, the great structure where faith was nourished and the values of a civilization depicted… and you didn't bother to look at it! … This is not a matter of grades. You'll slide through all right. It's not bad, it is just flat. It's the sheer poverty of your approach that is horrifying".

Perhaps you're a little embarrassed by this outburst. Can you imagine me or one of my colleagues delivering it in a class now? I doubt it: the dynamic has changed. The society in which we live has trained students to think of education as a chore to be undergone as a job-qualification. There are always exceptions of course - plenty on my courses I won't mention and several past students, such as Ed, who sometimes comments here: one of the finest minds I've ever met. Students aren't to blame: the school system has failed, we academics have failed, and society as a whole has abandoned any sense of education as a liberatory good in itself.

However, there's one more huge twist in The Small Room, one which really makes me stand outside the book, trying to work out whether it's hugely exaggerated or we've lost something. One act almost destroys the university, tears holes in marriages and relationships, threatens to cost millions of dollars, shakes the foundations of the institutions and the philosophies of its staff and students.

What could this heinous crime be?

A student plagiarises an essay. 

How I envy that institution. Last week I marked several feet of essays, and uncovered at least 10 plagiarists. This is pretty standard. I didn't fall into an existential crisis. The Chancellor did not intervene. Colleagues didn't split from their partners in shock at their feelings on the subject. The student body did not divide between mercy and a lynch mob. Sadly, plagiarism is simply a strategy, and a very logical one given that the education has been replaced by the certificate as the object of the exercise. Just as capitalism automatically leads to theft, our education system - part of a social and economic structure predicated on competitive gain - has created plagiarism by encouraging students to become fixated on the acquisition of credits by any means necessary. We academic wring our hands and warn about the breach of academic integrity, but we know that the wider world has a sneaking admiration for those who cut corners and pull fast ones.

So: read The Small Room. It's a wonderful novel from a long, long time ago and far, far away.

Oh yes: on another subject, students should click here.

Richard Quinn is a God Amongst Men

I may have mentioned that some of my students cheated… in my class on Ethics and Philosophy.

Richard Quinn is a professor in Florida. He took a very interesting line with cheats. He offered a deal - own up, take an ethics course and live to study another day, or take the chance of being identified and thrown out.

200 students owned up.

Here's his astonishing lecture.

Plagiarists: watch this

With thanks to the University of Bergen.



Click "CC" to watch with subtitles if your Norwegian is a little rusty (and don't leave him outside in the rain again).

I marked some plagiarised essays this week. The irony is almost bottomless: the assignment was on ethics…

Here's a duller piece from the HEA.


Plagiarism from The Higher Education Academy on Vimeo.

I'm Hearing Double, or Old Habits Die Hard

Via Doonesbury - and don't take this as an endorsement of plagiarism, students:

"If we have multiple, highly skilled Special Operations forces identifying targets for precision-guided munitions, we will need fewer conventional ground forces. That's an important lesson learned from Afghanistan".

General Tommy Franks, in American Soldier.

"If we have multiple, highly skilled Special Operations forces identifying targets for precision-guided munitions, we will need fewer conventional ground forces. That's an important lesson learned from Afghanistan". 

George W. Bush in Decision Points. 

Would you cheat?

The usual cautions apply to this: it's a survey, and it's in the Daily Telegraph (thanks to Adam for sending it to me).

However, this article claims that a Manchester University study shows that half of students are willing to cheat - primarily through plagiarism and buying essays from the internet. Supposedly the paid-for essay sector is worth £200 million.

I think I'm pretty good at catching cheats, because I'm good at spotting language that doesn't come naturally to, say, a first-year undergraduate. There's been a rash of plagiarism this year - one student's essay claimed that she was an expert at 'intersectional theory', which is a) not relevant to the subject and b) news to me. Then again, I obviously don't know what I've missed when marking.

The problem is that students are paying a lot of money to get a qualification. In a consumer capitalist situation, the educational values are forgotten in pursuit of a certificate. The goal isn't learning, it's winning, and too many students are willing to use any means necessary.

The Manchester study questioned 90 second and third year students at three universities. It found they would be prepared to pay more than £300 for essays gaining a first class mark, £217 for a 2:1 and £164 for a 2:2 piece of work. Longer dissertations can cost up to £2,500. Some offer a cash back guarantee if the student is not awarded a certain degree classification.

"What is quite striking is that it appears that students did not see this form of behaviour as unethical," said Mr Rigby. "There was very little stigma attached to it. One student told me how he was working in the library next to someone who openly got out his credit card and paid for an essay off the internet.

"One could argue that in the modern university, the student is treated as, and increasingly identifies as, a consumer demanding 'value for money'. Perhaps subcontracting some of the work is seen as just an other rational choice by many informed consumers on campus."

Let's be clear: university work isn't the Kobayashi Maru test - it's possible to succeed, but the grade isn't the important bit, it's the intellectual growth. If you cheat, you cheat yourself and your colleagues. Have I ever cheated? No - I felt bad enough when an unseen poetry criticism essay was on a poem I'd read before. Also, my undergraduate education was much more personalised. We hand-wrote essays and gave them to a tutor whom we saw in very small groups, and discussed the face-to-face. I guess the analogy is with shoplifting or tax evasion: you wouldn't con a little old lady but you might not feel so bad ripping off a massive multinational. I wouldn't have tried to deceive the teachers I knew well and respected, but The Hegemon can feel like an impersonal machine. (That's not an excuse, by the way, it's an institutional failure).

Still, when I get sacked, I can make a living writing essays for you.

Irony round-up

This just in:

Sarah Palin, who coined the term "Drill, Baby, Drill", felt emboldened to accuse Obama this week of being in thrall to the oil industry.

Meanwhile, some Top Tips for students (I know I've said this before, but you're clearly not listening):

1. If you're going to plagiarise and you're functionally illiterate, try to mess up the stuff you're stealing. We can, somehow and with the aid of microscopes and computers, spot the difference between high-level professorial prose and your verbiage.

2. If you take the other route, and plagiarise from any old internet site, consider some quality control. School-level sites just don't cut it. Ask yourself this: if a site is called 'askkids.com', is it likely to contain university level material which will convince a lecturer? If you think the answer is yes, then feel free to use your exhaust pipe as a bong.

3. If you've spent hours stitching stolen material together from a bewildering array of websites, why not consider using those hours for reading books and thinking about what to write? After all, you've proved that you can concentrate and put the work in. Now all you need to do is add a dash of honesty, get out of bed and go to the library. It's the shiny place with all the books and people loudly using their mobile phones.

Old habits die hard…

That convict's anthem, Men At Work's brilliant 'Down Under'… is based on a stolen riff! Terrible news. Utter recidivists, these Australians.

Actually, I'm not convinced, but see what you think.

Still, all together now: 'she just smiled and gave me Vegemite sandwich'!

I know how Dumbledore feels

There's a scene in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince which finds the saintly professor forcing himself to drink enchanted/poisoned water which sends him mad with terror - and yet he has to continue imbibing until it's all gone, or his quest fails.

This is an exact analogy for marking essays. The first few this morning were fine. Some were good, others less so. Several hours later, I'm ready to sell my grandmother to cannibals if it would end the torment (though actually the alternative is to clean my flat).

I don't mind marking essays where the effort hasn't been rewarded by enlightenment. It's easy to tell how much work has gone into a piece, and effort does deserve recognition. What's soul-destroying is the plagiarism, especially lazy plagiarism. If you copy from the web, at least copy a decent source. I've had a couple today that have cut-and-pasted from a site riddled with factual errors. If you'd written it yourself, you might have done better…

A final thought. If you're only here for the piece of paper, I guess plagiarism is fine. It's an efficient method entirely in keeping with the instrumentalist, individualist and consumerist ethos dominant in Western society. However: learning should be transformative. You should be changed by everything you hear and write. Losing the opportunity to debate rather than listen to lecturers, and plagiarising essays doesn't hurt us (though it is disappointing). Most of all, it robs you of the chance to transform your intellect, your personality, and your future.

It's also a mammoth pain in the arse, trawling the web to track down your sources.

For a wittier and more learned take on plagiarism and intertextuality (though he doesn't se the word), read this essay in yesterday's Observer. In case you don't know the difference, plagiarism is the use of other people's ideas or words without acknowledgement. Intertextuality is the use of said ideas or words with the deliberate intention of touching off associations and memories: the author wants you to know where they came from, to add significance. Eliot's Waste Land uses countless fragmented quotations and references because one of the ideas he's exploring is the loss of a stable and coherent culture (destroyed by war, technology, lefties and so on), from which he pillages the references. You, on the other hand, nicking paragraphs from essays on 'cheatmate.com' isn't a witty and philosophical redefinition of the nature of scholarship, authority and the ownership of ideas…

Of cheese and plagiarism

Anita presented me with two of the finest Irish cheeses available, in thanks for wandering around Stoke with her. One of them was a lovely unpasteurised soft cheese from Gubbeen, a West Cork dairy and meat producer.

However - I'd seen their logo somewhere before (I can't copy it from their website, but have a look). As you know, I recently read a biography of Eric Gill - typographer, sculptor, child abuser - and saw this engraving, done on commission for a bakery's bags (wood engraving 1915, published 1929):

Gubbeen - you thieving swine.

Country Life

Well I'm at home. I've done the mandatory religious observance to keep the Aged Parents happy, and am sitting in the sun. The thing about being out in the countryside is that it's so noisy - more birds than I can identify screaming to be fed by their parents, squirrels, rabbits, the occasional fox - all accentuated by the absence of my usual auditory input: sirens, gunshots, car stereos, bad music played on mobile phones, people hawking up mucus onto the streets, revving engines.

As it's a holiday, I'll offer some free advice to my media students. If you are going to use the web for 'additional resources', avoid sites like 'megaessays.com', 'freeessays.com' and most of all, '8thgradeessays.com'. 8th grade is US high school for 12 year-olds. My superpower is being able to detect plagiarism in seconds so I will catch you, and it's not worth it. You're all intelligent enough and resourceful enough to find your way to the library and read some university level texts. If you get away with using American high school essays, you might get your degree but you won't have become educated. There's a difference between having a certificate and having acquired the literary and critical skills which make you a unique, skilled reader. If you only care about the certificate, of course, then good luck to you, but I think that's rather depressing.

Academic top tips for students

Students: when copying and pasting from Wikipedia and other webpages, take the time to change the font to the same one you're using in the rest of the essay. Removing the hyperlinks is also a good idea when trying to make me think that you wrote the paragraphs in question. Otherwise there's no challenge or fun playing these games of mental chess…

Emma from Limerick suggests that instead of handing plagiarised essays in, you could send me the URL of whatever site you plan to plunder. Then I could mark you on your choice of source and no paper is wasted, thus saving the environment.