Plagiarism in the 21st Century
What do J.K. Rowling, Stephen Ambrose, Dan Brown, Alex Haley, Helen Keller, and T.S. Eliot have in common? They were accused of plagiarism. Prominent writers accused of using other writers’ words without attribution.
Another thing they have in common: nothing much happened to them after the plagiarism was discovered. No fines, no loss of royalties, just a blip of adverse publicity. It might be mentioned on their Wikipedia pages where it is buried under accolades.
If you are a student and found to have plagiarized, you will be treated very differently than the authors above. Plagiarism is not a crime in the real world. It is in academia. Plagiarism violates a school’s code of conduct and/or honor code. It is severely dealt with.
This wasn’t always so. For most of the 20th Century accusations of plagiarism in colleges, graduate and professional schools were relatively rare.
That is not a commentary of the relative academic honesty of earlier generations.
Academic Plagiarism Before the Internet
Before the late 1970s, it took almost as much work to plagiarize as it did to submit original work. Research was done in the dusty stacks of libraries. Everything, of course, was handwritten, then typed out on manual typewriters (ask your grandparents). Detecting plagiarism was just as hard and very much a hit or miss proposition.
Papers, treatises, and other writings destined for a filing cabinet, never to be published, were virtually impossible to check for plagiarism. Published papers with plagiarized sentences, paragraphs, or worse were usually only uncovered if the writer of the original text happened to read it.
Even then, when the perceived plagiarism was a line, a description, statement, conclusion or more, there was a presumption it was inadvertent. There was a possibility the student had never read the ‘original text’ but had inadvertently echoed the line – some things can only be described in so many ways.
Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, after all, invented calculus at the same time without ever having published or even met.
Things changed in the late 1970s. With the use of computers came the ability to ‘cut and paste.’ The advantages of this to someone willing to cut corners is obvious – though they still had to do research by hand. Schools soon noticed an uptick in plagiarism cases. Schools began a ‘crack down’ and made more efforts to thoroughly review papers.
Plagiarism in the Information Age
The personal computer and the Internet created a plagiarism crisis that was felt from high schools to colleges, to graduate and professional schools. Plagiarism went digital. Anyone who wanted to cut corners now had access to unlimited content that was extraordinarily easy to copy and drop into a Word document.
From 1990 through 2003 or so, plagiarism was rampant and unchecked. Schools recognized that they needed to act. Detecting plagiarism also went digital. Papers are now analyzed for any signs of plagiarism. It takes seconds.
The slightest bit of plagiarism can result in a disciplinary hearing.
And therein lies the problem.
No matter how fast and precise a plagiarism web crawler may be it can’t think. It can’t tell if the ‘plagiarized’ phrase was used as a title or subtitle – something that’s perfectly permissible. It can’t tell the professor or hearing panel that the flagged phrase was on a heavily footnoted page and obviously a mistake.
It can’t tell if the same phrase or description is an archetype, a cliché, or the only way to describe an event. Or written about so much that almost nothing is original (we’ve heard that more papers about Macbeth are flagged for plagiarism than any other Literature papers). Or a Newton-Leibniz situation, the student never read or heard about the ‘plagiarized’ passage, they just happened to have the same thought. Or an instance of ‘self-plagiarism.’
Most of all, it can’t begin to know the student’s intent or awareness of what constitutes plagiarism.
Take any accusation of plagiarism for what it is – a potential end to an academic career and diploma.
Understand that you have options before, during, and after disciplinary hearings and findings.
Start with calling The Hahn Legal Group APC as soon as possible. We’re here to listen and help.
