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Information Ethics Problem of the Month is a feature on the Carnegie Mellon University Libraries Web site. Librarians, computing professionals, faculty, and students will be invited to contribute short essays on questions of special interest to the university community. If you would like to comment on an essay, suggest a topic, or volunteer to write a guest column, please contact the feature editor, Jean Alexander, jeana@andrew.cmu.edu.

When Is Plagiarism Not Cheating?
by
Jennifer Erica Sweda
Social Sciences Cataloging Librarian, Van Pelt-Dietrich Library, University of Pennsylvania
Writing Fellow, Writing Across the University Program (Critical Writing Program), University of Pennsylvania
jesweda@pobox.upenn.edu

Certainly, helping students learn how to correctly integrate and cite source material in their written work can be a challenge. Even students from strong American high schools sometimes reach college without a fundamental understanding of the conventions of academic written discourse. But this problem can become even more prevalent when dealing with a diverse group of international students for whom not only the English language, but also Western academic discourse, can be unfamiliar.

What do I mean specifically by Western academic discourse? In broad terms, the academy in the West emphasizes originality of scholarship, ownership of ideas and knowledge, and independent analysis. If North American students find the concepts of "originality, the use of quotation marks, and of the rewording of source material" difficult in their own writing, we should not be shocked when foreign students raised outside of Western culture find our rhetorical structures and academic expectations confusing.[1]

Literary scholar Denis Dutton explains that our "demand for originality in thought and expression is not universally shared, nor was it even found in its modern degree all through Western history. In the Middle Ages," he reminds us, "the copying and memorization of traditional texts was a stronger element in education than it is today, and such purely reproductive thought is still an important element in many non-European cultures."[2] Writing theorist Susan McLeod tells us that the "notion of stealing ideas or words is not only modern, it is also profoundly Western. Students from Middle Eastern, Asian, and African cultures are baffled by the notion that one can 'own' ideas."[3]

This means that our accepted academic conventions can be unknown to non-Western students whose scholarly discourses may demand "no requirement to argue, to resolve ambiguities or dilemmas, to reach clearcut conclusions" and whose traditions value "appreciation over criticism, summary over analysis, reproduction over originality."[4] International students may prize an oral tradition over a written one, which can hinder them in our writing-intensive environment, or they may write using a relational style and not an analytical one, which will most likely put them at odds with our expectations of them. As a result, copyright lawyer and book editor Laurie Stearns' definition of plagiarism as "a failure of the creative process through the author's failure either to transform the original material or to identify its source" and "intentionally taking the literary property of another without attribution and passing it off as one's own, having failed to add anything of value to the copied material and having reaped from its use an unearned benefit"[5] may constitute exactly what some non-Western students see as well-intentioned, legitimate scholarship (and rightly so, in their respective cultures).

So what can we as educators do to remedy this disconnect between our expectations and those of our international students? Simply being aware of this cultural variance in the conventions of academic written discourse is a good first step. Next, we need to remember that spending classroom/instructional time explaining assignments and defining conventions and our own expectations is never wasted time. We should also realize that what we might see as problems with a student's use of the English language may in fact be macro-level problems related to the cultural specificity of Western ideals of scholarship. This means that mistakes in grammar or diction often mask (or are simply easier to address) a fundamental misunderstanding of the rhetorical elements of argument, evidence, structure, and citation (especially those concerning the specific formulae of theses and dissertations). We need to actively inquire about our students' processes of researching and writing so that we can determine whether their plagiarism is the unwitting result of this ignorance of conventions.

Writing advisor Gail Craswell suggests that when giving feedback to a student on her writing, we avoid remarks such as "'what is the point of all this?,' 'how does this discussion relate to topic?', 'where is this going?', 'undirected exposition' and so on." These comments, she argues, are inappropriate because they mean nothing to students raised outside of our specific academic writing culture. "Such highly contextualized messages," she reminds us, "cannot be decoded outside the framework of academic conventions of writing to which they refer for their meaning."[6]

In stepping back from specific examples in a student's work and addressing instead the larger issues surrounding Western expectations of scholarly discourse, we can clarify our expectations for student work. In my experience with international students who have misunderstood an assignment, it usually takes only a brief discussion of disciplinary conventions and a few good examples on which she can model her own work for a student to begin significantly improving a draft. Finally, reminding international students that the most effective writers always write to their audience can help drive home the need to be aware of the rhetorical expectations of that audience. Focusing on these macro-level issues can help both international and traditional students alike to avoid unintentional plagiarism.

[1] Denis Dutton, "Plagiarism and Forgery," in Encyclopedia of Applied Ethics, ed. Ruth Chadwick (San Diego: Academic Press, 1998), v. 3, 509. Available: http://www.denisdutton.com/forgery_and_plagiarism.htm [June 18, 2004].

[2] Ibid.

[3] Susan H. McLeod, "Responding to Plagiarism: the Role of the WPA," WPA: Writing Program Administration 15:3 (1992): 12.

[4] Brigid Ballard & John Clanchy, "Assessment by Misconception: Cultural Influences and Intellectual Traditions," in Assessing Second Language Writing in Academic Contexts, ed. Liz Hamp-Lyons (Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing, 1991), 33.

[5] Laurie Stearns, "Copy Wrong: Plagiarism, Process, Property, and the Law," in Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual Property in a Postmodern World, eds. Lise Buranen & Alice M. Roy (Albany: State University of New York, 1999), 7.

[6] Gail Craswell, "Maintaining Textuality: A Case Study of the Problematic Use of Academic Discourse Conventions in the Thesis Text of an International Graduate Student" (Canberra: Australian National University Graduate School, 1993). Available: http://www.anu.edu.au/graduate/pubs/occasional_papers/GS93_4.pdf [June 18, 2004].