The Prominence of Plagiarism

We recently received a request at the Lounge to do a post on plagiarism in law schools from someone who said that (s)he had experienced significant instances of plagiarism in his/her school.  The concerns raised include the fact that many faculty at the school in question didn't seem to be taking it too seriously in terms of counseling students about plagiarism and implementing penalties for plagiarism.

Let's face it - our profession is all about expression, much of it in written form.  Thus, it is important in this age of blogging, and the availability of voluminous amounts of online information at the push of a button that students, librarians and professors think about the way we use our own words and the words of others.  We need to know: (a) when to attribute work; and, (b) when to ask permission to use work.  And we need to be able to express this clearly to our students.

I have been quite fortunate in recent years at my institution that the writing programs have been greatly strengthened and a lot of work has been put into explaining these issues to students along with other aspects of legal writing.  In fact, this has so much been the case that I've had upper level students afraid of doing group work culminating in a writing project for fear that they will incidentally engage in unintentional plagiarism of classmates' ideas.  So maybe this is taking things a step too far, but I'm certainly interested in whether others think plagiarism is a greater problem these days and, if so, what steps are being taken to: (a) educate students about it; and, (b) penalize students for engaging in unacceptable conduct.

Lots of us have used the plagiarism detecting software but it has significant limitations including what databases of information a particular software package covers, and whether it can account for students making minor changes in organization to the text to foil the software.

Other thoughts?  (And, thanks, anonymous "Unhappy Editor" for reading and commenting.)

Comments

[M.]

As many law review staffers and editors can attest, there are also problems with faculty work -- generally in the form of self-plagiarism, misattribution, failure to attribute, and failure to place quotation marks around directly quoted material. In my opinion, these mistakes are probably the result of time-pressure, the extreme length of law review articles, and RA work product. Many such errors are found and quietly corrected prior to publication. I believe most of them are unintentional. I raise this issue only to suggest that in addition to clear standards and strict enforcement, perhaps faculty could foster a culture of compliance by be more careful in their own written work.

[CSET test]

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