Cheating on the rise, with shortcuts just a click away

By Mary Kaye Ritz
Advertiser Religion & Ethics Writer

Several years ago, a Kamehameha middle-schooler won her category in the Language Arts Showcase, the state's prestigious school writing contest.

Her piece was about to be published in a compilation book that goes out to participating schools when one showcase judge grew suspicious, vaguely recognizing the piece. At the 11th hour, recalls Kamehameha English teacher Harriet Brundage, they discovered the girl had lifted parts of the story directly off the Internet.

The organization scuttled her award and scrambled to make sure the plagiarized piece didn't make it into print. Kamehameha suspended the girl, Brundage said, even though her parents defended her, saying it was an accident of fate that their daughter and an online source should come up with similar ideas.

The tale gets worse, said Brundage, who retired in June after 39 years of teaching English. The next year, the girl submitted another plagiarized piece. That time, the judges were ready, and she was expelled.

In 2000, The Advertiser's 18 & Under essay contest top award was rescinded after a teacher recognized parts of the published piece as being from Scholastic magazine's Pinnacle Award winner in 1998.

By many accounts, plagiarism is on the rise in today's copy-and-paste world, where shortcuts are only a click away, and teachers are grappling with ways to combat the growing problem.

U.S. history teacher Kamaile Shultz said the problem has worsened in the past five years, with more schools hooked up to the Internet, but she attributes the rise to intellectual and moral laziness rather than a lack of understanding.

Hawai'i's schoolchildren are taught at the elementary level that plagiarism is cheating, she said.

"I think they get it; they just want to do whatever they can to get by," said Shultz, of Mililani High, who has been teaching since 1969.

Sometimes it's just "sloppiness," she said, a quick fix to a looming deadline.

"They wait until the night before and figure 'Why not?' " she said. "Get a zero or try to sneak by?"

It's laziness, said Farrington High senior Tan Yan Chen, who said she knows what plagiarism is because it was first explained in middle school and more extensively by her high school English teachers in her freshman and sophomore years.

"It's when you take something, an idea or whatever, that doesn't belong to you, misrepresenting it as your work when it's really not," said Chen, who emigrated from China. "To get around that, (we) just have to credit the people we use or what you take off of newspapers, or whatever."

The laziness is part of being an American teenager, she said. She has heard of students who copied answers to vocabulary homework from a book, then passing them around until another student finally ratted. Even though she said she would feel too guilty to plagiarize, Chen understands the temptation of looking at the screen and seeing "whole paragraphs formed for you," just a scroll of the mouse and click away.

"Doing research papers are not fun, not something a 16-year-old, 17-year-old wants to do," she admitted, then laughed. "The easiest way to get around it is to copy someone else. But in the end, the loser is the student."

Besides the ethical issue of claiming credit for something you didn't do, there's the practical problem: You'll feel guilty and don't really learn anything, Chen said.

Cris Rathyen, one of the judges for The Advertiser's essay contest and an Advanced Placement English teacher at Moanalua High, said the other practical problem some students don't understand is this: It's easy for a teacher to catch.

Besides Web sites and search engines, teachers come equipped with their own wits, which allow them to tell when the student who usually writes like Bart Simpson suddenly sounds like Lisa.

Kansas high school teacher Christine Pelton fired up a software program and logged on to TurnItIn.com to verify that 28 of her students plagiarized portions of their semester project on leaves.

She flunked them, but parents took their case to the school board, and the board softened the punishment, giving partial credit for the assignment. In March, she quit.

Critics said that the Kansas parents and school board sent students the wrong message, that "whining works, complaining counts and no one really expects them to be fully honest," said Michael Josephson of the Josephson Institute of Ethics.

Historians Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin also came under fire this year for using unattributed passages in their work.

Mark Pollard, Moanalua High's English chairman, is working to create a plagiarism policy for his 13-member department, which he said he hopes to have in place at the beginning of next school year.

From there, he said, he'll take it to other department heads to see about establishing a schoolwide policy.

Some schools, such as Iolani and Punahou, not only have such policies but tough consequences, as well. Iolani Headmaster Val Iwashita said there have been dismissals there because of the issue.

Do they use Web sites, search engines and software to track a plagiarist?

"We use everything at our disposal," Iwashita said. "We need to be vigilant in discouraging students against cheating. Integrity of work that goes into presenting material is critically important."

Yet even he agrees there are degrees of understanding on plagiarism, an issue that ranges from simple (knowing not to use someone else's phrasing as your own) to the complex (knowing how original work expounds on someone else's idea). If a student unintentionally crosses the line, teachers describe the rule and warn the student first, he said.

"Judgment is used. ... We don't want to penalize the student unfairly," Iwashita said.

Punahou uses age-appropriate concepts to explain acceptable use policies, said Norman Cox, an educational technology coordinator.

While high schools are trying to clarify the concept of plagiarism for their students, John Zuern, an English professor at University of Hawai'i-Manoa, leaves none of that to chance. He starts his classes off by teaching responsible research methods and citation style.

While he knows neither make for electrifying subject matter, "The responsibility lies with the teacher. ... Not enough (teachers) have it as a policy, or part of the course content," Zuern said.

Once research methods and citation style have been adequately explained, Zuern said, he also counteracts the plagiarism problem by making specific assignments, having students put together many different ideas for which "they can't get off-the-shelf arguments."

Then it boils down to the ethical issue of not being familiar with moral concepts to understand borrowing without giving due credit, said Zuern, who also used to put in time at the UH writing workshop, a drop-in support service for students working on writing assignments. In those cases, he tries to explain it in labor terms: It was somebody else's hard work. You don't claim you did it, because then you're misrepresenting yourself.

But he tries to go about it in a positive way, because good writing teachers are supposed to build up students.

"Sometimes I think plagiarism comes not from lack of morals in students, but from a lack of confidence in their ability to make their arguments effectively," he said.

Chen learned early from her parents that the easy way isn't always the best way.

"When I was little, they taught me, no matter how poor you are, if you really want something, never steal," she said. "The whole concept of earning, you have to earn everything, because nothing in life is handed you on a silver platter. (You do) not veer off track because it's so tempting."

Instant gratification is part of the problem, she said: We're a society that can't even stand to wait a second for a Web page to pop up.

"You really have to work for stuff," she said.

And Chen is grateful for that work ethic: She has been accepted at Stanford University next year.

"Hard work does matter, and it gets you somewhere," she said.