Review of Guiding Students from Cheating and Plagiarism to Honesty and Integrity: Strategies for Change
Review of Guiding Students from Cheating and Plagiarism to Honesty and Integrity: Strategies for Change
by Ann Lathrop and Kathleen Foss, 2005
Reviewed by Greg Beatty
Guiding Students from Cheating and Plagiarism to Honesty and Integrity is a useful and fascinating book. Guiding Students provides a host of useful tools that can be applied immediately, as well as information that’s essential for putting some, if not all, aspects of plagiarism into context. However, there are also some rather striking gaps to the analyses provided, and some elements that will be difficult for adjuncts to apply.
Let us begin with the numerous positives to Guiding Students. The overall structure is the first of many such aspects. There are five parts to the book. These are both numbered and titled, and move logically through a sequence of topics. Part I is titled “Focus on Honesty and Integrity,” Part II “Leadership in Action,” and so on. This strong focus on the positive helps reframe the battle over plagiarism. It becomes one of many ways schools and teachers can help build character, rather that what it too often seems like: a burden that darkens the day and turns sunny dispositions cynical.
Within each part of the book readers will find subdivisions (usually chapters, though Part V contains appendices); each of these is usually divided further. The smaller subdivisions are individual case studies and statements from a wide range of authors. Within many of these subdivisions readers find “COPY ME” pages. These pages—all labeled “COPY ME” at the top—function as handouts to be immediately put into play. Some of these pages are survey results, breaking down student responses to questions about why they do or don’t cheat. Others are reading lists to guide further research. Still others are examples of personal statements from teachers to students meant to open discussions on the nature of integrity. All are intensely practical. You could photocopy these pages and hold an institutional workshop on plagiarism with little other preparation needed.
This array of subdivisions allows readers to pick and choose their subject matter with fair precision. It also provides a far richer matrix for understanding the cultural contexts in which plagiarism occurs than most instructors encounter. This is due both to the number of angles from which the subject is approached and from the range of individual voices: students, priests, teachers, and students all join voices to help readers understand plagiarism better. As one example, Chapter Two (“Student Voices”) extensively quotes student explanations of why they do and don’t cheat. Some of the reasons for cheating may be chilling—an eleventh grade girl is quoted as saying, “Cheating is the ‘cool’ thing to do. It’s like having the latest designer shoes or the ‘hip’ haircut’.”—but seeing the varied explanations of why students think they cheat is enlightening. Likewise, learning why students don’t cheat multiplies the approaches one can take when trying to prevent plagiarism.
The reasons students cheat and don’t cheat fall into certain categories: peer pressure ethical reasoning, emotional response to the teacher/class, and practical issues. The first factor is largely self-evident; the others deserve some further explanation. Students’ ethical reasoning included both their own judgments of what was right and wrong and their parents’. Regarding emotional response, students who saw no purpose to the class, or who failed to connect emotionally with the instructor, said they were more likely to cheat. Students who felt their teachers cared about them as people and/or who liked their students were less likely to cheat. Finally, the practical issues involved ranged from the subtle (how to be sure of those you were cheating off of knew the right answer) to the basic (how far apart desks were placed in the classroom).
As one might hope, the approaches for developing integrity/preventing plagiarism addressed each of these areas. Chapter 3, “Responding to Students,” contains a teacher’s letter to his students committing himself to academic integrity and explaining what that this asks of him (and them). Chapter 4 discusses the parents’ roles in academic integrity.
All of Part II addresses leadership. This takes different forms, some of which may be surprising. Chapter 7 focuses on “Librarians as a Force for Integrity,” while Chapter 5 is devoted to student honor codes. The five case studies discussing the development and implementation of student honor codes are among the most fascinating reading in the volume. Crucial here are the discussions of how much work it took to implement honor codes, but also how much genuine learning occurred in the academic, ethical, and social realms. The best of these stories detail organic development in which honor codes are not compelled from above but rather evolve as students, teachers, and administrators work together. As a writing teacher, I can’t help but see these projects as tremendous victories for rhetorical thinking. Communities learn to articulate meaningful and persuasive words with tremendous amounts at stake.
Not coincidentally, an entire section of the book (Part III) is dedicated to “Integrity in the Writing Process.” Some of the suggestions here will seem a bit basic to experienced instructors, such as asking for an annotated bibliography along the way to a research paper, and/or requiring descriptions of the development process followed for a paper be submitted along with a paper. However, all of the suggestions made are functional, and all address the same cluster of purposes: educating students on what constitutes proper research and documentation, designing assignments that are difficult to plagiarize, and creating/demonstrating heightened awareness of the writing process and possibility of plagiarism.
Part IV addresses “Using Technology with Integrity.” Aside from Part V, which contains only appendices, it is by far the shortest portion of the book—and therein lies one of the problems with the book. One chapter on “Integrity in Online Learning” and another detailing the specific technological tools available and what they do radically underestimates the influence of technology not just on the practical side of plagiarism, but on the cultural side. That is to say, Part IV reads as if students now were the same as students ever were, but with a few more tech toys to use to cheat. Simply put, this is not the case.
Contemporary students are part of a cyborg culture in which the nature of plagiarism has changed on a fundamental level. This must be addressed, and Lathrop and Foss really don’t do so. Students who have grown up sharing files, linking to one another’s blogs, and collectively authoring entries on Wikipedia will not see plagiarism as cheating. The educational campaign involved in guiding students to integrity must engage them on a much more profound level than those described here.
This weakness relates to another weakness, and that’s the book’s (at times charming) naiveté. Student explanations of why they cheat are valuable—but they assume two things that can’t be assumed. First, they assume that students mean the same thing by cheating that faculty do. As someone who has swum through a host of excuses on plagiarism, I promise you this is not the case. Second, this assumes that students accurately describe their own behavior. This is frequently not the case for adults, who misrepresent themselves both consciously and accidentally on many polls. Why then would it be the case for students? These “student voices” are an intensely valuable start on answering the question of why students cheat—but more sophisticated investigation is needed.
As for the aspects of the book that would be difficult for adjuncts to apply, those would be all techniques depending on time and community membership. As readers of the Adjunct Advocate know on a visceral level, adjuncts both are and aren’t members of the academic community; we exist on the borders of official institutional identity. That means it is going to be harder to initiate the vital community conversations described here. What’s more, all of the modifications to assignments that would make them closer to plagiarism-proof are time-intensive. Instituting academic honor codes took longer than a single quarter/semester at all of the schools described. hat means that any adjuncts involved at the start may not be there for the finish.
So, while adjunct faculty will find both conceptual and practical help in Guiding Students from Cheating and Plagiarism to Honesty and Integrity, they’ll also find it frustrating at times. It’s a symptom even of the things it seems to cure.
