If there is one thing I care most about when I teach history, it is doing all that I can to ensure that my students are honest and have integrity about their work. In my field, this means that they understand what plagiarism is and how to avoid it.

In my years of teaching, most of what I see is academic honesty. I’ve had very few cases in which a student has intentionally cheated. Sometimes, a student has gotten sloppy in his or her note taking and research and unintentionally used someone else’s words and ideas without citation. Still, this is plagiarism, and the consequences are the same. Famous historians like Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose both had high-profile cases of plagiarism in their work that, although unintentional, had a significant impact on their careers and reputations.

We live in an age in which students are bombarded with information. They often receive information and data in a medium that can be easily manipulated. They are used to downloading music, video, and games. Now, they can download books and articles. They can use editing tools to slice and dice this data to suit their needs. They are used to sharing this data with their friends and often don’t see that what they are passing along or downloading is actually someone else’s intellectual property. They rarely understand the implications of what they are doing.

So, we as educators have our work cut out for us. Dan Kindlon, the New York Times best-selling author and expert on adolescent issues, shared with the faculty some findings about how prevalent academic dishonesty is among high school students. The numbers were alarming, and Kindlon contended that it had a lot to do with the pressure and stress students feel in today’s climate. I think this is true for the intentional cheaters. But, in my experience, it has been with students who do not understand the finer points of what it means to use another writer’s work product or source material. Technology is making it easier to take short-cuts, and in the process, this affects the student’s ability to think about the material.

Attached is a New York Times article about the ways in which technology is affecting how students understand these issues and how murky it has become for them. I encourage you to take the time to speak with your child about honesty, integrity, and how to use others' ideas. Most importantly, we want students to do their own work. We want them to understand how to use critical evidence from an outside source, and know how to give credit and provide citations to these sources. It isn’t hard to do, and it will help a student avoid getting into trouble. It also helps them learn.

“Cutting and Pasting: A Senior Thesis by (Insert Name)

By BRENT STAPLES

A friend who teaches at a well-known eastern university told me recently that plagiarism was turning him into a cop. He begins the semester collecting evidence, in the form of an in-class essay that gives him a sense of how well students think and write. He looks back at the samples later when students turn in papers that feature their own, less-than-perfect prose alongside expertly written passages lifted verbatim from the Web.

“I have to assume that in every class, someone will do it,” he said. “It doesn’t stop them if you say, ‘This is plagiarism. I won’t accept it.’ I have to tell them that it is a failing offense and could lead me to file a complaint with the university, which could lead to them being put on probation or being asked to leave.”

Not everyone who gets caught knows enough about what they did to be remorseful. Recently, for example, a student who plagiarized a sizable chunk of a paper essentially told my friend to keep his shirt on, that what he’d done was no big deal. Beyond that, the student said, he would be ashamed to go home to the family with an F.

As my friend sees it: “This represents a shift away from the view of education as the process of intellectual engagement through which we learn to think critically and toward the view of education as mere training. In training, you are trying to find the right answer at any cost, not trying to improve your mind.”

Like many other professors, he no longer sees traditional term papers as a valid index of student competence. To get an accurate, Internet-free reading of how much students have learned, he gives them written assignments in class — where they can be watched.

These kinds of precautions are no longer unusual in the college world. As Trip Gabriel pointed out in The Times recently, more than half the colleges in the country have retained services that check student papers for material lifted from the Internet and elsewhere. Many schools now require incoming students to take online tutorials that explain what plagiarism is and how to avoid it.

Nationally, discussions about plagiarism tend to focus on questions of ethics. But as David Pritchard, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told me recently: “The big sleeping dog here is not the moral issue. The problem is that kids don’t learn if they don’t do the work.”

Prof. Pritchard and his colleagues illustrated the point in a study of cheating behavior by M.I.T. students who used an online system to complete homework. The students who were found to have copied the most answers from others started out with the same math and physics skills as their harder-working classmates. But by skipping the actual work in homework, they fell behind in understanding and became significantly more likely to fail.

The Pritchard axiom — that repetitive cheating undermines learning — has ominous implications for a world in which even junior high school students cut and paste from the Internet instead of producing their own writing.

If we look closely at plagiarism as practiced by youngsters, we can see that they have a different relationship to the printed word than did the generations before them. When many young people think of writing, they don’t think of fashioning original sentences into a sustained thought. They think of making something like a collage of found passages and ideas from the Internet.

They become like rap musicians who construct what they describe as new works by “sampling” (which is to say, cutting and pasting) beats and refrains from the works of others.

This habit of mind is already pervasive in the culture and will be difficult to roll back. But parents, teachers and policy makers need to understand that this is not just a matter of personal style or generational expression. It’s a question of whether we can preserve the methods through which education at its best teaches people to think critically and originally. “

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/opinion/13tue4.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Cutting%20and%20Pasting:%20A%20Senior%20Thesis&st=cse