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Plagiarism, aided by online sources like Wikipedia and SparkNotes, has become the most common type of academic integrity violation at the University of Maine, and faculty members have different ideas about how to solve the problem.
“Right now, plagiarism is the most prevalent,” said David Fiacco, director of the UMaine Office of Community Standards, Right and Responsibilities. “We are seeing an upswing in cheating on exams, projects — whatever it might be.”
Violations of the university’s academic integrity policies are divided into three categories — plagiarism, cheating and fabrication of data. Fiacco rarely deals with first-time offenders, but his office serves as a resource for faculty.
“Many of the cases of academic integrity are addressed in the classroom directly by the faculty,” he said. “We are making a very conscientious effort to reach out to faculty members to let them know we can help them with that.”
The Center for Teaching Excellence will offer a workshop in February about strategies for minimizing cheating in the classroom. Fiacco cited a number of measures that have had varying degrees of success. These include distributing multiple versions of a test or using teaching assistants to observe exams.
Some students and faculty members may remember that UMaine once had a subscription to plagiarism screening service, Turnitin, which was discontinued due to budget cuts.
“The dynamic of the way classes are structured now just lends itself to that. You have very large classes, some online and some not,” Fiacco said. “It’s a lot to manage.”
English professor Dylan Dryer said that an open dialogue about the reasoning behind academic integrity can prevent “a needlessly adversarial climate” in the classroom.
“I think there is a lot of hysteria around the question of plagiarism in higher education,” Dryer said.
He said that plagiarism may be the result of misunderstanding among students. The accepted system of research and citation is cumbersome and unnatural, but a necessary part of academic pursuits.
When students are encouraged to build on the knowledge of others, the line between learning and misrepresenting can become blurred.
“Most of us, as teachers, do not pay as much attention as we should to the way we assign writing,” Dryer said.
When assigning an essay, Dryer tries to write prompts in a way that encourages students to think independently about a topic, as opposed to recycling thoughts of others.
“That diminishes the temptation [to plagiarize] by encouraging one to explore an idea rather than repeat back what you think I think,” he said.
Dryer said students and faculty should approach each other with good faith.
“There are going to be a handful of students who are lazy or knuckleheads, but they are few and far between and there is nothing I or anyone else can do for them,” Dryer said.
Fiacco agreed that students usually have good intentions.
“Generally, people are inherently good,” he said. “They don’t start the semester thinking, ‘I’m going to cheat on my final exam at the end of this semester.’”
The motivations behind an academic integrity violation do have an impact on the consequences, according to Fiacco.
“If someone said ‘I cheated because I felt like it,’ that is a little different than ‘My 14-year-old sister is pregnant and my parents have left home and I’m managing all of this,’” Fiacco said. “We’re human beings too so we want to help people out.”
When a professor suspects a student of cheating or falsifying work in their class, they have full discretion as to the student’s grade. They are required to find the student responsible by giving them notice and an opportunity to be heard.
“If they have [falsified work] then we will identify appropriate academic interventions,” Fiacco said.
A first-time offender will most always receive a deferred suspension. They do not have to leave the university, but any further violations will put them in danger of being “separated from the university,” according to Fiacco.
UMaine has recently contracted with academicintegrityseminars.com, a program founded by three faculty members at the University of Maryland in Baltimore County. The online program requires offenders to do readings and complete assignments that strengthen their ethical knowledge.
“The faculty tailors many of the readings, beyond the core readings, to the circumstance or profession the student is in,” Fiacco said.
Fiacco said there are various degrees of academic integrity violations that must be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.
“I look at academic integrity violations on a continuum,” Fiacco said. “At one end you have the first-year student who just does a horrible job of citing their work, mostly for a lack of knowing how to.”
For these students, Fiacco will arrange for academic integrity seminars and tutors at the UMaine Writing Center.
“Then at the other end, there’s the [doctoral] student who may cut and paste, whole cloth, two or three chapters for their dissertation — clearly very different circumstances,” he said. “A graduate student will see more significant outcomes than the first student.”
Few violators progress to this point, either reforming their behavior or choosing to leave the university. Fiacco said that in the past year 18 students were referred to his office for academic integrity violations, and only one was for a second offense.
UMaine differs from other academic institutions because it does not indicate an academic integrity violation on a transcript. If a student receives a failing grade in a course, they can choose to retake it for a better grade and leave the indiscretion behind them.
“I’m not sure how I feel about [changing transcripts]. I would be OK with it and it more accurately reflects the indiscretion, but people do make mistakes,” Fiacco said. “I don’t want to permanently damage someone’s opportunities.”
In most cases, plagiarism is not well planned and is easily detected by a professor. Fiacco shared stories of one student who stole an assignment from a cluster computer after a previous user forgot to log off, and another that stole paragraphs from a textbook authored by their own instructor.
English department chair Naomi Jacobs said that especially blatant plagiarism can be a breach of trust.
“People put a lot of time into grading papers and the thought that someone would hand us something they spent a minute on and expect us to slave over it — it is an insult,” Jacobs said.
Cheating and plagiarism are also detected by one’s peers. Fiacco has seen a few cases of a student reporting a classmate in the past few years. It is a new phenomenon, but remains uncommon.
“If students don’t help identify and acknowledge those students that are cheating, they are contributing to the devaluation of their own education. What good is your UMaine degree if generally the community thinks half the people here cheated their way through?” Fiacco said. “We want students to know they have a stake in this.”
The amount and variety of information available online has changed the face of plagiarism. Jacobs, who has been teaching since 1975, said academic dishonesty, especially what she called “stupid plagiarizing,” has become more common.
“With the Internet, it’s just so easy to cut and paste,” Jacobs said.
Fiacco has seen the effects of the information age as well.
“Clearly it’s so easy. If you had a 20-page paper due tomorrow, could you crank something out? Yes,” Fiacco said. “You could simply pluck things from all these different sources, piece them together and try to identify some kind of flow.”
The demands of full-time employment or a long commute can cause a student to cheat or plagiarize out of desperation, especially during midterm or finals weeks, according to Fiacco.
“There is usually an underlying cause that has caused them to mismanage their time — stress,” he said. “We know that our students are managing more than they ever have in the past.”
Jacobs admitted that students must handle personal stress in addition to academic requirements, but points to some of her students who have families and demanding lives who would never resort to plagiarism.
“No matter how stressed they are, there are students who find a way to succeed without deceiving others,” Jacobs said.
