18 Beyond Punishment: Complicating the Story of Student Plagiarism

Universities hand out credentials—diplomas and degrees—to graduating students. For the credentials to be socially valued, they must accurately reflect the actual knowledge and academic skills that students gained in their programs. If people become aware that some students in a university met their academic requirements by cheating on exams, by submitting assignments bought from an essay mill, or by using Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) uncritically, all the degrees granted by that university may be judged negatively. Since universities want students to do genuine learning, and since their reputations and public image are at stake, they have policies that aim to prevent academic dishonesty. In North American universities, these policies are often described as codes of “academic integrity.”

Studies have found that both native English-speaking students and multilingual students commit academic offences, but some studies suggest that multilingual students commit a larger number of violations (Pecorari & Petrić, 2014). This essay argues that if we examine the cultural beliefs behind the concept of academic integrity, and the reasons why multilingual students intentionally or unintentionally violate its codes, we can develop more effective ways of addressing the problem than punishment.

Acts of academic misconduct can range from forging diplomas and submitting false medical notes to falsifying lab results, using cheat sheets, and having someone other than the student write an exam in the student’s place. In the Writing class, the focus is on the types of misconduct that affect the teaching and learning of research, writing, and citation skills: plagiarism, or the use of the words of others without acknowledgement; contract cheating, or the buying and submission of essays from a commercial service (Rowland et al., 2018); and, increasingly, the use of AI tools irresponsibly and without documentation (Eke, 2023).

Much of the language used to discuss academic integrity comes from the publications of the International Center for Academic Integrity (ICAI), an organization started in the 1990s to deter plagiarism. In Canada, the Universities of Toronto, Waterloo, and Windsor, as well as McGill and Toronto Metropolitan Universities, among others, have adopted the ideas of this organization. A booklet published by this organization “defines academic integrity as a commitment to six fundamental values: honesty, trust, fairness, respect, responsibility, and courage. … Scholarly communities flourish when community members ‘live’ the fundamental values” (International Center for Academic Integrity [ICAI], 2021, p. 4). ICAI promotes “honor codes” as a way of preventing misconduct.

The language of the ICAI’s booklet suggests that people across the globe share these values. It does not seem to consider that there could be actions that violate Western codes of academic integrity which are also ethical. Take, for example, a student who is driven by compassion or solidarity to help a fellow student who is unwell to finish her essay. Both students would be considered guilty of academic misconduct. But we could argue that compassion is a good thing, and that therefore this is not an act of dishonesty at the same level as buying an essay. In other words, there is room for disagreement about whether or not the six values identified by ICAI should be the most important values in the ethical frameworks of academics.

If the academic integrity codes and values do not apply to all situations at all times, we need to ask where they came from, who made them up, and what kind of culture they came from. One possible answer to these questions is that the rules are about three centuries old. They are closely tied to the understanding of property and ownership in Western capitalist societies, where the concept of copyright or “private ownership” of words emerged in the 18^th century (Litman, 2018). The values give importance to competition and individualism, not to collaboration and collective success. They are upheld in North American universities because the universities, to some extent, support both private property and individualist thinking.

Instead of believing that non-Western cultures are somehow morally deficient or wrong in their approach to ownership of ideas and words, multilingual students could have a critical understanding of the connection between North American culture and the citation practices that the university rewards. If these rules are a relatively recent Western development, then people who grew up in the Western world would have had more opportunities to learn them. Since not all multilingual students will be as familiar with them as students brought up in the West, international students could be educated to understand why Western instructors value academic integrity so much, why students may be harshly treated if they plagiarize deliberately or accidentally, and why it is important for them to learn citation practices.

Even though many instructors want to educate multilingual students in the cultural factors behind the abhorrence of academic misconduct, almost all institutions punish students who have plagiarized. The punishments often affect multilingual students’ grades and careers. This problem is made worse by the fact that some instructors do not make a distinction between “patchwriting” (Howard, 1995) and deliberate cheating on a larger scale (like contract cheating or submitting a friend’s essay). Patchwriting happens when students use too many phrases and words from the original text because they are still learning to paraphrase. It is described by Howard as a stage in the development of good writers.

The instructor’s role could be seen either as primarily to enforce rules and punish those who do not stick to them or as primarily to show kindness and understanding when dealing with the multilingual student’s occasional mistakes. Both are ethical approaches. The first approach (reporting and punishing) can be called “rule-ethical” and the second one “care-ethical” (Vehviläinen et al., 2018). A rule-ethical instructor may genuinely feel that reporting student lapses will support more engaged learning and better retention of students’ own voices by deterring recourse to academic shortcuts.

However, multilingual students may not be fully prepared for Canadian university programs; they may not be in a position to demonstrate or rapidly acquire the kind of complex academic skills that will permit effective paraphrase, for example, or a critical approach to choice of research sources. It is no easy task to master obscure and seemingly arbitrary rules, deal with language challenges, and potentially transfer the learning from one instance to the next. Care-ethical writing instructors can help multilingual students by explaining the rules for paraphrasing and citation in detail, along with the reasoning or logic behind the rules. This will enable students to remember the concepts better and to transfer them from the Writing course to other courses. Instructors can also show patience when students are trying to understand the rules, and be aware that they will need a lot of practice before they are able to apply the newly learned rule consistently and in a variety of writing contexts. Well-designed assignments that have relevance in students’ lives and an educational approach that removes students’ anxieties about research and citation practices are likely to create a better environment for learning than approaches that focus on rules and punishment.

References

Eke, D. O. (2023). ChatGPT and the rise of generative AI: Threat to academic integrity? Journal of Responsible Technology, 13, 100060. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrt.2023.100060

Howard, R. M. (1995). Plagiarisms, authorships, and the academic death penalty. College English, 57(7), 788–806. https://doi.org/10.2307/378403

International Center for Academic Integrity. (2021). The fundamental values of academic integrity (3rd ed.). https://academicintegrity.org/images/pdfs/20019_ICAI-Fundamental-Values_R12.pdf

Litman, J. (2018). What we don’t see when we see copyright as property. Cambridge Law Journal, 77(3), 536–558. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008197318000600

Pecorari, D. & Petrić, B. (2014).  Plagiarism in second-language writing. Language Teaching, 47(3), 269–302. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/language-teaching/article/abs/plagiarism-in-secondlanguage-writing/62C159FCCCB32A23EC7DA2D17C5E9706

Rowland, S., Slade, C., Wong, K.-S., & Whiting, B. (2018). “Just turn to us”: The persuasive features of contract cheating websites. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 43(4), 652–665. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2017.1391948

Vehviläinen, S., Löfström, E., & Nevgi, A. (2018). Dealing with plagiarism in the academic community: Emotional engagement and moral distress. Higher Education, 75(1), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-017-0112-6