Sunny Bains unedited

What's a 'little' plagiarism?

As you may know from my previous post, plagiarism is a big issue for me. Recently UCAS, Britain's Universities and Colleges Admissions Service, did a scan to see how much of the personal statements in university applications had been plagiarized. There have been several stories about this, including one on the BBC website, most of which seem to be basically ripped from a UCAS press release. (We won't go into the irony of this here...)

One of the classic examples of plagiarism that was caught involved would-be students claiming that their love of chemistry came from their, "burning a hole in pyjamas at age eight."

Most of the story is what you'd expect, but what concerned me was the attitude of the UCAS Chief Executive Anthony McClaren, which suggests that "borrowing material and adapting it" (5% of all applicants) is not really cheating. Only 1% of candidates copy directly from the internet without making changes (which makes you wonder what their coursework was like), and this, says McClaren, means that plagiarism "is not rife".

For me, the fact that 1/20 students doesn't know why they want to study and has to "adapt" from someone else's reason, is not a good thing.

Worse, the applications scanned by the CopyCatch plagiarism detection software were all from those who wanted to be medics, vets, and dentists: that is, applying to professions for which there seems to be at least some concept of a vocation. I wonder what the figures would look like for my department—electrical engineering—where many students come in with no interest whatever in their subject: just the intent to get a good degree and a job in the city. We're just a means to an end for them.

The good news is that McClaren says that UCAS will shortly be boosting their plagiarism detection effort, doubling the verification unit that is responsible for identifying fraudulent applications. The bad news is that he doesn't suggest what the penalties will be (if any) for students who "borrow" from other people's life experience to make themselves look more committed to their subject.

British academia encourages plagiarism

This is a gentler version of the plagiarism saga that I previously posted, a version of which has now been published in the Times Higher Educational Supplement. The previous posts were taken down on advice from colleagues that it might threaten my university employment.

It doesn’t pay to be an honest student. Early penalties for plagiarism are currently so minor that if it’s a choice between handing in nothing and handing in 15 paragraphs plucked from Wikipedia and HowStuffWorks, then you’d be mad not to cheat. There’s a chance, of course, that you’ll get caught and get zero. But then you were going to get zero for handing in nothing anyway…

It is my opinion that by punishing the honest and being lenient towards the dishonest, the current academic culture (as encoded in the regulations of many UK universities) not only condones plagiarism but encourages it.

I recently started a crackdown on plagiarism in an undergraduate course where I teach engineers how to write and give presentations (not easy at the best of times). I taught first year students about why using essays from cheating websites was a mistake, and showed them how major changes in topic and writing style made it easy to tell where sources of text changed. I then gave the same class to graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) as part of their training.

The GTAs did well: they caught a total of 16 students out of about 160 in the class. Most of these had cut and pasted whole paragraphs (often several) from the Internet: we made printouts of these pages and highlighted the relevant text in both the essay and the source.

Then I had a brainstorm. I told the whole class that we had found that 10% of the essays were plagiarised and offered honest students (a relative term in this context!) a lesser punishment if they came forward to admit that they had cheated. I reminded them (though they’d been told in lectures) what cut-and-paste plagiarism was. Not only did several of those we’d already caught admit that they’d cheated, but so did ten other students who we hadn’t identified.

Here’s what was supposed to happen (and what I told the students). Those who came forward would get zero for their essay. However, they could avoid further punishment by rewriting it, and would also get feedback on their writing (the main point of the exercise).

Those who had not come forward were to get zero, plus only half the marks for their next two assignments for my course (a small module worth just 3% of the year). This punishment I determined from what I felt was a logical stance: that it had to be worse to be caught plagiarizing then to submit nothing at all. In addition, the offence might end up on their permanent record.

The department was great: when we presented the evidence concerning the students who hadn’t come forward, my boss passed in on to the college administration with the recommendations that we had agreed between us. He was confident that they would, as they had always done in the past, accept our plan, and was pleased that we’d made a big leap forward with this perennial issue.

What neither of us realized was that the college regulations (inherited from the University of London), seem to prohibit punishment outside reprimand and a penalty on the single piece of work that was plagiarized. I say seem to, because the wording is a little vague and open to interpretation. The department is currently figuring out what to do next. I’ve also asked the college to take a new look at their regulations.

But just fixing things here is not enough, the culture has to change. I attended a plagiarism seminar 2-3 years ago where we were encouraged to give moderate penalties, warnings, to use the event as an opportunity for teaching. This approach is fine if you buy the argument that, if students want to cheat during their higher education, they are only depriving themselves in the long run: we shouldn’t spend too much time worrying about them.

However, this just doesn’t wash: the honest students suffer because a vicious cycle is set up. We set work for them. Some do the work, some copy it from others. However, because a significant proportion of the class is cheating, they’re not learning. So the teaching does not appear to be effective. So we assign more work to try to get the information into the minds of the students. Now more of them are overwhelmed with the workload, more are likely to cheat, and so on. And those that are learning are likely getting worse grades than those that aren’t.

And let’s not forget that our degrees are devalued by students who come out with poor minds and good grades. A pool of university students becomes a lucky dip for employers: they have to hope they don’t get the one who took all the shortcuts.

If you doubt that plagiarism is practised by a large minority, come talk to my GTAs. Those who did their undergraduate degrees here will tell you about the cheating cartels (where large groups do a single piece of work collectively) or the groups that have high-graded laboratory reports going back years for students to copy from. Anyone involved with teaching can confirm there’s a serious problem here. It’s dealing with it that’s the problem.

I want to end my story with a shocking twist. Of the essays that were re-submitted because of admitted plagiarism, almost half had plagiarized again. Obviously, this means there is a deep problem in secondary education, and in our process of selecting university students, and in our academic culture.

I would argue that being more punitive towards plagiarisers and more lenient towards honest students will be—along with better detection—an important element in changing this culture.

Splitting out

For those of you who have subscribed to my blog, first... thanks!

Second, you should know that I have now split the blog into two parts. The first is purely technical and is called Brains and Machines. The second will have the stuff about pseudoscience, research, and academia and will continue to be called Sunny Bains unedited.

It's possible that what you're signed up to now is the wrong bit, in which case you might want to unsubscribe, look at the two links above, and resubscribe accordingly.

Hope this helps!

Patrick Purcell versus the little grey man

My friend Patrick Purcell died just short of his 78th birthday last week. I'm still thinking about what I want to say about him personally, but his death has made me think about that of another friend of mine, about what they had in common, and about dealing with grief.

The other friend was Stephen Benton, who died in 2003, and to whom we devoted special issue of the Holography newsletter.

Editing the issue—looking through photographs, corresponding with colleagues, compiling lists of associated web pages—was difficult. But it was also therapeutic. With long-distance colleagues or people we don't see regularly, it is not so easy to grieve. Especially with those people in our field who we meet at conferences, because we often have no-one local to talk to about them. So we don't really have time to get over the loss. We just bury it and move on.

With Steve, I was lucky. The newsletter gave me no choice but to face up to his death and I also had Patrick to commiserate with. He had been friends with Steve much longer than I: it made a big difference having him to talk to.

We discussed at the time how sad it was that professors like Steve—a true inventor and scholar, someone with a real gift for inspiring people and helping people—were being replaced by what I call 'little gray men'. (Patrick was too much of a gentleman to ever use such a term). These were 'professional academics': smart but uncreative men (usually) with little or no passion for their subjects or interest in teaching. They can be identified by the fact that instead of having two or three themes in their research that they follow throughout their lives, they would 'follow the money', jumping on whatever funding bandwagon happens to be passing through. Other identifying traits include lack of imagination, arrogance, a penchant for collecting titles and awards, and respect for even the most rediculous authority. You can also throw in a general meanness of spirit.

When Patrick died, the the same thing happened again. I  felt the need to do something for him so contacted his colleagues, put up a memorial site, and offered to pass on funeral arrangements etc. I did this for Patrick, and to give his friends an outlet for their feelings. But I also did it for me. I couldn't have done any other kind of work that afternoon, and the project has allowed me to be around him for a little while longer.

All of us here have also, again, been commiserating with each other, and having the same little gray man conversation. Like Steve, Patrick was the opposite of the little gray man: he followed his interests regardless of the prevailing fashion. He made time to help others. He inspired. The people he met were changed by him. And, for both of them, it wasn't just one or two close friends who felt this, but most of the people they came into contact with. In my case, it was Steve who made me believe that I should start a PhD, and Patrick who made me believe I could finish it. I owe them both.

When I moved back to the UK, it was the thought of the little gray men that scared me most. Though they are not quite as plentiful as I feared, they are nevertheless around, sucking the life and creativity out of the people around them as they try to build their empires.

I can only hope that, by having known people like Patrick and Steve, I will try harder and do better myself, and so encourage the people around me to do the same.  A tall order, I know.

Roses in January

Global warming seems to have been following me around lately.

It was pretty warm before I left London in mid-December. Then New York was a bizarre 60°F (16°C) almost every day I was there, the feeling was quite incongruous with all of the winter holiday lights blazing. Leaves were still on many trees and the idea of a white Christmas seemed laughable.

At the end of the trip, on my way to Miami airport, I heard on the radio about a major ice shelf in the Canadian Arctic splitting off from Ellesmere Island. I then watched An Inconvenient Truth on the plane coming back to the UK and learned just how compelling the case for global warming was. I had always believed it, but never bother to fully inform myself about it. I'm a science journalist, but this is far from my beat.

Weirdly, though, the thing that tipped the balance and got me to actually do something happened last Thursday. I was walking through the Rose Garden in Hyde Park on my way to work, and was shocked to find that there were still roses there. Not just old ones that had managed to hang on, but new ones. I was so surprised I got out my PDA and took some pictures.

That night I went on to the Climate Crisis website and then tried several of carbon footprint calculators to find out the size of my own contribution to this problem. I was horrified to find that I was almost as bad as the average American. I try pretty hard to be a good citizen environmentally: I use the backs of printed sheets of paper instead of notebooks, recycle despite the lack of decent services in my area, buy recycled products whenever I can, and use rechargeable batteries in my radios. On top of that, I have no car and a small flat that's well insulated.

However, (as you may have gathered) I fly back and forth across the Atlantic a fair bit for both business and personal reasons, and that makes me part of the problem. Call it Western guilt, but I decided to go pay up to make myself carbon neutral at CarbonFund.org. Cost about $220 for a clean conscience for my entire household for 2007. This will, I understand, plant lots of carbon-absorbing trees.

I know this is not the real answer: I have to consume less rather than just pay more. And I'm trying. But as someone who inherited a family that is spread across North America, Europe, and even Asia—and is part of a profession that requires travelling to where the sci/tech action is—it's not always possible to take the train...

Photos

Top: Old roses are still hanging on in London's Hyde Park, despite it being January.

Bottom: Roses are not just hanging on, there are new buds and blossoms too. The gardener told me that he'd never seen these May Gold roses (usually the first out in the spring) bloom in January. He was especially surprised to see them as he'd cut the bush back hard in the autumn.