There’s been an awful lot of hysteria lately over the increasing incidence of plagiarism in student assignments. No doubt much of the anguish over the issue derives from recent public reports on ‘soft marking’ of fee-paying students and on students being awarded degrees despite having been caught submitting – shamelessly – somebody else’s work as their own. These reports have been followed by firm statements from university administrations that plagiarists will not be tolerated and that responses to plagiarism will be swift and unswerving. In this respect, Justin Zobel and Margaret Hamilton’s piece in the November issue of Australian Universities Review (2002, pp.23-30) is just one example of the call to take the issue of plagiarism seriously and to punish its perpetrators appropriately. It seems to me, however, that the rush to condemn acts of plagiarism risks riding roughshod over a problem that may turn out to be a far more complex – behaviourally, ethically, conceptually, and even linguistically – than has been previously granted. For instance, it strikes me as significant that there aren’t really any ready substitutes for the word ‘plagiarism’. In The Angus & Robertson Dictionary and Thesaurus in One Volume sitting on my desk, the entry for ‘plagiarise’ lists the terms ‘appropriate’, ‘borrow’, ‘crib (Inf.)’, ‘infringe’, ‘lift (Inf.)’, ‘pirate’, ‘steal’, and ‘thieve’ as its synonyms, while the set thesaurus for Microsoft Word 97 offers to replace ‘plagiarism’ with ‘copying’ (which the thesaurus also lists as the meaning of ‘plagiarism’), ‘lifting’, ‘stealing’, ‘illegal use’, ‘breach of copyright’, or ‘bootlegging’. In both cases the alternatives can be separated roughly into two groups, depending on the terms’ moral charge. Thus ‘copying’ and ‘borrowing’, as morally neutral terms, describe the essential act constituting plagiarism, but without sufficiently indicating the inappropriateness of that act. What is inappropriate about plagiarism, of course, is that it constitutes not simply the ‘copying’ of someone’s work or ideas but rather the unacknowledged copying of such work and the subsequent submission of that work as one’s own. Hence the use of terms like ‘stealing’ and ‘cheating’ in order to underscore the seriousness of the ‘crime’– stressing the immorality of the act in order to encourage all right-minded students not to acquiesce to what might appear to be the easier way. Accordingly, Zobel and Hamilton begin their discussion of strategies for managing student plagiarism by depicting plagiarism (by definition) as a species of cheating: ‘Cheating, and particularly plagiarism – in this context, the inclusion of someone else’s work in an assignment without acknowledgment – is hardly a new phenomenon, but in modern universities it is exceedingly common’ (2002, p. 23).
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