Guest Post: Four Reasons to be Happy About Internet Plagiarism

by Russell Hunt
St. Thomas University

[This column is reprinted (with the author's permission) from http://people.stu.ca/~hunt/www/4reasons.htm. Teaching Perspectives (St. Thomas University) 5 (December 2002), [1-5]. Repr. Teaching Options Pedagogiques (University of Ottawa) 6:4 (August 2003), 3-5; repr. [as "Let's Hear it for Internet Plagiarism"] Teaching & Learning Bridges 2:3 (University of Saskatchewan) (November 2003), 2-5; Teaching Matters Newsletter (University of New Brunswick, Saint John) (January 2007) 6-9; in Think: Critical Thinking for Everyday Life, ed. Judith Boss (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010): 367-368. Note: this is an excerpt from a longer project, which can be found in draft form at http://people.stu.ca/~hunt/www/plagiary.htm ]

The "information technology revolution" is almost always presented as having cataclysmic consequences for education—sometimes for the better, but often, of course, for the worse. In postsecondary circles, perhaps the most commonly apprehended cataclysm is "Internet Plagiarism." When a university subscribes to turnitin.com, the local media invariably pick up the story—"Students to Learn that Internet Crime Doesn't Pay" -- with the kind of alacrity usually reserved for features on political sex scandals or patronage payoffs. When the newest cheating scandal surfaces at some prestigious southern university known for its military school style "honor code," the headlines leap across the tabloids like stories on child molestation by alien invaders.

It's almost never suggested that all this might be something other than a disaster for higher education. But that's exactly what I want to argue here. I believe the challenge of easier and more convenient plagiarism is to be welcomed. This rising tide threatens to change things—for, I predict and hope, the better. Here are some specific practices which are threatened by the increasing ease with which plagiarism can be committed.

1. The institutional rhetorical writing environment (the "research paper," the "literary essay," the "term paper") is challenged by this, and that's a good thing. Our reliance on these forms as ways of assessing student skills and knowledge has been increasingly questioned by people who are concerned with how learning and assessment take place, and can be fostered, and particularly with how the ability to manipulate written language ("literacy") is developed. The assumption that a student's learning is accurately and readily tested by her ability to produce, in a completely arhetorical situation, an artificial form that she'll never have to write again once she's survived formal education (the essay examination, the formal research paper), is questionable on the face of it, and is increasingly untenable. If the apprehension that it's almost impossible to escape the mass-produced and purchased term paper leads teachers to create more imaginative, and rhetorically sound, writing situations in their classes, the advent of the easily-purchased paper from schoolsucks.com is a salutary challenge to practices which ought to be challenged. One good, clear example of the argument which can be mounted against generic term paper assignments and in favor of assignments which track that writing process and / or are specific to a particular situation is in Tom Rocklin's online "Downloadable Term Papers: What's a Prof. to Do?" Many other equivalent arguments that assignment can be refigured to make plagiarism more difficult—and offer more authentic rhetorical contexts for student writing -- have been offered in recent years.

I'm unconvinced that we can address the problem by assuring students that "they are real writers with meaningful and important things to say," or invite them to revise their work where we can see the revisions, as long as we continue giving them more decontextualized, audienceless and purposeless writing exercises. Having something to say is—for anybody except, maybe, a Romantic poet—absolutely indistinguishable from having someone to say it to, and an authentic reason for saying it. To address this problem, I believe, we need to rethink the position of writing in students' lives and in the curriculum. One strong pressure to do that is the increasing likelihood that empty exercises can be fulfilled by perfunctory efforts, or borrowed texts.

2. The institutional structures around grades and certification are challenged by this, and that's a good thing. Perhaps more important is the way plagiarism challenges the overwhelming pressure for grades which our institutions have created and foster, and which has as its consequence the pressure on many good students to cut a corner here and there (there's lots of evidence that it's not mainly the marginal students in danger of failing who cheat; it's as often those excellent students who believe, possibly with some reason, that their lives depend on keeping their GPA up to some arbitrary scratch). An even more central consideration is the way the existence of plagiarism itself challenges the way the university structures its system of incentives and rewards, as a zero-sum game, with a limited number of winners.

University itself, as our profession has structured it, is the most effective possible situation for encouraging plagiarism and cheating. If I wanted to learn how to play the guitar, or improve my golf swing, or write HTML, "cheating" would be the last thing that would ever occur to me. It would be utterly irrelevant to the situation. On the other hand, if I wanted a certificate saying that I could pick a jig, play a round in under 80, or produce a slick Web page (and never expected actually to perform the activity in question), I might well consider cheating (and consider it primarily a moral problem). This is the situation we've built for our students: a system in which the only incentives or motives anyone cares about are marks, credits, and certificates. We're not entirely responsible for that—government policies which have tilted financial and social responsibility for education increasingly toward the students and their families have helped a lot -- but the crucial factor has been our insistence, as a profession, that the only motivation we could ever count on is what is built into the certification process. When students say—as they regularly do—"why should I do this if it's not marked?" or "why should I do this well if it's not graded?" or even "I understand that I should do this, but you're not marking it, and my other professors are marking what I do for them," they're saying exactly what educational institutions have been highly successful at teaching them to say.

They're learning exactly the same thing, with a different spin, when we tell them that plagiarism is a moral issue. We're saying that the only reason you might choose not to do it is a moral one. But think about it: if you wanted to build a deck and were taking a class to learn how to do it, your decision not to cheat would not be based on moral considerations.

3. The model of knowledge held by almost all students, and by many faculty—the tacit assumption that knowledge is stored information and that skills are isolated, asocial faculties—is challenged by this, and that's a good thing. When we judge essays by what they contain and how logically it's organized (and how grammatically it's presented) we miss the most important fact about written texts, which is that they are rhetorical moves in scholarly and social enterprises. In recent years there have been periodic assaults on what Paolo Freire (1974) called "the banking model" of education (and what, more recently, Tom Marino [2002], writing on the POD email list, referred to as "educational bulimics"). Partisans of active learning, of problem- and project-based learning, of cooperative learning, and of many other "radical" educational initiatives, all contend that information and ideas are not inert masses to be shifted and copied in much the way two computers exchange packages of information, but rather need to be continuously reformatted, reconstituted, restructured, reshaped and reinvented and exchanged in new forms -- not only as learning processes but as the social basis of the intellectual enterprise. A model of the educational enterprise which presumes that knowledge comes in packages (one reinforced by marking systems which say you can get "73%" of Renaissance literature or introductory organic chemistry) invites learners to think of what they're doing as importing pre-packaged nuggets of information into their texts and their minds.

Similarly, a model which assumes that a skill like "writing the academic essay" is an ability which can be demonstrated on demand, quite apart from any authentic rhetorical situation, actual question, or expectation of effect (or definition of what the "academic essay" actually is), virtually prohibits students from recognizing that all writing is shaped by rhetorical context and situation, and thus renders them tone-deaf to the shifts in register and diction which make so much plagiarized undergraduate text instantly recognizable. The best documentation of the strangely arhetorical situation student writing lives in that I know of is in the work done as part of the extensive study of school-based and workplace writing at McGill and Carleton Universities (Dias, Freedman, Medway & Paré, 1999; Dias & Paré, 2000).

4. But there's a reason to welcome this challenge that's far more important than any of these—more important, even, than the way the revolutionary volatility of text mediated by photocopying and electronic files have assaulted traditional assumptions of intellectual property and copyright by distributing the power to copy beyond those who have the right to copy. It's this: by facing this challenge we will be forced to help our students learn what I believe to be the most important thing they can learn at university: just how the intellectual enterprise of scholarship and research really works. Traditionally, when we explain to students why plagiarism is bad and what their motives should be for properly citing and crediting their sources, we present them in terms of a model of how texts work in the process of sharing ideas and information which is profoundly different from how they actually work outside of classroom-based writing, and profoundly destructive to their understanding of the assumptions and methods of scholarship.

When you look at the usual set of examples of plagiarism as it occurs in student papers, for example, what you see is almost invariably drawn from kinds of writing obviously and radically identifiable as classroom texts. And how classroom texts relate to or use the ideas and texts of others is typically very different from how they're used in science, scholarship, or in other publications. There are many such explanatory examples in print and on the Web; let me take one from the Northwestern University "The Writing Place" Web site. They offer the following as an explanation of how to do an acceptable and properly credited paraphrase:

Original

But Frida's outlook was vastly different from that of the Surrealists. Her art was not the product of a disillusioned European culture searching for an escape from the limits of logic by plumbing the subconscious. Instead, her fantasy was a product of her temperament, life, and place; it was a way of coming to terms with reality, not of passing beyond reality into another realm. Hayden Herrera, Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo (258)

Paraphrase

As Herrera explains, Frida's surrealistic vision was unlike that of the European Surrealists. While their art grew out of their disenchantment with society and their desire to explore the subconscious mind as a refuge from rational thinking, Frida's vision was an outgrowth of her own personality and life experiences in Mexico. She used her surrealistic images to understand better her actual life, not to create a dreamworld (258).

Key words and phrases in the original are in boldface. The changes in wording and sentence structure in the paraphrase are underlined.

What is clearest about this is that the writer of the second paragraph has no motive for rephrasing the passage other than to put it into different words. Had she really needed the entire passage as part of an argument or explanation she was offering, she would have been far better advised to quote it directly. The paraphrase neither clarifies nor renders newly pointed; it's merely designed to demonstrate to a sceptical reader that the writer actually understands the phrases she is using in her text. Without more context than the Northwestern site gives us, it's difficult to know exactly how the paragraph functions in a larger rhetorical purpose (if it does). But published scholarly literature is full of examples of writers using the texts, words and ideas of others to serve their own immediate purposes. Here's an example of the way two researchers opened their discussion of the context of their work in 1984:

To say that listeners attempt to construct points is not, however, to make clear just what sort of thing a 'point' actually is. Despite recent interest in the pragmatics of oral stories (Polanyi 1979, 1982; Robinson 1981), conversations (Schank et al. 1982), and narrative discourse generally (Prince 1983), definitions of point are hard to come by. Those that do exist are usually couched in negative terms: apparently it is easier to indicate what a point is not than to be clear about what it is. Perhaps the most memorable (negative) definition of point was that of Labov (1972: 366), who observed that a narrative without one is met with the "withering" rejoinder, "So what?" (Vipond & Hunt, 1984)

It is clear here that the motives of the writers do not include prevention of charges of plagiarism; moreover, it's equally clear that they are not -- as they would be enjoined to do by the Northwestern Web site -- attempting to "cite every piece of information that is not a) the result of your own research, or b) common knowledge." What they are doing is more complex. The bouquet of citations offered in this paragraph is informing the reader that the writers know, and are comfortable with, the literature their article is addressing; they are moving to place their argument in an already existing written conversation about the pragmatics of stories; they are advertising to the readers of their article, likely to be interested in psychology or literature, that there is an area of inquiry -- the sociology of discourse -- that is relevant to studies in the psychology of literature; and they are establishing a tone of comfortable authority in that conversation by the acknowledgement of Labov's contribution and by using his language --"withering" is picked out of Labov's article because it is often cited as conveying the power of pointlessness to humiliate (I believe I speak with some authority for the authors' motives, since I was one of them).

Scholars -- writers generally -- use citations for many things: they establish their own bona fides and currency, they advertise their alliances, they bring work to the attention of their reader, they assert ties of collegiality, they exemplify contending positions or define nuances of difference among competing theories or ideas. They do not use them to defend themselves against potential allegations of plagiarism.

The clearest difference between the way undergraduate students, writing essays, cite and quote and the way scholars do it in public is this: typically, the scholars are achieving something positive; the students are avoiding something negative.

The conclusion we're driven to, then, is this: offering lessons and courses and workshops on "avoiding plagiarism" -- indeed, posing plagiarism as a problem at all -- begins at the wrong end of the stick. It might usefully be analogized to looking for a good way to teach the infield fly rule to people who have no clear idea what baseball is.

References

"Avoiding Plagiarism." The Writing Place, Northwestern University. http://www.writing.nwu.edu/tips/plag.html (November 2001). Archived http://web.archive.org/web/20011119211908/http://www.writing.nwu.edu/tips/plag.html Dias, Patrick, Aviva Freedman, Peter Medway, and Anthony Paré, eds. Worlds Apart: Acting and Writing in Academic and Workplace Contexts [The Rhetoric, Society and Knowledge Series]. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999.

Dias, Patrick, and Anthony Paré, eds. Transitions: Writing in Academic and Workplace Settings. Cresskill, New Jersey: Hampton Press, 2000.

Freire, Paolo. The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Seabury, 1974. (Translated from the original Portuguese (1968) by Myra Bergman Ramos).

Marino, Tom. "Re: How many minutes per class day does the typical student study?" Professional & Organizational Development Network in Higher Education , 28 May 2002. http://listserv.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0205&L=pod&O=D&P=14486.

Rocklin, Tom. "Downloadable Term Papers: What's a Prof. to Do?" University of Iowa Center for Teaching. Tools and Resources: Teaching Ideas from the Center for Teaching and Around the World. n.d. http://www.uiowa.edu/~centeach/resources/ideas/term-paper-download.html

Vipond, Douglas, and Russell A. Hunt. "Point-Driven Understanding: Pragmatic and Cognitive Dimensions of Literary Reading." Poetics 13 (June 1984), 261-277.

Turnitin.com and Student Plagiarism

I have recently come across instructors using Turnitin.com to teach students how to cite and reference scholarship. I find this practice completely wrong-headed.

First, Turnitin is plagiarism detection software. It was not designed as a teaching tool. I remain dubious that it can serve a purpose for which it was never intended better than other forms of instruction. One could easily focus on the most common mistakes students make on their in-text citations without having to resort to Turnitin software—the money spent on the software and the time spent providing students a visual walkthrough of the system would seem better invested in explaining the purpose and principles of scholarship, than teaching students one particular software package.

Second, as an editor and author as well as an academic, I feel strongly that student copyright and confidentiality is routinely violated by Turnitin retaining copies of student work in (an American) database. Instructors may not have an issue with this, but many authors and students feel this is a violation of their rights.

Third, instructors using Turnitin software as a teaching tool by having students run their first drafts through Turnitin.com, adjusting their papers until they get a better Turnitin score, ends up mandating a particular writing process—a common but deeply mistaken approach to teaching writing. My commentary on my frustration with such writing instruction is in this earlier post on this blog.

Fourth, focusing on "catching plagiarism"—which I would argue is more than implicit in a software package called "turn it in"—is in my view a wrong approach to teaching the importance of citation scholarship. Students learn that they must follow certain (to them bizarre and arbitrary rules) to manage the score delivered by a software package and does not, I would argue, properly socialize students into the philosophy of scholarship. This approach does not seem to acknowledge that students come from other cultures/philosophical positions that may view the universe very differently. For example, the mashup artist who takes a hundred different film clips, edits them together with some other person's soundtrack to create a new YouTube video that gets a million likes and a monetized video feed is going to need more than Turnitin software to understand why that same behaviour in university gets them a 0 and a yelling at. Effective instruction is not about explaining the rules, it's about converting students to our worldview. I do not perceive Turnitin software as a useful tool in this process.

I realize mine is a minority view. Turnitin software is 'easy' for instructors and allows them to pretend to be addressing the issues of academic integrity which large classes and a host of other structural issues have made more difficult to manage. That 'easy' or 'widely promoted' equates to 'best practice' or 'best outcomes' remains to be demonstrated to me. I argue there is a difference between 'trained' and 'educated' and using Turnitin to teach rules strikes me (and I dare say most students) like a punitive training exercise rather than an effective approach to socializing students into a new and better worldview.

As I have mentioned before in this blog, the more appropriate approach to issues of Internet plagiarism is to scrap the sort of assignments that allow for 'off-the-shelf' responses, and instead shift to authentic assessments that require original thought and personal commitment. If one asks students for a paper on McBeth, one should not be surprised if students go online to find them one. Instead, ask students how they interacted with the text to relate it to their own lives and or something of that ilk. If your students can't be bothered to actually do your assignments, that likely has more to do with it being a bad assignment, than about having bad students.

Detecting Plagiarism Tip 2

A recent post by a colleague on an editing site made the point that

if text is copied and pasted into Word from e.g. Wikipedia, it can include non-breaking spaces (small raised circles instead of the usual dot seen with show/hide is turned on). These are practically impossible to type by mistake! Similarly, when text is copied and pasted from PDFs, odd line breaks/returns are imported—another give-away.

Thought I'd pass that along.

Plagiarism: Two Unsuccessful Examples

In a recent discussion of plagiarism with some editors, I was reminded of an example from my own teaching experience that I now relate here for your amusement.

As a new prof I had the singular experience of an undergraduate handing in a paper to the course I was teaching on the sociology of education that, as it turned out, I had written when I had taken the same course a decade or so before. Unbeknownst to me, the paper must have been photocopied by a classmate of mine years before and entered into the frat files. The original title page must have long since been discarded by the frat boys as who knows how many times the paper had been recycled, so my student merrily retrieved it from the files, typed up a new cover page with his name, and handed it in to it's author. It took me a minute to recognize after all those years, but there was something about it that was strangely familiar. And as it occurred to me that it was in fact, my paper, I recognized that the typing had the cracked line through the 'e' that I had had on my typewriter that year. I actually went through the effort of digging through the garage to find the original paper, and yup, it was identical. So that was an 'F' for the student, and an anecdote for me.

The other example that I recall from roughly the same period was a colleague of mine telling of the case of a seminary student in his PhD defense. The originally scheduled external examiner had called in sick, so the supervisor had located a replacement. "You're in luck," he had told the student, "Dr X from the University of Y in Germany is in Calgary for a conference and has agreed to fly up to sit in as your external. It's a great honor because he is apparently quite an expert on your topic." But of course, turns out he really was an expert because when he opened the student's dissertation, he discovered at once it was his dissertation translated from the German. Since one does not get a PhD in theology for translating someone else's doctoral thesis, that was another FAIL. But I have to say, great example of the direct intervention of God against someone unworthy of the doctor of theology, because how else to explain the coincidence? The poor bastard must have thought himself completely safe from discover (this being decades before the internet).

Moral of the story: don't plagiarize or god will get you. .

Detecting Plagiarism

As referred to in the previous post, students sometimes plagiarize passages from the Internet to insert into their written assignments. Even in large classes where one does not know students or their work that well, one can usually spot such insertions immediately because the diction, style, thoughtfulness, etc does not match with the rest of the paper. In fact, it is often hilariously discordant because weak writers do not know enough to be able to assess their own weaknesses, and cannot themselves detect the errors in their own work that make the lack of such errors in the plagiarized passages so blatant.

Proving the copying, however, is sometimes a bit trickier. The quick and free way to start is to select some distinct phrase from the suspect passage and googling it. About half the time the passage will immediately pop up as Google recognizes the source for that phrase or sentence. Miscreants will be astounded that one found the article in some book or article they had assumed to be too obscure to come to one's notice, but of course one has at least as good a command of Google as they do, and most of them have never heard of Google Scholar, and one is searching by phrases not topics, so likely nailed it a good deal faster than they had unearthed it originally.

There are a couple of student tactics for getting around such simple counter-measures, however. First, some students figured out that if they run the original passage through Google translate to switch the passage to say, Italian, and then back again into English, the original phrasing will be sufficiently garbled that a Google search will not be able to find the original passage. Of course, the diction and style is so garbled by these measures that the plagiarized passage virtually leaps off the page. Similarly, if you get a nearly incoherent essay that says sort of the right content, it may have been a complete paper lifted off the net and transmogrified. Of course, such writing is so atrocious, it may not be necessary to even raise the issue of plagiarism, since an 'F' is an 'F', but if the references have been left intact, those might be a good place to start a Google search.

Another student technique, with which I had been unfamiliar until brought to my attention by Murray Hay, PhD, is that they can insert hidden characters with a passage so that when one copies the phrase to search for, Google looks for the phrase including the hidden character(s) and so does not find it. The solution here, obviously, is to type the phrase into Google oneself rather than cutting and pasting.

Another quick strategy for identifying stolen passages is to check for paragraph styles. Students usually have the wherewithal to do a 'select all' and change the font to be consistent throughout, but may well forget to change (or not understand about) styles in Word. Doesn't always show up, but if you spot a variety of styles for different paragraphs, the question has to arise why the student would do one paragraph in this style, the next in something else, rather than stick with the default.

Of course, there are services, such as Turnitin.com, that will provide a much more sophisticated analysis of a paper for a fee. I recommend strongly against the use of such services. First, as mentioned in my previous post, I dislike the assumption of guilt whether directed at 'suspect' papers, or routinely applied to the entire class. The damaging effects of false accusations make identify specific suspect papers morally untenable; and applying the process to all papers denigrates the entire student population and undermines the trust required for effective teaching. Further, there are many copyright issues around a service such as Turnitin.com, as the company adds any paper analyzed to its database. Student work is the student's, not the faculty's or the instructor's, so cavalierly handing it over to a third party strikes me as a highly questionable practice. I suppose your faculty can impose any testing it wants as a contractual requirement for receiving a degree from the institution, but such high handed actions have about the same character as drug testing. So, you know, good luck with that.

If one does use a service such as Turnitin.com, it is important that this be noted in the course outline; otherwise, one runs the risks of lawsuits.

Term paper mills are another concern of many instructors, but these are usually not worth worrying about. Yes, a student can buy a generic paper off the net, often at quite reasonable rates. No, they probably won't fit the specifics of your assignment&mdash>unless one are designing very bad assignments. A generic paper on MacBeth might fit a generic assignment on MacBeth, but if one is designing your assessments on the questions at the end of the chapter or the package that came with the Powerpoint for the course, than one deserves what one gets. Authentic assessments do not lend themselves to generic answers found on the list at some term paper mill. If one's says, "I need a paper on MacBeth", then students will try to find one for you. More interesting questions generate more interesting papers (which are also more interesting to mark). If on the other hand, one has questions that more accurately reflect the needs and interests of one's students, then the generic paper is going to be off topic. Students too weak or too rushed to write credible answers of their own will be correspondingly unable to adapt the plagiarized paper to the specific demands of the assignment.

Wealthier or more desperate students could theoretically commission a specifically targeted paper through some of the more sophisticated paper mills, but I've never encountered one worth more than a 'C' (in a class with a B+/A- average). Better than a 0 for no submission, I suppose, but that student wasn't making it through the final anyway.... Detecting the plagiarism is likely easy for anyone with classes small enough to know individual students, since the paper's style and the student's will usually sufficiently diverge as to be obvious. Certainly, their in-class performance will not likely accord with the knowledge, skills, and opinions expressed in the commissioned paper. One then just asks to discuss the paper with the student, asking questions about their reasons for decision to do this or that in terms of the content. If the student is able to answer fluently, then hey, they actually know the content, so what's the problem? They perhaps beat an arbitrarily imposed deadline, giving them an unfair advantage over their peers, but it might be better for the instructor to re-examine one's deadlines than worry obsessively about plagiarism. More likely, students commissioning such papers forget to even read it, and their lack of knowledge about their own submission will give them away.

The problem is more serious in larger classes where students can count on their anonymity to protect them from too close scrutiny. One way to cut down on cheating is to have students post their work to a secure class website to share. Although you and your marker may not be able to identify the plagiarist, their peers often know. Habitual cheaters will be often fingered by long suffering peers, and those papers can be examined more closely. I have colleagues who identified several such cases by opening up the Personal Information page (which few students ever bother with, or even know about) and noting the paper was written by someone other than the student.

Ultimately, the best way to address plagiarism is to design better assignments. Is the term paper even an appropriate format for one's course? There has been much ink spilled in defense of this traditional assessment, and it does indeed hold the potential to assess student writing ability, critical thinking skills, and so on; but that is equally true of many other, possibly more relevant, written formats. Further, although essay assignments could test critical thinking and writing skills, they mostly don't. Badly constructed assignments often amount to little more than asking students for an info dump on some topic, regurgitating the instructor's analysis rather than their own. Such assignments encourage plagiarism. Instructors using an Inquiry Approach, on the other hand, instead ask students to research personally relevant questions for which answers do not yet exist, which makes plagiarism rather irrelevant. If one honestly believes plagiarism to be rampant on one's campus, change up the assignments rather than clamping down on students. Widespread plagiarism indicates structural problems with the institution's assessment practices: bad assignments, poorly administered; administrators who fail to enforce official policies when instructors identify plagiarism; unnecessary and unrealistic pressure on students with a program; policies that enforce unfair grading practices (e.g., limiting the number of high grades in a class, regardless of actual student mastery), and so on. Fix the problems, and plagiarism will largely disappear, with the exception of a few sociopaths clever enough to get through the above screens. And really, are these not the future engineers and executives of, say Volks Wagon, that our institutions are intended to produce?

Oh, and speaking of plagiarism, I cannot tell you how many times I've heard colleagues go on and on about students stealing whole lines from the net, who, when I pass by their classrooms, have Powerpoints filled with images they've stolen off the net. Whenever I challenge then about this practice, the inevitable answer is some variation on, 'that's just pictures' or 'well, I can't be expected to draw that', without any apparent recognition of the irony of their actions. Unless you have received permission and cited the source for every illustration in your own presentations, stop saying you "don't understand why students think it's okay to plagiarize," because you've been role modelling the same behaviour.

(The illustration for this page, is from http://writersdepartment.com/.)