Experts debate how to deal with plagiarism

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Leona Sigwing is certain of one thing: Students in the Piper school district know what plagiarism is and that it's wrong.

In December, Christine Pelton failed 28 of the 118 students in her sophomore botany classes after she determined they had plagiarized a semester project worth 50 percent of their grade. After some parents complained, the school board in the small, rural Kansas district on the fringe of the Kansas City area told Pelton to reduce the penalty. She resigned in protest.

Since then, students in the district have been teased about being cheaters, and national commentators have held up Piper schools as an example of failing education and moral standards.

That's unfair to a district where cheating and its consequences are consistently discussed, beginning in kindergarten, said Sigwing, a high school language arts teacher in Piper.

In an informal survey last week, teachers told her that the discussion in elementary grades usually centers on honesty and not copying others' work. In higher grades, more detailed discussions on proper research methods, plagiarism and copyright laws are integrated in all classes -- including art, band and special education.

Middle school students who are caught cheating are generally given a chance to redo the assignment, but most high school teachers make it clear that cheating will result in a failing grade, according to the teachers' responses.

Pelton, who has an unlisted phone number and could not be reached by The Associated Press, has said the 28 students took information directly from the Internet and didn't properly cite sources or rewrite the information in their own words.

Some of the complaining parents told the school board their children didn't know they were plagiarizing by directly using information off the Internet.

Sigwing -- who notes that 90 students in Pelton's class did the assignment correctly -- doubts that is true.

"I suppose it is possible that one or two genuinely didn't understand they were plagiarizing," she said. "But I doubt that more than two didn't know."

John Barrie, co-founder of Plagiarism.org, which offers programs to detect plagiarism from the Internet, agrees with Sigwing. He says most students who cheat know exactly what they are doing, and he has little patience for those who make excuses for them.

"The name of the game is to find an advantage to get into the best college or the best job," Barrie said. "If I were a parent of one of those 90 students, I'd be saying to the school board, 'My kid did the work. Why are you giving these other kids this advantage?"'

Michele Eodice, director of the University of Kansas Writing Center, believes educators should take a different approach to combat plagiarism. "We are teaching students formulas and rules for how to cite sources, but we don't tell them why we do it," she said. "We have to teach them to respect and honor the ideas of those who came before them. We need to discuss reading critically and building on those other ideas. It's not just busywork, there's a reason for these rules."

The Writing Center encourages teachers to incorporate the writing process into their courses.

Eodice suggests such things as requiring drafts, peer reviews of the work in progress and making students document their research process. That would stop students from beginning work on the project just hours before it is due.

"Plagiarism is not a new phenomenon," she said. "It's generally sloppiness, bad time management. Incorporating the writing process into the project stops that eleventh-hour desperation."

Barrie dismisses those suggestions as unrealistic.

"All those things would be great in fantasy land," Barrie said. "But for 90 percent of the students, that's not what's going on, and it's never going to go on. That allows students who aren't honest to slip through the system without actually doing the work."

Barrie said his company's business has quintupled in 1 1/2 years, with hundreds of thousands of registered users in 37 countries. He admits that controversies such as the one at Piper help his business.

"Schools may look around and say 'We don't want to be the next Piper,"' he said. "A lot of schools didn't want to be the first to turn over the rock and admit there's a problem. Now, they know everyone is dealing with it a little more openly."

The controversy has devastated the staff at Piper High School and prompted several teachers to say they will leave at the end of the school year, Sigwing said. As for her, she said she will, for the first time in nearly two decades of teaching, begin using an Internet program to detect any plagiarism in her students' papers.