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Plagiarism and costs.

Article Excerpt
It is costly for faculty to deal with cheating. Keith-Spiegel et al. (1998) identified several of these costs and argued that they can be grouped into four categories: emotionality, difficult, fear, and denial. I argue that the emotional and fear costs for faculty make it unlikely that the common approaches to dealing with plagiarism will be effective. I provide an example of an old approach which diminishes some of the costs for faculty.

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Evidence indicates that cheating on written assignments is common, perhaps more common than cheating on exams. For example, statistics reported by Premeaux (2005) indicate that students estimate that the "percentage of students you think cheat on a typical written assignment" is about 45% while the "percentage of students you think cheat on a typical exam" is about 32%. Hollinger and Lanza-Kaduce (1996) report that about 38% of students admitted that they had plagiarized during a fifteen-week period.

While cheating appears to be common, catching students cheating is less common. Roig (1997) reports that 3% of students "admitted to have been caught plagiarizing." Diekhoff et al. (1996) find that about 2% of students say "that they had ever been caught cheating during their tenure as college students." Diekhoff et al. do not single out plagiarism.

The disparity between the statistics on cheating and getting caught is striking. The statistics indicate that the chance that an individual will be caught in a particular instance of cheating is quite small. Given the common approaches to dealing with plagiarism, the statistics suggest that the costs imposed by faculty on students for plagiarism are quite low.

Keith-Spiegel et al. (1998) identify costs for faculty of dealing with cheating. My purpose in this paper is to examine the implications that these costs have for the effectiveness of the common approaches to dealing with plagiarism. This examination suggests a course of action--an oral exam--that may be appropriate for some faculty in some situations.

Common Approaches

Plagiarize is defined in Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (1988) as "to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own." Writing manuals provide additional information. For example, the Little, Brown Handbook (1989) states "When you summarize or paraphrase, you do...

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