Plagiarism

Some of you have heard me talk about plagiarism before. Few things anger or distress me as much as a student who doesn't put the work into her speech or paper. One of the colleges where I teach doesn't have a firm policy about plagiarism, they leave it up to the instructor, so my policy has become that anyone caught plagiarizing gets a 0 for the assignment, period.

In my Speech class, I always spend part of a lecture, early in the semester, discussing exactly what plagiarism is and warning them against it. I give them handouts. I tell them, "I always know." And I do. This isn't because I'm brilliant, it's because they're stupid. If I can google some part of your speech and it comes up, then you've plagiarized it. Duh. I have access to more sophisticated programs, such as turnitin.com, articlechecker.com, and copyscape, but I don't need them. The Google and Yahoo serach engines work just fine.

We Speech teachers got a memo from the head of our department, in which she said that plagiarism was more of a problem this last semester than she had ever seen. She says that some students seem really not to know that cutting and pasting a paragraph here, a paragraph there, and then presenting it as your speech, is actually plagiarism.

My first instinct is to ask, "How do you get to college and not know that's plagiarism?" But, believe me, you'd be shocked at what students get to college not knowing. At least in my class, I KNOW I've told them exactly what plagiarism is--something I don't have to do--so they have no excuses.

This past semester I failed two students for plagiarizing on their final speeches. They're never even smart about it, either. One student copied wholesale a speech from a site called something like InformativeSpeeches.Com, and the other, who did a speech on cancer, copied hers entirely from Cancer.net--though she did cut and paste different paragraphs from different pages on the site. And it's very common for them to copy things directly from Wikipedia.

So, here's some advice for you if you ever have to take a Speech class. If you can't pronounce the words you use in your speech, your teacher will know you didn't come up with them. If you seem bored by your own topic, the teacher will know you didn't come up with your information. If you can't communicate coherently in daily conversation, but your speech suddenly sounds like a Nobel Prize winner wrote it, the teacher will know it's because a Nobel Prize winner wrote it, not you.

Teachers aren't stupid. And plagiarism is more than just lazy; it's dishonest and dishonorable. So...classes start in 12 days, and I guess I'll just have to continue to wage my own personal war against it. I kind of feel bad for my new students, because it always ends up that each new class pays for the sins of the one that came before.