This essay appeared on the New Yorker’s “Book Bench” blog on August 4, 2010.

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A deeply troubling article sat atop the New York Times’ most-emailed list yesterday (no, not the one about catching horrible diseases at the gym). “Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age,” the headline proclaimed, pinpointing a problem, weaving a theory, and excusing youthful copycats in one fell swoop. The story here is that a large number of college students today are acting as college students always have—baldly lifting whole passages for their term papers from other sources. But it’s the Digital Age now, and between unverifiable, unattributed information sitting around online and the general ease with which young people obtain, alter, and share creative content on the Internet, students can’t seem to figure out that cheating on a paper is wrong. In fact, a lot of them can’t even tell that they’re cheating, and the Internet is to blame.

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Really? When I was in college (I graduated three years ago), I was well aware of the necessity of avoiding minefields of unattributed—and often incorrect—information on the Web. Wikipedia was never an acceptable source, perhaps because my professors knew they’d get students like the one from the University of Maryland who, when “reprimanded for copying from Wikipedia . . . said he thought its entries—unsigned and collectively written—did not need to be credited since they counted, essentially, as common knowledge.” There are probably only two types of people pulling these excuses: the crafty, using the Digital Age argument to their advantage, and the completely clueless, who, like plenty in preceding generations, just don’t understand the concept of plagiarism. The Times asked current students to weigh in (helpfully labelling them “Generation Plagiarism”), and one wrote:

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“I never ‘copy and paste’ but I will take information from the Internet and change out a few words then put it in my paper. So far, I have not encountered any problems with this. Thought [sic] the information/words are technically mine because of a few undetectable word swaps, I still consider the information to be that of someone else.”

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The student goes on to say that, “In the digital age, plagiarism isn’t and shouldn’t be as big of a deal as it used to be when people used books for research.” The response leaves me just as confused as I believe he is, but I’m pretty convinced that he’d still be fuzzy on plagiarism if he’d lived back when people actually used books. But what I’ve found most frustrating in the ensuing debate is the assertion that these students are a part of some new Reality Hunger–type wave of open-source everything—if every song is sampled, why shouldn’t writers do the same? The question is interesting, complicated, and divisive, but it has little bearing on a Psych 101 paper.

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Excusing plagiarism as some sort of modern-day academic mash-up won’t teach students anything more than how to lie and get away with it. We should be teaching students how to produce original work—and that there’s plenty of original thinking across the Internet—and leave the plagiarizing to the politicians.

AT ISSUE: SOURCES FOR UNDERSTANDING PLAGIARISM