I have students present the material they’re learning in many ways, and I like the idea of using video or performance. I also like the idea of having students deliberately plagiarize in order to talk about the construction of knowledge. But they would have to be able to distinguish plagiarism from other forms of knowledge acquisition (although I hesitate to call plagiairsm “knowledge acquisition,” because it’s not clear to me what students acquire by engaging in it deceptively). A collegue of mine has designed and taught an entire course on plagiarism where she does the kind of thing you’re talking about.

And I stand by my claim that students need to write in order to learn. Absolutely. It’s not the only thing they need to do - I didn’t say that - but they definitely need to do it. They need to express their understanding of a text in their own words. That’s something that plagiarism robs them of. Also, writing is only one way to assess student learning. Most professors I know grade based on multiple criteria, including class participation, willingness to engage material, presentations, progress made during a semester….

Given the necessity of having students write in order to learn the material I teach

Is that really a given? Why is writing the only way to learn? Aren’t there multiple modes of intelligence and multiple styles of learning? Are you talking about the students’ learning or your assessment of their learning, and your having measurable milestones for their progress?

To a certain degree, I think regular writing works like that too, but you could test it in a different way. Obviously I don’t know your classroom environment too well a few things that spring to mind given the right possibilities. You could do add-on projects featuring orally presented or performed components. Anything that crosses it into a different media or format where they will have to examine, adapt and re-apply the existing information in a completely new way.

For example, say your students are required to take a 10 page paper and transform it into a 2 minute video presentation based on that paper. Suddenly the playing field is leveled. They can’t just plagiarise a video (especially if they themselves have to appear in it), and more importantly, they have to apply the knowledge in a new way. The students who did the work at the basic levels and wrote original papers are more likely to be able to adapt the essence of the material. But at the same time, the student who plagiarized is also going to learn a lot of things. They might even realize they are much better at making videos than writing research papers.

If you wanted to really tackle the bull by the horns, you could also have them intentionally put together a completely plagiarized paper. Instruct them to “Rip - Mix - Burn” as Apple advertized a few years back. But make it be about a completely obscure topic, or a topic which is essentially nonsensical or false. Have them remix the words of other people to prove things that aren’t true and that they never said. The whole thing could be billed as an exercise about communication, distortion and authenticity. There are many many possibilities.

Shit, I have a lot of ideas about this. I ought to jot these all down sometime.

Given the necessity of having students write in order to learn the material I teach, I don’t see how I can make writing assignments absolutely plagiarism-proof. I have worked hard to be innovative and flexible, and to reach students with different styles of learning. In order to have the time to do that, I can’t spend my time tracking down and punishing plagiarists. I agree that that’s an absurd thing to do. But my reasons are different from yours.

Computer programming is a field which is absolutely built on plagiarism. And the best programmers are also lazy and rampant thieves of other people’s code. The opportunity to grab somebody else’s code and pass it off as your own in such a situation is essentially what drives the industry. It’s not a moral failing, it’s getting the task at hand accomplished in the simplest possible way.

The thing we really had to grapple with though was how to get people to be able to do the coding and understand the logic for themselves. If they got onto the job site and couldn’t swim and do the work, they would get fired and we wouldn’t get paid. So it was a very tricky thing to balance between the two skills. And yes plagiarism is a skill and no, people that do it aren’t stupid and aren’t immoral.

I stand by everything I said here and all the issues I raised are completely valid ones based on my experience as a student and as a teacher, and as someone who’s working at the “cutting edge of shifting epistemological norms” as you said. You don’t need to agree with me. This is just a conversation, and that’s my perspective.

Anyway, all I’m suggesting is that if teachers don’t want to waste time trying to catch plagiarism, don’t operate according to a model which allows it. All the time they spend trying to catch plagiarists and moralize at them about how wrong it is could be better spent coming up with creative alternatives for educational assessment that don’t rely on tests, essays and projects that people don’t want to do.

Plagiarism is a growing problem on college campuses, and a single case of plagiarism can take hundreds on the part of the professor of hours to research, document, and take through the requisite disciplinary channels. It’s not just a matter of a professor having a spare afternoon and preferring to play computer solitaire.

Plagiarists are not learning how to solve problems, as you suggest. Most plagiarism is done out of desparation, and it’s done very poorly. Not to put too fine a point on it, but plagiarists tend to be stupid. Frankly, that makes their plagiarism even more insulting to the professor - how dumb do they think I am? These are not clever kids at the cutting edge of shifting epistemological norms. These are kids who are too lazy, tired, desperate, or entitled to think for themselves. Good college teaching is all about teaching kids to “make decision, reason through problems, and solve puzzles,” but not every student is going to rise to the occasion. It is my job as a professor to evaluate whether a student is engaging the material in the course. If a student can’t make an honest attempt to learn, and if s/he instead lies and represents someone else’s work as her/his own, then that IS a moral failing. It’s called lying.