Plagiarism

[Malcolm Johnston]

Dear Colleagues,

I have been a victim of plagiarism myself.  Here, I will mention a
particular case only.  This was in an exam for second year students of
Second Language Acquisition.  SLA was my specialty.  A cross-sectional
study of 12 Polish speakers and 12 Vietnamese speakers) learning
English, which I carried out in 1982--1983, is still apparently the
largest corpus-based study of its kind ever done.  This is something I
find somewhat disturbing, because although it covered many areas of
syntax and morphology, it was hardly definitive.  It would never have
been completed if I had not bought an expensive micro-PDP 11/23,
learnt to program in C and the shell and manage a commercial Unix-type
system (Whitesmith's Idris).

Later the data was used to develop a prototype of Processability
Theory and I worked for some time with Manfred Pienemann.  However,
those ideas did not have much impact on the original study, since it
was well-advanced by the time we met.  Manfred did give me a lot of
useful background on SLA, however.  The study, ``Syntactic and
Morphological Progressions in Learner English'' (SAMPLE) was funded by
the Commonwealth Department of Immigration.

I used some of the findings from the SAMPLE study to write booklets
for ESL teachers.  At the time, all new arrivals had the right to free
English courses.  Where we now have prisons, we then had migrant
hostels.

It was when I was teaching at the Bankstown campus of The University
of Western Sydney that the plagiarism occurred.  It involved an exam.
The exam had the following format.  Students could pick up a list of
about eight questions a week before sitting the exam.  Of these they
had to answer only four.  They were not permitted to bring anything
besides the questions and writing materials into the room.  The course
was small and there were roughly ten students.

One of the students, who even in my very lenient, specialized view,
could barely speak any English (one wonders how this student ever got
through first year), came to me for advice about what to read for the
exam.  I gestured vaguely at a shelf of books and pamphlets which
happened to contain one of the pamphlets I wrote concerning aspects of
the SAMPLE study.  Language difficulties rendered further discourse
impossible.

Although I did not design the exam, I was asked to invigilate it.  I
remained in the room with the students for the duration of the exam;
it is possible I opened the door and glanced out into the corridor
once or twice, but only for a second or two.

It was also my job to mark the exam and when I came to the paper
supposedly composed by the student who had consulted me, I was
immediately surprised.  There was a longish, completely grammatical
first sentence.  Ditto for sentence two, although there was an error
with a preposition.  By the time I had read the third sentence I was
no longer surprised.  Not only was it grammatical, it was rather
elegant and (you've probably guessed) it was written by me!  As was
the rest of the exam paper.  The bogus paper was peppered with copying
errors but there was absolutely no doubt of its origin.  Of all the
books and papers on the shelf I'd pointed to, this student had picked
out the only one written by me.  The plagiarist must have prepared a
copy and then swapped it with the paper that was written in the exam.

Given that this was a small, specialized and relatively advanced
class, it had not even occurred to me that a student would resort to
plagiarism.  However, one had.  The matter was dealt with in-house.
The student had already failed other components of the course and was
given 0% for the exam.  That rendered the person ineligible to
continue studies at the University.  The decision was taken by my
immediate superior and the Acting Head of Department.  Some might
consider this excessively lenient but, in practice, given that the
student would have their student visa revoked and only be able to
remain in Australia illegally, the result was more or less the same as
having the perpetrator hauled up in front of the Dean and far less
time-consuming: why waste time on a hopeless case?

In a certain sense, the above narration is more amusing than dire.
However, I would like to make the following point.  When someone has
abused your good will and tolerance and behaved abominably, you feel
just as you do when you are robbed or your car is stolen: violated.

I cannot speak for Stefan but I would not be surprised if he felt
similarly, given the sources he names for the plagiarized sections.
If somebody has put plagiarized work on a public site, I see no reason
why the person who has suffered this insult should not make it
public.  One presumes the relevant University authorities will carry
out an investigation and come to a conclusion but the conclusion may
not be publicized.

A word about political correctness.  An old friend of mine who was
working at the time as an economist for a multi-national bank, wrote
an email to a colleague in which he apologized for his tardy response
by writing that ``he had been down with a wog.''

In Australian English, ``wog'' can mean a cold, a dose of flu or mild
gastroenteritis.  Of course, it has an alternative, derogatory and
racist sense and in this country applied largely to the first post-War
influx of Italian and Greek immigrants.  The computer chose to
interpret the word in this second (contextually impossible) sense.  It vetoed 
the email.  For me, that summarizes political correctness: a knee-jerk 
reaction that can be carried out by a machine that does not think.  Whoever
chose to play the gender card in this particular discussion might like
to think about that.

Australia may have been the first country to give the vote to women
but it is certainly not free of sexism; in the corporate world, for
instance, our ``glass ceiling'' is still very low.  There is however,
a very real difference between an informed and intelligent discussion
of sexism or anything else and mindless political correctness.

Nobody ever said male plagiarists did not exist.  As a matter of fact,
we had a notorious example of just that on our campus.  I had the good
fortune never to cross his tracks.  There also seemed to be a certain
lack of will on the part of the University to bring him to book: ``the
real world,'' apparently, would catch up with him soon enough.  I
should also add the disclaimer that never having dealt with him, I
have no knowledge of how difficult that would have been: he was
reputed to far more cunning than the plagiarist I encountered.

Looking at the various postings on this issue and bearing in mind the purpose 
of this list, I find it very peculiar indeed that Stefan has almost come to 
occupy the role of wrongdoer.  People have feelings and personalities shape 
ideas.  I don't believe you should or can behave as if this is not the case.

Malcolm Johnston,
Retired