The Plagiarism Fetish
by zunguzungu
Lots of people are responding to this essay, by a professional writer-of-student-papers-for-them:
I’ve written toward a master’s degree in cognitive psychology, a Ph.D. in sociology, and a handful of postgraduate credits in international diplomacy. I’ve worked on bachelor’s degrees in hospitality, business administration, and accounting. I’ve written for courses in history, cinema, labor relations, pharmacology, theology, sports management, maritime security, airline services, sustainability, municipal budgeting, marketing, philosophy, ethics, Eastern religion, postmodern architecture, anthropology, literature, and public administration. I’ve attended three dozen online universities. I’ve completed 12 graduate theses of 50 pages or more. All for someone else. You’ve never heard of me, but there’s a good chance that you’ve read some of my work. I’m a hired gun, a doctor of everything, an academic mercenary. My customers are your students. I promise you that. Somebody in your classroom uses a service that you can’t detect, that you can’t defend against, that you may not even know exists.
If this guy didn’t exist, our bad conscience would have to invent him. And maybe it did. Which is why I think blaming someone misses the larger point, which is that when a system is set up to make cheating easy and profitable, someone will come along and profit from it. Treating a systemic problem moralistically accomplishes very little. So while the NY Times might want to blame the phenomenon on digital technology or “the youth” — the Times being very good at moral panic — I want to suggest that this person’s existence is simply a symptom of a basically misguided approach to what paper writing is. If you treat a paper in objective terms, as simply a thing the student conjures up magically from the bowels of their laptop, you make this sort of counterfeit easy. The easiest way for a professor to assign papers is to remove him or herself from the process, to simply say “here’s the assignment, turn it in on this date.” Which is the logic of capitalist production: you specify what you want and when you want it, but by removing yourself from the process of production, you get to transform the labor of paper writing into a monetary transaction, de-socializing and de-contextualizing the object of production. Students produce the commodity (the paper) and you pay them for it (in a grade), and whatever happens in the middle goes blissfully unexamined.
As Marx put it, a commodity is a “mysterious thing” because the labor of its production has been rendered “as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labor.” This is the commodity fetish: by severing the object from the relations of its production, you get to regard it simply as purely a function of its objective characteristics. The same is true with papers: when we treat a paper simply as an object — something we teach our students to produce and then critique objectively — we make it impossible to think in any kind of critical terms about how it was produced. In capitalist production that’s precisely the point: you want tantalum for your cell phone, but you don’t want to know about how it was produced. You want it for what it can do to make cell phones possible; precisely what you don’t want it for is its broader social meaning (or the labor that went into creating it), so you need a structure of thinking to prevent yourself from understanding how blood-soaked it is.
But what is a boon for the capitalist (who doesn’t want to worry about the labor of producing a commodity), is a dangerous exemption for the teacher: those instructions are easy for the student to pass on to the plagiarizer. When we treat papers this way, we lose the ability to know anything about how they were produced: because you’ve removed yourself so completely from the process of the paper’s production, its appearance as a finished product can only be judged in terms of its objective qualities. You can grade it, but you cannot confirm that the student wrote it because you know nothing about how it was produced. This is therefore an easy hurdle for a dedicated plagiarizer to clear.
This is not a systemic necessity; for those of us who make our own syllabi, it’s a choice, and a bad one. As Angus Johnson writes,
What’s really dismaying to me about the kerfuffle is how quick many professors have been to disclaim responsibility for addressing this problem. Four of the first six commenters on the Chronicle essay are teachers who say it’s beyond their powers to put a stop to this kind of cheating in their classrooms, that because of their class sizes or their administrations’ policies, they’re just not able to do anything about the problem.
I just don’t believe it. I just don’t believe that there’s no way for them to address the issue, that they’ve tried everything there is to try and been stymied at every turn. That just doesn’t ring true to me — not on the basis of my own experience nor in light of the comments left by other aggressively anti-cheating professors in the thread. Combating cheating and plagiarism takes inventiveness. It takes dedication. It takes flexibility. But it absolutely can be done.
I agree, and treating papers as a process rather than a product is the first step. Because focusing in on all the stages between assignment and submission — making that the focus of your intervention — transforms the problem. By requiring a series of intermediate steps which build to a final portfolio of work (and include a variety of different interventions and conferences both with me and with other students), you accomplish two things. On the one hand, it makes the paper writing process much more transparent. Plagiarism becomes both a much more labor intensive proposition and therefore much easier to detect: when a substantial paper trail is required, most students will just to write the paper themselves (and the ones who don’t will be much more easily caught). At the same time, it allows you to do exactly what it is your job to do: intervene in the process, guiding, critiquing, and being involved long before the student makes the irrevocable errors that pointing out after the fact does little or nothing to correct anyway (so many papers that students turn in were flawed from the start because the first step the student took was the wrong one; intervening earlier allows you to prevent that from happening in ways that postmortem evaluations cannot).
This takes work on the part of the professor, of course. And part of the problem is that in those enormous classes so beloved of education-as-commodity minded administrators, it becomes very difficult to be involved in students’ writing processes. Online education is the easiest place for plagiarism because the whole point of it is to break down every element of the education “production” process to its most basic units; rationalizing the system means transforming a process into a transaction. But it only becomes easier and cheaper (to the extent that it does) by skimping on something very, very important, whether or not it shows up in the bottom line.
I don’t mean to insult people who face this problem or imply that I’ve personally solved it; it’s a huge and difficult issue, and the conditions under which we work (not always created by us) are a big part of why it’s such a problem. But we should understand that treating education as an economic transaction is almost the entire problem, and we have significant means available to us to push back. Which is why I thoroughly endorse Angus’ vocationally minded rejection of the idea that a systemic problem is not our responsibility:
…if you, as a college professor, create a classroom environment in which students are able to cheat without consequences, you’re rewarding cheating and punishing honest work. You can wring your hands all you like about declining ethical standards, but the situation you deplore is one that you’ve helped to create.
To put it another way, if you’re a teacher or a professor then finding and punishing cheaters is your job. It’s your job in the same way that grading is your job. It’s your job in the same way that facilitating class discussion is your job. It’s your job in the same way that crafting appropriate tests and assignments is your job.
zunguzungu 
I also think that the burden of responsibility is most often put squarely on the student. Yes, I agree that finding and punishing cheaters is part in parcel of the teaching profession, I think much more emphasis needs to be placed on this whole “appropriate assignment” situation.
I work in lit, and I have been in faculty meetings and witnessed complaints about plagiarism from folks who are assigning essays on the oldest of old chestnuts. If you ask for a take home essay on “Hills Like White Elephants” or “Sailing to Byzantium”, you can bet that you’re going to get plagiarized stuff. If professors and teachers want original thoughts, we’ve got to have some original thoughts of our own. Is it harder to read new and interesting literature, think up new and interesting ways to teach and new and interesting (and process-driven–as you mention) assignments? Yes. Is it easier to toss down a couple questions gleaned from a publisher-supplied desk copy of the most recent collection of bits and bobs from the canon? Yes. Thing is, when you put the work in before the assignment, there’s less work chasing down cheaters after the students hand their papers in. It depends on where you want to spend your time…
As an added bonus, you can expose students to stuff that aint just the old standards. Sure, have ’em chat about Hemingway in class, but when you give the essay, push the envelope. Work on the questions–do your research and take the time. After all, isn’t that what we ask of students?
I’m not really shocked at the Chronicle’s piece – one of my grad-school-days senior thesis students went on to create a ‘homework aid’ site that features ‘essay drafts’ for purchase, so this is pretty old news, and predates the internet by … centuries, probably – but it does raise some questions for me about how I assign work. I often stage work in upper division courses, and always stage work in grad-level courses (writing guidance I never got!) most of which are online….
In my lower-division World surveys, though, I admit that I’ve been a little lazy on the essay side of things, partially because my focus is more on testing than writing. Like a lot of faculty, I’ve gotten away from in-class final testing, shifting almost exclusively to take-home essays on the grounds that I’m more likely to get quality work from them without the pressure, and to make things even worse, I give out the final essay questions 2-3 weeks in advance, so that students who want to prepare have the time to do so in a responsible fashion. This makes me distinctly vulnerable to the work-for-hire cheat. That said, my students aren’t likely to drop a couple of hundred bucks on an essay (and custom-written material for my finals wouldn’t be much less than that, I think): they’re just not all that rich, most of them; lots of them can’t even buy their books until the financial aid checks come in, sometimes a month or more into the semester. So I’m going to struggle with this, and even more so because I’m facing potentially doubled section sizes next semester, making lots of extra work on writing assignments a distinctly unpleasant prospect….
Honestly brilliant. A pleasure to read.
I am all agreement with Jack Crow. But I wonder the following: even in a smaller class, say a composition class, where the instructor has a little more time and leeway to personalize the product, isn’t this just a mystification of the fact that the true transaction is between the parents and the administration, and that the instructor and the student are actors on a stage, pretending to be the real scene of the action? In which case, the plagiarism is sort of neat in that it calls this bluff… I often tried to test this hypothesis while I was teaching by asking myself: if there was no university, and these seventeen people had asked me to teach them how to read (Ha! Ahahahahaha!!), would I be doing anything differently in this class? Would I be doing anything the same?? etc.
I’ve argued elsewhere that grades are our primary work product, rather than education per se, and the indirect economics of the traditional student (rare though they are in my world) does potentially set up some weird incentives, but I wouldn’t go so far as to claim that the classroom isn’t central, any more than the realities of financial capitalism render the factory irrelevant. Because grades’ most important function, for most practical purposes, is communication of qualifications to potential employers, watering them down too much will result in decreased value, increased regulation, not to mention collapsing self-esteem and devalued employment.
Wait, that’s already happenning….
Excellent analysis, Aaron. I agree with this.
Do you think the “Shadow Scholar” there is real? I have no doubt that there are businesses out there willing to help students cheat through their classes, but that article looked like it was written with a little too much sanctimonious relish.
In fact it read like the confession of an evil super villain (think Syndrome from The Incredibles) admitting to all the chaos he has caused because of the gaps in the education system, what with the personal griping about how his teachers never recognized his brilliant writing talents and how now he’s using them for evil to produce millions of pages at a superhuman rate to get students to fool the very people who ostracized a genius like him. The Shadow Scholar! Mwahahaha!
As one commentator pointed out, he should switch careers because as it stands now he’s working his ass off for peanuts.
I think you’re right that intervening into the writing process is a good way to make plagiarism more difficult and less appealing for students, but I think the problem then turns into an issue of compartmentalization. On the one hand, the writing teacher becomes an active mentor instead of a distant judge, which sounds fine. On the other hand, the teacher still has to play judge at the end of the process, since writing is ultimately about navigating the disconnect between oneself and readers, between process and product. The risk in getting too close to works-in-progress is that it becomes progressively more difficult to talk about disambiguation and emphasis as the student project becomes increasingly collaborative.
A certain amount of alienation is the prerequisite for writing anything at all…which is not to say that I want us all to ignore confused students and celebrate the social barriers that keep us in our own heads, only that I think a certain amount of reification keeps us honest. One can’t produce a paper without giving a certain amount of agency and vitality over to form…and that’s a basically good thing.
Not sure what incentives teachers have for investing their time and energy into uncovering cheating. Grading is a thankless, underpaid task, far less lucrative than writing the papers, though ostensibly the authority and power of the grader is what allows the hired gun to make as much as he does. And it always seemed to me when I was a college instructor that the administration was not on my side when grades were challenged. I felt like I would get put on trial for calling attention to plagiarism.
Agree that assessing the process rather than the product would eliminate much of this problem, but that too requires more work from the instructor, who often is being treated by management like an assembly-line worker and thus has a reasonable inclination to shirk when possible. Teachers “who care” tend to have their wholly personal and uncompensated moral imperatives exploited by a system that pretends to care about education but obviously cares only about money.
And so the education product gets reified, and in the process becomes a simulation of itself.
Apropos of Rob’s comment, the prescribed ritual for confronting plagiarists here at UCB involves a conversation in which the instructor attempts to prompt a confession without ever making an accusation. The pretext for this is that those who repent before they’re backed into a corner deserve lighter consequences, but I strongly suspect that this policy is better at preempting lawsuits than at re-igniting the dying embers of student virtue. What burns me about this approach, apart from the inevitable awkwardness of talking to cheaters about cheating, is that it is nearly impossible to engage in this kind of non-accusatory coaxing without behaving disingenuously toward the student, without pushing our cheaters toward an emotional performance that makes me feel like I’m judging ANTM instead of teaching. “I just don’t see YOU in this photo. Personality is SO important.” It’s our job to search out cheaters, but I don’t think it’s our job (or our business) to regulate their affect about cheating beyond explaining the rationale for our standards of intellectual property. Moralism isn’t only a poor explanatory framework for plagiarism, it’s a way of naturalizing legal transactions as if they were primarily ethical ones in a way that makes it almost impossible to teach the offenders for the rest of the semester. [/rant]
How come we Marxists get all flummoxed when we have to talk about the labor relation in the classroom. Everyone tends to agree that students are workers, but no one knows how. You say because students produce papers that are valorized by the prof, Evan Calder Williams says because student debt is put to work we qualify, Marc Bousquet says students are workers because they increasingly hold “job-jobs.” None of these seem right at all. Students don’t get paid to write papers, they have to pay many thousands of dollars to get to the assignments. According to Evan’s analysis, students without debt don’t count, and for Bousquet, it isn’t the student as such who is a worker, but instead the worker as student as worker.
Without acknowledging the primacy of student labor, which does not arise from valorization, the classroom will continue to be inexplicable. I like “Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine” as an explanation: http://destructural.wordpress.com/2010/08/05/students-and-homework-machines/
[…] Bady has the best response to the current Plagiarism Fetish stuff going around, about that guy who writes papers for […]
A couple of quick piggybacks to other people’s comments–
1. A mantra I inherited from my dissertation advisor: “If you ask for shitty writing, that’s what you get.” Really just a PG-13 way of reinforcing the original point that a system in which it’s easy and superficially beneficial to cheat is likely to produce cheating.
2. As a composition specialist whose teaching load is about 75% gen-ed writing courses, I agree that it’s part of my job to catch cheaters. But I don’t agree that it’s my job to punish them. It’s my job to teach writing, which means that if I catch a cheater, I’m much more likely to make the cheater actually do the assignment than I am to haul him/her up in front of the Honor Council. Punishing the cheater doesn’t teach him/her what the class is designed to teach. It *might*, on its best days, discourage further cheating, or it might encourage more creative cheating, or it might ruin the life of somebody who simply exercised bad judgment, or… But it doesn’t teach anything about writing, and if I have any faith whatsoever in my pedagogy and curriculum, that’s what has to come first.
WE (i.e the teachers) are part of the problem and there are old-fashioned solutions. For many of my courses I offer students the option of taking an oral exam instead of a written report. guess what? The better students opt for it. they are confident, willingto argue and discuss and show me that they have really learned the material. They sit in front and talk, not their ghosts or shadows. But the psychometrists will have a fit. they will bring out all the nonsense of reliability, validity and time worn shibboleths that degrade teaching and learning into a mindless bureaucratic exercise. a plague on that fraternity who destroy the joys of scholarship into mindless number crunching. If any one has converted learning intoa commodity it is that tribe of number crunchers who cannot really recognise value till it “is formulated, bent upon a pin”