Plagiarism and Pandemic Panic:
Acknowledging an Anxiety of Moving Research and Composition Online

Sandra M. Leonard

Let’s face it: plagiarism is nerve-racking. I teach freshman and sophomore composition at a public university to students of many different backgrounds, abilities, comfort levels, and academic experience. While I do get a few students each semester who are adept at navigating the expectations of academic research writing, many others are uncomfortable particularly regarding matters of attribution and citation. And I don’t blame them in the least. The nuances of source use in research writing go way beyond using a formal documentation style and involve skills more complex than academic policies and even composition textbooks generally acknowledge. Sometimes, student difficulty can be traced to a lack of preparation, but students also struggle with the varying standards and expectations that exist in different genres and fields. To make matters more stressful, these expectations come with steep threats and consequences in the form of plagiarism sanctions.

Even in the most typical of semesters, a mixture of overconfidence, fear, and utter confusion swirls around attribution expectations. Counteracting these forces often requires a good deal of time and all of my skills as a composition instructor to guide students through these expectations and reassure them when they are on the right track. Plagiarism is known to increase when students are stressed, underconfident, and underprepared (Power; Selemani et al.; The Citation Project). So, when Covid-19 cut a week of instruction time and shut down the university right as students were beginning their final major research project, I dreaded a perfect storm of plagiarism anxiety. 

My university closed during Spring break, giving professors one week after the break to shift their classes to an online format. Luckily, we had already gone over the basics of research, source use, and formal citation methods. However, after moving the classroom to an entirely online format, I was anxious that students would wholly abandon the precepts we practiced. Afterall, theorists such as Mark Amerika have made reference to Raymond Federman’s idea of “pla(y)giarism” as part of the nature of the networked culture (332). As reasonable as academic standards of citation seem to be to scholars and instructors who seek to build a network or argument based on response and conversation, writing on the web doesn’t always follow these rules. Though we had discussed samples and completed shorter assignments using cited quotation and paraphrase, previous assignments were more rigidly structured than the final assignment, which allowed for greater experimentation and choice to create a researched report and proposal based on the course theme. My own experience has taught me that this assignment requires a good deal of hands-on feedback to set expectations, discuss stumbling blocks, and prompt revision.

In typical semesters, I would address questions and problems through in-person conferences with students. In the course of our meeting, I’d have the student go through a few examples of source use in their paper with their source packets readily available for review. In this one-on-one setting, I’ve found that I’m able to catch and correct particularly deep source use confusion, such as a student several semesters ago who was under the honest impression that they were expected only to quote items that were already quoted in other texts. Were we not sitting down together in a situation where I could discover why they used a particular passage, I don’t think I would have fully gotten to the bottom of the student’s misunderstanding.

Some instructors swear by using Zoom in the exact same manner, perhaps even more effectively.  My own writing center uses a Zoom-like conferencing platform where both student and tutor can see each other and the student’s document at the same time. However, as soon as the semester moved online a significant percentage of my students contacted me saying that they lacked fully reliable Internet access, didn’t have a camera/mic on the same device they could access their essay, or wouldn’t be able to set aside a stable time to meet since they had new job or childcare responsibilities in the wake of school shutdowns and moving. In response to their concerns, I instead made synchronic meetings optional and relied more heavily on feedback, leaving questions and comments on their drafts in a shared Google Drive. My comments focused on content, giving just a few general reminders on style and primarily offered suggestions about clarifying and being transparent in their research with questions as simple as “Who wrote this?” and “Can you explain why this person’s opinions are important?” With some prompting, students would respond on the comment thread, or follow up with emailed questions.  After students resolved my comments and made revisions, I had students peer review the essays again, using my style of comments as a model for those to leave on others.

To further guide them in the complexities of source use, I supplemented my personalized comments with more general, skills-oriented Youtube lectures and an annotated sample essay (appropriately, or perhaps as overkill, on plagiarism) that I could direct them to if they could benefit from examples.

Even after these efforts, I was worried that I wasn’t doing enough and that some students were falling through the cracks. However, my students expressed a different anxiety in their writing: a suspicion of their peers.

To match my own research interests and ironically foreshadow this essay, my course theme this semester had been all about cheating and rule-breaking. The final project was to be on a topic of their choice involving the breaking of written or unwritten societal rules. I encouraged students to respond to problems they were concerned with in their own lives, and most chose to respond to some element of the Covid crisis: hoarding supplies, breaking quarantine, fake tests, and the deliberate spread of false information surrounding the disease. Besides these, many of them surprised me by choosing to write final reports on the problem of student cheating online, which all saw as a direct result of moving classes and testing online. Though dishonesty was a particular theme of my course, in past semesters students didn’t seem to be drawn to academic dishonesty as being particularly relevant to them. Now, however, students expressed worry that their peers would deliberately take advantage of the online environment, particularly in test-taking scenarios. Like the student in this New York Times Ethicist column, my students were afraid that their own honest efforts that semester would be both suspected and disadvantaged as a result of rampant cheating.

I didn’t doubt this anxiety—especially as it appeared to be spreading to my colleagues as well. My students reported professors being hypervigilant over cheating using lockdown browsers, experimenting with third-party facial recognition software, and giving multiple warning notifications about cheating. My newsfeed and Google scholar alerts swelled as it became apparent that there were increasingly unusual cases of cheating accusations by professors, such as this case of a TA who attempted to entrap students by planting fake exam answers online. I’ll admit that I was affected as well and redesigned the final exam as open book/open notes for my one non-composition course in hopes of avoiding occurrences of cheating. Whether the increase in academic dishonesty as a result of the move online was real or imagined, all of the efforts to mitigate cheating definitely increased my students’ anxiety about it.

For all of my own anxiety, it turns out I was wrong to predict an increase of plagiarism in my composition courses. While I did have cases of confusion and errors in citation, all of these mistakes shocked me for being so very…normal. If anything, there was greater originality of thought in how they related to their chosen topics and no instances of what I would interpret to be deliberate plagiarism. In the few cases of source overuse and patchwriting or missing citations, I corrected most early on in my feedback sessions and emails. Others who had submitted final drafts with significant errors required a rewrite, but nothing out of the ordinary. Many of my students impressed me by rising to the occasion and using this final assignment as a way to make sense of their chaotic and stressful situations.

While I’d love to attribute the semester’s relative success to my own efforts, I suspect the real reason that my feared a-plagiar-ocalypse didn’t happen is that generations of composition students have already faced the crisis just now plaguing other fields. In this digital age, and even before, the student writer does not write in seclusion, but surrounded by a polyphony of other voices that they can choose to respond to, cite, gain inspiration from, or copy.  The challenge of writers is to find their own voice among the influences of others. Perhaps my initial nervousness was an overreaction, but I do think that acknowledging and responding to it was part of the process and it forced me to think of my students’ needs in navigating research expectations in an online environment.

Works Cited

Amerika, Mark. Meta/Data: A Digital Poetics. MIT Press, 2007.

Citation Project. http://www.citationproject.net/ Accessed 30 June 2020.

Delaney and Kwame Anthony Appiah. “If My Classmates Are Going to Cheat on an Online Exam, Why Can’t I?” The New York Times, 7 April 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/magazine/if-my-classmates-are-going-to-cheat-on-an-online-exam-why-cant-i.html. Accessed 30 June 2020.

Huang, Alexa and Elizabeth Rivlin eds. Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation. Palgrave, 2014.

Power, Lori G. “University Students’ Perceptions of Plagiarism.” The Journal of Higher Education, vol. 80, no. 6, Nov./Dec. 2009, pp. 643-662.

Selemani, Apatsa, et al. “Why Do Postgraduate Students Commit Plagiarism? An Empirical Study.” International Journal for Educational Integrity, vol. 14, Jan. 2018.