An Overview
‘Voicelessness’: Another Reason Students Cheat?
An Overview
DePaul University’s School for New Learning’s Writing News identifies its “Top Ten Reasons Students Plagiarize and What You Can Do”:
(10) They’re lazy. (A comparatively rare reason, they claim.)
(9) They panic.
(8) They lack confidence.
(7) They think they are giving you the facts, the truth or the answer – static knowledge that belongs to everyone.
(6) They do not understand how to integrate source material into their own argument.
(5) They do not understand why sources are so important and what all the fuss is about.
(4) They are sloppy.
(3) They do not understand that they need citations not just for direct quotes, but also for facts, figures and ideas from a source.
(2) They are learning.
(1) They are used to a collaborative model of knowledge production.
A helpful list. But after interviewing 6,000 students at 31 institutions, Donald McCabe and Linda Treviño found that the biggest reason students cheat is because their peers do:
the strong influence of peers’ behavior may suggest that academic dishonesty not only is learned from observing the behavior of peers, but that peers’ behavior provides a kind of normative support for cheating. The fact that others are cheating may also suggest that, in such a climate, the non-cheater feels left at a disadvantage. Thus cheating may come to be viewed as an acceptable way of getting and staying ahead. (533)
The power of peer influence may result from the confluence of “millennial” generation students’ characteristic group- and peer-oriented outlooks (Howe, Strauss) and what anthropologist Susan D. Blum describes as the instrumentalist worldview of this pressured, high-achieving generation who’ve “absorbed cultural messages about competition, success, multi-tasking, and the bottom line” (140). “A large number even of accomplished students consider intellectual labor to be a means to an end. They mentally calculate exactly how much effort they need to gain their desired reward: their grade, and ultimately their degree” (125). If everybody seems to be doing it, thus upping the performance ante, how can the extrinsically motivated student resist?
Indeed, in a recent study of 2,000 students at the University of Arizona, two-thirds of the subjects admitted to cheating. Students most commonly cheated on assignments they viewed as trivial. Inside Higher Ed‘s Allie Grasgreen reports:
‘Homework seems to be the issue where it’s just, in students’ minds, less of a big deal. That this is not a high-stakes evaluation of their performance,’ said Angela Baldasare, [divisional manager of assessment and data analysis at the University of Arizona]. ‘…Sometimes classroom guidelines are less clear on homework, or what’s permissible with homework, than … for exams or papers.’ For instance, students don’t blink an eye at rushing to copy homework or compare answers right before class.
Communicating the value and purposes of one’s assignments, and building series of assignments in which key skills build and are built upon, may make it harder for students to rationalize or feel justified cheating on these activities. “When students feel like assignments are arbitrary, it’s really easy for them to talk themselves into not doing it by cheating,” David Rettinger, author of a 2009 study on student cheating, told the Monitor on Psychology . “You want to make it hard for them … by saying, ‘This is what you’ll learn and how it’s useful to you.’”
‘Voicelessness’: Another Reason Students Cheat?In “Inventing the University” (1985), an influential essay in the field of composition studies, David Bartholomae claims that a student has to appropriate (or be appropriated by) a specialized discourse, and he has to do this as though he were easily and comfortably one with his audience, as though he were a member of the academy or an historian or an anthropologist or an economist; he has to invent the university by assembling and mimicking its language…. He must learn to speak our language. Or he must dare to speak it or to carry off the bluff, since speaking and writing will most certainly be required long before the skill is ‘learned.’ And this, understandably, causes problems. ‘Problems’ seems an understatement considering the difficulty of the task: students may be expected to move from discipline to discipline imitating the rhetorical gestures and ways of presenting knowledge of each, often with little explicit instruction in the conventions of a field. Top students notice how their faculty present information and make arguments and begin to replicate those moves almost intuitively. Everyone else struggles. Indeed, if “mimicry” and “bluffing” are part of the learning process—we fake it until we make it—it’s perhaps understandable that some students have trouble distinguishing their words and ideas from those of their sources—what does one’s “own voice” sound like, or even mean in an academic context? Abigail Lipson and Shelia Reindl describe a feeling of utter “voicelessness” in students who don’t perceive themselves to be thinkers or part of a “community of the mind” in the first place: “This may explain in part why some students who have been thoroughly taught the conventions of source use have not learned them. They cannot make clear the relationship between their own ideas and the ideas of others because in their experience they do not have their own ideas, and therefore there is no relationship” (12). How do we invite our students into a community of the mind and help them feel at home there, knowing they have insights we value? This is a difficult question, but finding answers seems crucial to establishing a culture of academic integrity on campus. It’s notable that Dr. Carolyn Bergquist and Alexandra Bodnar, in their “Integrity in Action” profiles, both mention students’ surprise that someone had even noticed that they’ve committed academic misconduct and seemed interested in what they had to say about the context of the infraction and their ideas more generally. We might wonder if those accounts suggest a problem of student disconnect and anonymity that we should address, especially in our newest students. To encourage students’ sense of individual voice in academic contexts, faculty might: (1) Develop writing assignments that allow student to draw on a personal archive of “evidence” (emails, Facebook posts, family photographs, etc.) and the power of their own experiences alongside the academic tools you’re teaching. For example, if you were to teach, say, Paulo Freire’s “banking concepts of education,” ask students to use it as a lens through which to read incidents from their own schooling. (2) Ask that students cite a comment by a peer during class discussion as part of an essay; have them list it along with every other source. (3) After they’ve written a paper and cited their sources as usual, ask students to write all over the document in colored inks, or to tape images or bits of dialogue collage-style in the margins, making visible the unacknowledged sources that influenced the paper–a conversation the writer had with her mother or roommate; the surprising thing a professor in another class said that led her to her topic for you; an incident from his childhood when he first thought about “nature” or “gender” or “selfhood.” Perhaps read the dedication, acknowledgments page, footnotes, and works cited for a book in your field, even a book you authored. Talk about how looking at these together help us see a map of inspiration. Ask students why some items make it into, or are excluded from, formal citation. How does it change their relationship to the paper to see these “sources” acknowledged? How might they revise the paper with a sharper and more urgent picture of how the work matters to them? Works Cited Blum, Susan D. My Word!: Plagiarism and College Culture. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2009. Print. Howe, Neil and William Strauss. Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation. NY: Vintage, 2000. Print. Grasgreen, Allie. “Who Cheats, and How.” Inside Higher Ed. 16 Mar. 2012. Web. 23 May 2013. Lipson, Abigail and Sheila Reindl. “The Responsible Plagiarist: Understanding Students Who Misuse Sources.”About Campus 8.3 (2003): 7-14. Print. McCabe, D.L., & Treviño, L.K. “Academic Dishonesty: Honor Codes and Other Contextual Influences.” Journal of Higher Education 64.5 (1993): 522–538. JSTOR. Web. 23 March 2013. Novotney, Amy. “Beat the Cheat: Psychologists Are Providing Insight into Why Students Cheat and What Faculty, Schools and Even Students Can Do about It.” Monitor on Psychology 42.6 (2011): 54. Web. 18 July 2013. |
—by Lee Rumbarger