Possibly, each anecdote deserves a separate entry but since they seem to be interconnected somehow, here they are together.

I show a student where the plagiarised sentence she’s used comes from (a website) and she claims not to be aware of having copied –her defence is that the complete sentence stayed in her mind like that and hence appeared in her essay. I point out to one of my mature students that a whole paragraph in his essay comes from an unacknowledged source and he claims he didn’t know that this particular source could not be used (Yahoo. Answers) –he doesn’t quite defend himself but still demands to pass the subject. He tells me he sympathises with my worries about plagiarising as he’s a secondary school teacher. Third, a student explains to a colleague that he doesn’t understand why she considers that his exercise is plagiarised, as the suspect text comes a from a book (quoted in a website, I think) and not from a website. The same colleague has her students sign a document stating that the whole content of their essays is in their own words, and still finds plagiarised text. Finally, a student demands his right to be re-assessed and when I catch him plagiarising he answers that since I hadn’t noticed the plagiarism the first time around I should not fail him.

Recently I came across a website with a banner warning students not to plagiarise its contents and explaining, once more, what plagiarising consists of. The concept is very simple and we’re truly puzzled as to why students have so many difficulties to grasp it: you plagiarise when you pass off as your own text copied from another source, which remains unacknowledged. This source can be from the internet or printed, that is irrelevant; what matters is that work you submit as 100% yours actually includes paragraphs, complete sentences or fragments of long sentences that you have not written. One thing is a quotation, which is a borrowing properly identified between quotation marks and accompanied by a bibliographical reference to the source text, and quite another plagiarism, which is an intellectual offence, as you steal from others words and ideas that you present as your own.

The difficulties to see plagiarising as a serious offence have much to do, of course, with the weakening of the sense of authority that the internet is responsible for. The main source of information we use today, Wikipedia, is anonymous and, as such, often copied by other websites. This might give the wrong idea that anything on the net can be freely used, no matter whether it has an author or not. The author is not quite as dead as Barthes supposed but the idea of authorship (and the rights it entails) is being questioned. ‘Copyleft’ discourse even supposes that this is at it should be, as ideas and knowledge should circulate freely regardless of copyright regulated by law. The problem with this approach is that it can’t apply to texts on which merit is assessed, such as students’ exercises. We assess on an individual basis, checking the originality and the effort put into each assignment. If a student borrows text produced by someone else’s efforts, then s/he is cheating in his personal assessment. Students who plagiarise just don’t make the effort of making themselves responsible for their own work.

I’m not sure what example to quote, as we’re surrounded by blatant examples of ‘legal’ plagiarism. Just this week a judge has declared that Zara has a right to use red soles in its high-heeled shoes, even though this is a gimmick plagiarised from French designer Christian Louboutin. Some fashion ignoramus might indeed think that Zara have great original ideas, without realising that the credit is due to Louboutin. And that is the whole point of plagiarism: that you arrogate to yourself merits that others deserve (Zara could have used green or asked Louboutin for permission, instead). Here, of course, the judge is establishing a dangerous precedent by allowing Zara to plagiarise for quite unclear reasons (it seems Louboutin didn’t copyright the specific Pantone red). The universities, in contrast, have very different ideas about plagiarism because we teachers, as producers of ideas, are all Louboutins (or aspiring Louboutins). We know how hard it is to think and this is why we don’t welcome Zaras in our midst. They do exist, but we ‘don’t buy them’… (I hope you get the analogy and don’t go telling everyone that teachers are snobs who don’t shop in Zara and that we earn enough money to buy red-soled Louboutins!!).

I hope this explains to you, students, why you should not plagiarise and to you, teachers, why it’s so hard to prove that plagiarising is a crime.

I do know that the correct word to name the document that describes a subject is “syllabus” but I’m using “teaching guide” here on purpose to discuss the new kind of syllabus we’ve been using since the beginning of our degree, three academic years ago. As degree Coordinator I’m facing now the daunting prospect of checking ALL the Teaching Guides of my colleagues in English Studies to make sure that they are indeed available and properly filled in. I’m not sure how many I’ll receive punctually but I’m satisfied that things work reasonably on this account in my Department, where, yes, we have this tendency to out-Pope the Pope, as we day in Spanish.

How do I know? Well, I attended a Coordinators’ meeting this week and I was truly appalled to hear that many Humanities teachers are not just dragging their feet but resisting with all their might the very idea of having to write a Teaching Guide. Not just because spelling out the competences for each subject is mind-boggling and time-consuming but rather because they do not want to commit themselves to a reading list and a programme –um, I’m not sure whether they mean right now or never. A Coordinator passed on her Department’s complaint that now we’re too busy marking essays so as to think of what students need to read from 12 September onwards. Considering that students will register on 16 July, I wonder when these teachers will find it convenient to publish their syllabus.

Yes, we’re terribly pressed for time but this is how we do our job. I don’t want to put myself as an example of anything but those of you following this blog will recall a recent posting about the plays I’m reading at full speed for my next year subject. Yes, I was tempted to leave the play list open but a) it’s a bad example for the students, who think we improvise all the time; b) all the work I’m doing now is time I’ll gain when teaching the subject, as I know from experience. As for the Teaching Guide, I do profoundly agree with my colleague from Zaragoza, Paco Collado, who complains that it stresses abilities at the cost of downplaying knowledge. In a Teaching Guide you CAN’T say that on completion of the subject the student will have a sound knowledge of, say, British Drama; you MUST claim that s/he will be ABLE TO SHOW his/her understanding of the main lines of British Drama, as teaching has become now training TO DO SOMETHING, not to KNOW SOMETHING. However, I have always supported the idea of the Teaching Guide as a very convenient teaching tool to which you can refer at any time, and indeed as a contract with the students. I was taught to see it that way in 1998, when I started working for UOC, a virtual university for which the Teaching Guide is almost sacred. It’s taken UAB a long time to catch up…

A Teaching Guide is not, however, and should never be a straightjacket. This semester, for instance, with all the disruptions caused by the strikes, we’ve had to improvise much syllabus-wise. The Guide is, precisely, a Guide to guide both teachers and students and also a healthy reminder that we teachers need to get used to specifying how we teach and how we assess students in a public document. I won’t go now into that other problem, which is some teachers’ absolute reluctance to sharing a Teaching Guide with their colleagues. Or I will, as that’s simple for me: I’m happy to say that I work for a Department in which teachers understand that a subject taught by different teachers must offer to all the groups involved the same contents and assessment methods –your ‘libertad de cátedra’ or academic freedom should apply to how you teach not to what you teach when you share a subject (quite another matter is an elective). I can, though, imagine very well the tensions that these anti-Teaching Guide teachers are suffering and I’m sorry for them.

Having said all this, I must now answer the question everyone is asking me: do students read the Teaching Guide for each subject? I wonder!! I do know that we’re writing the TGs for a future degree assessment by the corresponding authorities, bent on using the scissors on us, yet I do hope the TGs are also useful as what they should be: good teaching tools for all.

I’m tempted to cut’n’paste my entry for 28 May 2011, written after marking a disastrous Literature quiz based on studying our handbook Introduction to English Literature. Yet, re-reading it, I notice that things are even worse this time around as, instead of 50 titles, the quiz covered only 20 –presumably those any self-respecting student of English should be able to identify by author and period. A colleague tells me that I should not write this entry as students might feel offended that I reproduce their mistakes here. Sorry, but in that case I must be cruel: these are not mistakes, they are something else that must be addressed urgently. Judge for yourself:

David Copperfield, by Charles Darwin (see also Sense and Sensibility)
Heart of Darkness, by John Connor (the hero of the Terminator series?)
Lord of the Rings, by, Lord Byron/ JK Tolkien (JRR Rowling?)
Middlemarch, by (literal): Brontë, the first one not Charlotte
Robinson Crusoe, by Oscar Twain from the Jacobean period
Sense and Sensibility, by Charles Darwin/ by Pope Alexander / by John Austen
The Time Machine, by Julio Verne (again??)
To the Lighthouse, by George Tenis
Wuthering Heights, by (literal) The Roberts: Charlotte, Anne, etc./ by Chatterine Brotën/ by Charlotte Wrontë / by The Brontës (in collaboration??)

For some strange reason, Thomas Hardy was named in possibly 70% of the exams as the author of A Passage to India. Some glorious misspellings include: Sheckespeare (no first name…) and Launance Stready… And what’s worse, much too often authors were named correctly but placed in VERY wrong periods. I could have dinner today, if I wanted to, with Mary Shelley and Charles Dickens.

Most students passed the quiz thanks to the second part, a multiple choice exam in which, I’m sure, luck had a share, big or small (as it is always the case with these exercises). In one extreme case a student passed with a 5 by scoring only 2/40 for the quiz and 48/60 from the multiple choice. Perhaps we need to correct that.

What worries me TERRIBLY is that the students’ imaginative quiz answers –and the many blank ones– reveal a WORRYING inability to study in a systematic way. The quiz is not what interests us but the process of preparing for it: we expected our students to draw their own charts, with periods and main authors. I know from the comments one of them made that they have problems discriminating between major and minor writers yet this one of the skills (or competences) they should be learning. As I wrote a year ago, the other worrying, not to say, SCARY factor is how the quiz results show that those approaching us lack the basic cultural capital a student of English should possess (and indeed acquire in the first year). Many of the quiz answers seemed to be shouting at us: ‘I don’t care, and you won’t make me care!!’ Or maybe, simply, I can’t make sense of so much raw data.
Food for thought…