Plagiarism: it's a never-ending debate

An interesting debate over at the Becker-Posner blog this week, with posts by Posner and Becker on plagiarism: both by students, and by Professors. And there's an interesting point of difference: Posner appears to view student plagiarism as requiring more serious punishment because it is harder to detect.

According to Posner, where student essays are read by few (ie, their professors), professor essays are read by many (ok, not many, but more surely) and are more likely to come to the attention of the plagiarised writer. According to some fairly well known theories used in analysis of criminal law in particular, as the risk of detection decreases, the punishment must increase in order to achieve the same level of deterrence. So, student plagiarism is should be punished more strongly.

Becker begs to differ - arguing that penalties should reflect both the punished person's level of knowledge about their wrongdoing, and the harm to society that arises from the transgression. Professor plagiarism is worse on both counts: they know better what is allowed, and they also stand to gain more from their plagiarism (promotions, tenure, research grants etc).

For my own two cents worth: when it comes to academic plagiarism, if it looks to students like the penalties are insufficient for faculty, it seems to me that that's because they're not looking hard enough. Academic work is so much (like many professions) about reputation. No one wants a reputation as a plagiarist. It's likely to impact on options for promotion - but even if it doesn't, then it will impact on your collegiate atmosphere and your relationships with other academics. I reckon life with that reputation would be absolutely miserable.

As for the student issue: I do not think that, currently in the Australian university system, we are taking plagiarism by students sufficiently seriously or sufficiently conveying to students that it must not happen. Until we can convince students that it is actually serious, they will continue to do it. I detect some elements of it pretty regularly.

We do need to do one of two things: improve detection, or increase penalties. Increasing penalties would likely be pretty effective: imagine if serious instances of plagiarism were permanently recorded on the transcript of the student. However, always looks disproportionate (do you really want to punishment someone permanently for that kind of mistake?)Ideally, then, we want to improve detection - perhaps the new forms of technology will help here. Until something is done, however, some students are likely to continue conducting a cost-benefit analysis which runs something like: the chance of me getting caught is minimal, if I am caught the punishment is low, therefore I will engage in some level of plagiarism.