Where’s Your Academic Integrity?

The writing assignment that I gave out to my GZ class seems to be the gift that keeps on enlightening.  Both Celia and I encountered major problems with plagiarism.  Some students used Chinese language propaganda pamphlets and just translated them into English and pasted them into their essays.  Others lifted whole passages from Wikipedia as their own.  Plagiarism in our classroom was a surprise because at the beginning of the semester we explained why plagiarism was bad, the consequences of plagiarism such as getting a zero and being kicked out of class, and then had the students sign a contract vowing that they would not plagiarize.  Right before we handed out the assignment, we gave a detailed lecture about the importance of citing and how to cite various sources of information.  Yet, all of this knowledge seemed to go in one ear and out the other as they wrote their essays.

A simple test to check if something was plagiarized after having my suspicions roused was to take the offending sentence and plug it into Google.  Offending sentences are easy to spot because they have better grammar and sound different than the other sentences around it.  If the sentence came up as part of an article, then I knew the student had plagiarized.

As I graded the essays, I spent a lot of time wondering what made my students decide to just plagiarize when I thought they knew it was wrong.  Part of the answer is cultural.  Academic scholarship does not seem as important in China as it is in the United States, thus there isn’t a culture among aspiring and actual professors of creating and protecting original works, while giving credit to those who may have influenced those works.  Whereas in the US, graduate students are always writing and citing until they become a professor.  Then the cycle of writing and citing continues as long as they are in academia.  Since professors in China seem to not be inculcated in the ways of academic scholarship, they do not expect such behavior from their students.  Chinese academics who have spent time studying in the US or write for US publications have a different attitude towards giving credit to others’ ideas, but these academics tend to be in the minority.

I also think this lack of academic integrity is wrapped up in the larger debate about intellectual property rights (IPR) in China and the idea of collective harmony and stability.  The West is always threatening sanctions against China for piracy of all sorts of products ranging from movies and computer software to semiconductors.  IPR are hard to enforce from without, but only gain traction when there is an indigenous respect for such rights.  The idea of community is very strong in China.  As I’ve written about in the past, harmony and stability are important values in Chinese society or at least they are repeated enough by my students that this Westerner believes them to be important values.  A strong sense of community promotes stability and harmony.  With a strong sense of community comes the idea that all parts of the community are for the use of the community, including ideas.  Why should an individual lay claim to an idea and then have other people credit him or her for that idea when the community is paramount to the individual?  IPR seem to cut across the idea of community and ownership of ideas because they lead to a competitive marketplace of ideas, which could undermine stability and harmony.

This explanation may seem very abstract, but take this explanation and now apply it to my classroom.  When my students write, they usually transcribe rote statements they have been learning since primary school without any real analysis of those statements.  They do not know where these statements came from except that year in and year out their teachers told them they needed to learn them.  Try asking a student why they think Taiwan is an inalienable part of China and the most you will come up with is “because it is” or worse, a blank stare.  The why behind these statements is not taught in school.  Much of the writing I received is filled with these statements that are not attributed to any particular source because repeated enough these ideas seem to have no intrinsic value.  The ideas are part of the community and free to be used by the students as they see fit.  There is a lack of knowledge or respect for individual ownership of ideas, so the students see no need to credit other people for coming up with the original idea.

Until something is done to begin to change this attitude, both among academics and the average person, the battle against plagiarism and the infringement of IPR will continue.