Downloading on the lowdown does no favors

Sue Clark

I once substituted for a teacher and stumbled across an alarming

discovery. The students were occupied working out of their textbooks,

so I pulled a few essays and assignments out of the files to see what

topics were being discussed.

The first one I scanned was about racial discrimination. I knew

the student and I knew his vocabulary. The essay had been plagiarized

from the Internet and turned in as original work.

I called the student up to the desk and showed him the paper. “Did

you write this?”

“Yes; that was an Internet assignment,” he said.

“What does ‘emulsion’ mean?”

He hesitated. “That was written a long time ago, maybe months,” he

said.

“But you said you wrote it,” I prodded.

Again, he nodded.

“So, again, what does emulsion mean?” I asked.

He gave me a look that said, “Why are you doing this to me; I’m a

good kid.”

“You used the word in your essay, Joe. What does it mean?”

He hung his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “But I got a B on it,

look there.” He pointed to the grade on the front of the paper.

I wouldn’t give him any peace. “What does paradigm mean? How about

proclivity?” I stopped. “You just downloaded these from a website,

didn’t you?”

“Yes,” he said, “but I always get a good grade.”

“If you mean a good grade for looking up a website, then I have no

problem with it,” I said. “But you need to know that this ‘essay’ is

plagiarized, and if you try that stuff in college or with some other

teacher here, you’ll get an F. He’s not doing you kids a favor.”

Joe slouched off to his seat.

I called up two other students. I took their essays on the Civil

War and laid them out side by side. They each looked briefly at the

other’s paper and burst out laughing. The essays were exactly the

same.

“Busted,” the class sang out.

“I see you both found the same website,” I commented.

As I looked through the reports I became more frustrated. I walked

to the podium. “Hey, guys,” I said. “You know that downloading from

the net is cheating?”

“No it isn’t; he wants an essay and we give him one,” one student

remarked.

“If you do this when you go to college, you’ll get caught and it

will be plagiarism,” I said. “Any teacher worth her salt will know

when you use vocabulary like ‘slain’ instead of murdered, or ‘joie de

vivre’ instead of happiness.”

I continued, to a fidgeting and less-than-receptive audience. “You

have to learn how to read this stuff and write it up in your own

words. If you don’t, you will never learn anything. What are you

going to do when you have an essay test and you can’t write?”

The class assured me that the teacher accepted downloads from the

Internet. “He never says anything, and we get the grades,” they

confirmed.

“I’m sure he counts them as extra credit, but, I repeat, this is

not doing you a favor,” I said. “You need to know how to read

something and write about it in your own words.”

The class just looked at me, and some grinned. One student said,

“We will do it when we have to. We don’t have to in here.”

I took the two identical essays and placed them where the teacher

would see them. Then faced the class again.

“You know this isn’t right,” I said.

No one would meet my eyes.

The bell rang and they escaped. Later that day I talked to the

teacher about what I had found. “Thank you for alerting me to this,”

was his response.

When I was an English teacher, I assigned a lot of writing and

graded a lot of essays. It was often a pain. If I caught a student

plagiarizing (this was before computers), I would give them an F and

the same lecture I’d just given. The constant vigilance and

interactive nature of high-level writing instruction pulled me out of

the field and into counseling.

But once an English teacher, always an English teacher. I was

compelled to raise a fuss on this issue.

By accepting downloaded material in the name of essays, we are

doing our young people a serious disservice. They begin to truly

think it’s OK to plagiarize.

* SUE CLARK is a Newport Beach resident and a high school guidance

counselor at Creekside High School in Irvine.