Wikipedia and plagiarism
Posted by Jeremy on October 20, 2009 · 8 Comments
This semester has been my first foray into doing the professorial thing full-time. For the most part it has shown me how prepared I was for this by Missouri, because it’s been pretty smooth. I’m busy, to be sure, but not overwhelmed by the thought of it all. So at least I’m not losing the mental battle!
A couple weeks ago I had a new and unexpected experience. I gave my first exam to my Media & Society course, which covered some basic ideas about each of our main media channels and some media theories that drive news and information flow. One of these ideas I tested on was the notion of the “marketplace of ideas,” one of our more classic concepts, which posits that the public can arrive at the best decision or policy as a result of robust discussion through a free exchange of ideas. Essentially, people bring competing ideas to the discussion, they debate the whole thing, and the truth emerges.
Well, we talked about this quite a bit in the six weeks before the exam. If there was a common thread in the course, it was this marketplace of ideas.
As I was grading the exams, I kept noticing some peculiar wording to a short answer question that came up over and over, except that it was wording I didn’t use in lecture nor could it be found in the readings. For one, students connected the marketplace of ideas to “the economic concept of the free market” which we brushed on but never in those exact words. Also cited was it being a key facet of a “liberal democracy.” It wasn’t just that students had these answers, but rather that the exact words were being used over and over.
Cheating on the test? Possibly, but that wasn’t the pressing issue in my mind. More broadly, where in the world did they get this from? The “liberal democracy” one really stuck out because my guess is that few in the course could actually tell me what that really meant. That’s a grad school phrase, not an undergrad phrase.
So I thought about it. I don’t have an attendance policy, so there probably were students who didn’t have complete notes. Others might have felt like their notes were incomplete. So where would they go to pad their notes?
Ah, yes. Wikipedia.
It was the first place I went, and the entry for the marketplace of ideas did not disappoint. I plugged the aforementioned phrases into a search window and quickly found them at the top of the document.
I struggled with this one immediately, and I still do. Was it plagiarism to use Wikipedia in their answers without credit? After all, if they use ideas from the book or my lectures, no citation is required. But I’m testing them on the material we cover in class. If this were a paper for class, this would be an open-and-shut case, which is why it feels wrong to see it on a test. It would seem to me that any external material would require citation. But where would that leave studying techniques such as using analogies and such in order to illustrate and absorb material?
What I did do is mark the answers wrong, because it was using material that was not part of the answer I gave in class. I also gave them a pretty straightforward lecture that Wikipedia is more than a collection of facts, that it is a crowd-created database of ideas and that plagiarism at its core is about stealing ideas. But, I added, when you’re dealing with ideas it means interpretation, and sometimes those ideas are wrong. The marketplace of ideas concept has been debated and extended; much of that is there in the Wikipedia article, and I disagree with some of it. At the very least, it’s a pretty dumb idea to cite ideas that we haven’t covered in class on an exam. You’re being tested on the class material and are playing with fire if you stray beyond that.
I also told them from here on out that if I saw it again, they’d lose more points. And I added that many professors might consider this plagiarism.
As for me, I don’t know where I stand on the question of plagiarism. I asked around my department with some colleagues and got some varying perspectives on it. Can a student plagiarize on an exam? I still don’t know what I think. I do know this is one of those interesting things that happen due to digital media. When I was in college there was no quick way to look up a concept as complex as the marketplace of ideas (and thus more incentive to either go to class or have a great study buddy). Easy access and delivery, plus the wisdom of the crowds, gives students a way to be informed – and misinformed – much more quickly than I could as an undergrad.
All I know is next semester I’ll include a line that includes a ban on using outside material on exams. I hate to add to the “fine print” on these things, but I suppose it’s part of my evolution as a professor.
But what do you think? Was this plagiarism? Something else? Wikipedia offers me no answers on this one.
I think the solution you provide, to include a line that bans sing outside material on exams like wikipedia is good. However, do you ban all outside material? Sometimes on tests Ive been able to add something I read somewhere that helped me explain my opinion or answer the question, and it made a better answer because of that.
So, I guess there is a fine line when banning “all outside material.” It should be made clear though that the large chunk of your answer on an exam should be from lecture or reading, not some outside source. Any outside source is probably just fluff or shows a better understanding of the material, and is not the only explanation of the material and definitely not the key part of the answer (as appears to be the case with this wikipedia incident – all they knew about the marketplace of ideas was what they read on wikipedia).
Hmmm, good point there. I wonder if something more reasonable then would be to say you’re being tested on class material, but any outside material used to illustrate should be attributed. That would be more clear and allow for some of the things you mention there. I don’t mind them using real-world examples to illustrate, and in fact I find that when students do this it’s a good sign they’re thinking about the material beyond merely regurgitating it. But it just feels off to have it being used without mention.
I don’t think it’s plagiarism as much as it is students who weren’t prepared or didn’t fully understand. I remember looking up other sources to fully understand ideas, can’t say that I quoted them verbatim on an exam, I would have at least paraphrased it. So I think they’re more guilty of being lazy, which is a sign of being an undergrad. Since attendance in the class wasn’t required you can be sure there were those that didn’t show up often. I would make it anecdotal as you go over the syllabus rather than a hard-line rule.
Hey there – found your blog from a link on Twitter and was really interested in the subject you’ve brought up. I’ve been on the opposite side of this situation – as a student -, though the resource that I used was not Wikipedia. (By the way, I love the irony that your students upset you by using Wikipedia in answer to a question about the marketplace of ideas, seeing as Wikipedia is probably the purest example of a marketplace of ideas.)
I definitely don’t think this is plagiarism. Plagiarism has to be the copying of a unique idea, and phrases like liberal democracy or the free market theory are hardly unique. Anyone with a passing acquaintance with history or a few college classes under his or her belt would be familiar with both. I wonder if you underestimate your students a bit – I’m an undergrad, and I am familiar with both phrases. It sounds likely that they did get the phrases from Wikipedia, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t understand them. It would be difficult to paraphrase “liberal democracy” – I suppose you could define the term, but if I were using that phrase in an essay I would not stop to define it (unless the question specifically asked me to). I would assume that my reader would also be familiar with the term and then move on to making my point.
Also, I wonder if the behavior you’re trying to correct here is not so much students taking a phrase from Wikipedia rather than a lecture or reading, but rather skipping class and not understanding the material. If that’s the case, perhaps you should consider an attendance policy (not that I encourage those, in general) to more fairly grade that particular behavior. As to understanding the material – it doesn’t seem to me to be at all clear that anyone did misunderstand the material. All you know (or at least, all you have probable evidence for) is that a student – for whatever reason – went to Wikipedia to garner more information about a particular topic that he/she figured was likely to come up on an exam, that he/she retained some of that knowledge, and then used it on the exam. There’s no plagiarizing, no evident misunderstanding of the material, and no incorrect answers. Seems unfair to mark a student down when that’s the case, don’t you think?
Elizabeth, good thoughts, but a couple points. Your response makes a lot – and I mean a lot – of assumptions here about me, my students, and what they are required to have as GE. I’d at least ask you rethink how those assumptions are influencing your answer. Also, given your background perhaps consider that you’re assuming everyone else is as up to date (or even cares) about political science as much as you do. In research we call that making generalizations based on a small sample size. I took 9 units of poli-sci in college but had to get into my second year of my MA program before I’d heard the term. It’s not underestimating my students so much as understanding it’s a pretty technical term that they might not know even if they know the concept behind it (democracy based on individual liberty).
For example, I didn’t cite any answers and yet you seem to think there’s no evidence that their answers demonstrated a misunderstanding of the material. You don’t even know the question! So you’re assuming a lot about the quality of the answers here (e.g. “There’s no plagiarizing, no evident misunderstanding of the material, and no incorrect answers”). There actually is plenty of evidence right there on the exams. Broadly speaking, I’ll say this: The wikipedia entry sketched out the concept, but the question was about the MOI’s role in journalism. Knowing the wiki entry was not enough to demonstrate an understanding of the material we discussed in class. You had to be able to apply it, and phrases like “liberal democracy” don’t get at the question even if the definition in broad terms is technically accurate. So they lost points, not for using Wikipedia, but rather for not answering the question.
I’d disagree with your assertion that wikipedia is the purest form of the MOI, but that’s for another debate. It might be the purest example of how the MOI plays out, but it definitely doesn’t fit the theoretical descriptions its proponents often give it. Theory and practice don’t always match with this one.
Lastly, I very much disagree with your final part if you think it’s that clear-cut. I am not taking the position that it definitely is plagiarism, but I think it’s more grey than you make it out to be and that really is the crux of my post. If a student wrote a reflection paper that cited class material but brought in other ideas from Wikipedia without citation, they’d fail that thing in a second. So the question (which you don’t really address) is why exams are different. Exams are about demonstrating knowledge; so are papers. Exams ask you to absorb material, memorize, recite back facts, and analyze; so do papers. In fact, if your justification is built around the fact that they understand the material, then we’d let a lot of plagiarists go in the realm of term-paper writing.
So what’s the difference? Why would I fail a student who didn’t cite an external source in a paper but not call it plagiarism on an exam? The only reason I didn’t is because I don’t expect them to cite class notes or readings that I assign.
Mostly I’ve never thought about it before. Most of the academics I’ve talked with said they’d consider this plagiarism. While I’m not sure I agree, this does make the question significant if only because that’s the standard by which students will be judged if they are found to be doing this in other courses. At the very least, I think I’m helping them but having a discussion about it now.
I don’t think it’s plagiarism unless you specifically ask students to cite examples on the exam, and they don’t do so. (The only way I can think of making that workable is if it’s an open book exam, and they’re turning in a written document — which pretty much makes it a paper, in which plagiarism rules would apply).
Granted, I haven’t been in college or grad school for a while, but I recall in grad school using terms like “Jeffersonian democracy” and “the market revolution” without having to cite chapter and verse on who originated them. Something like “whiteness” you’d maybe want to mention David Roedinger as originating, but unless you’re talking about “The Wages of Whiteness” per se, I wouldn’t expect a citation.
It’s annoying that they’d use Wikipedia to research your class, instead of actually attending class, but I’m not sure that using Wikipedia makes their answers wrong, per se. Of course, it’s hard to evaluate unless you actually give questions & answers
!
err, David Roediger. My mistake
I guess I’m hazy also on whether that is truly plagiarism. On the one hand, the student was trying to understand a concept, and that’s a good thing. Using someone else’s words for a concept is plagiarism in my mind even if that “someone else” is a collective unknown number of people.
I think you struck a good balance with your solution. I have advised my students (I teach news writing as a Ph.D. student) that while Wikipedia isn’t a bad source because the its collectiveness helps bolster its accuracy, it’s not a source they can cite or quote in their news stories. So I guess I would hold that you can’t quote Wikipedia in a test or essay either, and, certainly, if you did, you should cite it.
Plus, as you point out, the bottom line is, the student should have defined what he or she meant by “liberal democracy” and “the economic concept of the free market.” For me, even with citation, I’m not a fan of people just throwing in truncated quotes willy-nilly when it’s clear they don’t understand what they mean.