Abstracts - Earli

G 430 August 2007 08:30 - 10:30Room: -1.63SymposiumThere is no such thing as cheating and plagiarism: Only how wedefine itChair: Hakan Hult, Linköping University, SwedenOrganiser: Torgny Ottosson, Kristianstad University, SwedenDiscussant: Per Lauvas, Ostfold University College, NorwayThis symposium contributes to discussions of how cheating and student plagiarism is construed.Both are often portrayed as threatening academic quality and as evidence of students’ disregard forvalues. Graduating plagiarists or cheaters might lack skills to function effectively, becomeplagiarising researchers and otherwise threaten knowledge. We use the symposium to argue foralternative perspectives. Evidence suggests 90% of students plagiarise at least occasionally andmany cheat. Re-using others’ text is arguably a natural and predictable expression ofintertextuality; it cannot always be unethical since even expert paraphrasers often leave substantialreproductions of the original text in their ‘new version’. Academic culture is generally regarded asstable yet it has shifted over 300 years from regarding copying as the preferred way to demonstratelearning to instead, valuing unique and individualised work. Conventions for attribution,footnoting and paraphrasing have also evolved. Given this context, we ask if plagiarism mightmore appropriately be viewed as a failure of the Academy to teach students the required writingskills and cheating as students’ attempts to navigate unknown systems. Either might result fromteachers’ failures to find appropriate ways to assess learning and/or encourage and supportacademic integrity. We argue for more nuanced ways of labelling practices that range from theunethical (e.g., buying papers from so-called ‘paper mills’) to the seemingly trivial (e.g., citingwithout exact use of attribution) other than moral panic. Papers presented deal with issues ofmedia influence on discourse; academic culture and writing; and the use of software for writingreports, for plagiarism detection and deterrence. The ultimate questions are whether currentconcepts of cheating and plagiarism reflect the real world and whether, in their currentmanifestation, the concepts can inhibit students’ learning.Reclaiming the issue of student plagiarism: The impact of external agents and agencies onuniversities’ management of student plagiarismJude Carroll, Oxford Brookes University, United KingdomWriters about student plagiarism commonly begin their paper or article by mentioning the highlevel of interest which the topic seems to attract. This paper addresses the nature of that comment.More importantly, it considers the impact which those outside the academy (for example,journalists, politicians and social commentators) have had on decisions and procedures adoptedwithin it for dealing with student plagiarism. Plagiarism is a pedagogic issue yet can so easily bebound up with unhelpful assumptions about students’ morals, the integrity of awards, and even thefrequency of cases. The paper uses discourse analysis and longitudinal case studies to inspect arange of recent articles and pronouncements from several countries including the UK, Australia,New Zealand and Sweden. It identifies and documents the impact that journalistic practices,certain kinds of language and individual campaigns have had on academic decisions and– 370 –