This version fixes a long-standing bug that caused WCopyfind 4.1.0 to crash while reading certain .DOCX and .HTML files. I finally found the bug and eliminated it.

Lou

1. Smart quotes in .doc files should now be handled properly.
2. The number of matching document pairs is now listed at the end of the comparison report.
3. If no matching document pairs were found, the comparison report indicates that it found no matches.
4. Several memory allocation/deallocation problems were found and fixed.

Also, WCopyfind generates a log file in the report folder. If WCopyfind crashes during use, please send me a copy of that log file and I will try to find the bug.

Lou

The key components of this web site are all still here:

1. WCopyfind — a program to find duplications of language between documents
2. My thoughts on issues relating to plagiarism, scholarship, and society
3. Links to other web sites that concern themselves with plagiarism.

As part of this update, I have largely rewritten WCopyfind (3.0) so that it handles two important modern document formats: .docx and .pdf. It also handles .html and .txt files better than it did before. And it still handles .doc files imperfectly and it will do what it can to find text in just about any file you feed it.

All the best,

Lou

Unfortunately, the timeless nature of writing isn’t shared by its fraudulent imitation: plagiarism. Though nearly as ancient as writing itself, plagiarism adapts quickly to new technology. With a web full of seemingly ownerless prose, plagiarism is as easy as cut-and-paste. And if you don’t see exactly what you want for free, you can buy it online at any number of “paper mills.”

But a more insidious way in which technology has fostered plagiarism is by shifting our attention from content to appearance. A well-written student paper is no longer “A” work unless it’s printed in color on glossy paper, with fonts and images and an accompanying multimedia presentation. Students feel expected to turn in the best papers ever written, not the best papers they can write themselves. So they assemble those papers. With hours invested in the decorations, students feel justified in stealing some or all of the text. After all, they “couldn’t have said it any better” themselves.

In addition to its easy rationalization by people seeking the rewards of writing without the associated effort, plagiarism is also widely misunderstood. It isn’t limited to the theft of another person’s words; it also includes the theft of their ideas. More generally, plagiarism is any form of dishonesty about authorship. A reader or listener should always know whose thoughts they’re hearing.

Plagiarism isn’t a victimless crime. It deprives its readers of their time and trust, and its true authors of their good names. In academia, plagiarism inflates grades relative to education and devalues honest scholarship. Among authors and journalists, plagiarism cheapens the very art of writing, much as performance enhancing drugs cheapen so many sports. Plagiarism is as much a problem of morale as it is of ethics.

Prosecuting plagiarists is a miserable undertaking. It brings joy to no one, as I know from sad experience at the University of Virginia. After uncovered extensive plagiarism in my large introductory physics class in 2001, I spent two years dealing with endless honor cases. But I view that episode as an anti-scandal—as an enlightened community taking action against a misbehaving few in order to maintain its own intellectual integrity. Eliminating plagiarism isn’t about the plagiarists; it’s about supporting the honest people by giving them a fair environment.

Plagiarism isn’t an obscure tweed-collar crime. It’s a sorry fact of life everywhere and any school or organization that feels untainted is probably in denial. With plagiarism so commonplace, an organization that deals openly with it deserves our support, not our condemnation. There is no scandal in cleaning house. The scandal is in tolerating or covering up plagiarism.

Unfortunately, plagiarism is openly tolerated in the most public sectors of modern life. It wasn’t always that way. Lincoln didn’t just perform his Gettysburg address; he actually wrote it. What happened to that tradition of intellectual honesty in public speech? With ghostwriting so ubiquitous among the rich and powerful, it’s no wonder that young people see little value in learning to write well. They view writing the way they view cleaning their rooms—an unpleasant chore they’ll do only until they can afford to hire someone else.

When students believe that writing assignments are merely hazing rituals, hurdles on the path to success in life, some will inevitably plagiarize. And when instructors assign writing that has no clear educational goals, how can the students value it? Having explicitly stated goals is both good discipline and a way to avoid misunderstandings. If students believe an assignment is “busy work,” some will be busy cheating.

Finally, students need to be taught that the act of writing is intrinsically valuable to them. It crystallizes one’s thoughts in a way that nothing else can. As a physicist, I find that I often learn more from writing papers and proposals than I do from working in the laboratory. I rarely find writing easy, but I always find it rewarding.

If the rewards and consequences of student behavior aren’t aligned with the instructor’s academic goals, there will almost certainly be some amount of academic misconduct. But even when the alignment is good, it’s important that the students understand the goals underlying the assignments. I have taken to putting explicit goals on each of my assignments, so that there should be no misunderstanding about why I want the students to do what I have asked them to do. It the very least, it is good self-discipline for me and ensures that I’m not just assigning busy work. Nothing attracts misconduct like busy work or work that is perceived as busy work by the students. In the act of stating explicit goals for an assignment, an instructor must reconcile the assigned work with the goals and will tend to eliminate work that has little educational value. In the act of hearing or reading why they are being asked to complete an assignment, the students must overlay their default goal (i.e., getting high grades) with the stated goals. Hopefully, this communication of purpose will help to keep everyone on the same page.

One reason why conveying the instructor’s goals to the students is important is that their default goal, obtaining the highest possible grades, is usually associated with turning in the best possible finished work. For most students, the best possible finished work would be the work of someone else. Students who assemble their papers out of other people’s words often do so because they can’t improve on those words. The claim that “I couldn’t write it any better myself, so I just put it in my paper” is not only a common excuse, it is a compelling rationalization on the part of many students. They convince themselves that cutting and pasting in that fashion is OK because they assume that the instructor actually wants the best paper ever written on the topic. Therefore, I state as part of my term paper assignment that I don’t want the best paper ever written on the topic; I want the best paper that the student himself can write in his own words.

Instead, I think that instructors give inflated grades to buy peace. The higher the grades an instructor assigns, the less students will complain to the instructor and the easier the instructor’s life will be as a result. Across each campus and society in general, grading is an arms race and no instructor wants to stand out as giving the lowest grades. Apart from a few curmudgeons who relish being hardnoses and intimidate their students, the harsh graders will end up enduring lots of student complaints about lower-than-expected grades.

Instructors have every incentive to give their students artificially high grades. They get peace and they may even get some measure of vacuous popularity. The same goes for departments and even for entire schools. Since giving a B or C risks conflict and discord, why give anything less than an A? In a world where normative data are secret, there is simply no direct cost to giving high grades; it’s a free lunch! Of course, there is a small indirect cost to inflating grades. When everyone gets A-range grades, there is no dynamic range left and all classes become essentially pass-fail: an A is passing and every other grade is failure.

There is a simple way to stop this arms race: publish normative data. In other words, let the whole world know the average grade in every class, every department, and every school. Apart from having to meet FERPA requirements (student privacy), this disclosure would eliminate most incentives for giving steadily higher grades. An instructor would no longer be able to buy peace with inflated grades. Suddenly instructors would be able to use the whole range of grades again to truly distinguish the excellent from the middling from the mediocre. If it were widely known that the average grade in a particular class was a C, a student could once again be proud of getting a B. And if an instructor really felt that all of the students in a class deserved A grades, let that instructor defend that belief as part of the normative data.

In any case, no one should ever take a student’s grades too seriously. I’ve learned from long experience just how hard it is to assign meaningful grades, even though I teach a physical science with relatively little room for subjectivity. Students are so different how they think and learn that it’s hard to use a one-dimensional measure to represent a multi-dimensional educational process. Personally, I need a broad dynamic range just to limit the effects of measurement errors. For twenty years, I’ve kept my average grade at a B and made good use of the whole spectrum from A+ down to F. Because of how challenging it is to measure student performance meaningfully, I can’t claim that there is any significant distinction between students whose grades differ by a minor step (e.g., between a B+ and an A-). I think, however, that there is a real distinction between those whose grades differ by major grade steps (e.g., between a B and an A).

Finally, I hope that everyone who encounters my former students will look beyond grades to see for themselves what those students have learned and what they now know. Education isn’t meant to be a hazing or weeding out ritual; it should teach something. Student should emerge from school with something wonderful between their ears and it should show. If it doesn’t, what have we been doing?

As much as I love learning myself, I recognize that there are people who do not share that love and whose lives will not be improved by passing through an educational system they neither value nor respect. Many of these people will go on to lives that make no use of what they would or would not have learned in college, so making them attend college just for appearances is a waste of time and resources. It will only serve to reinforce their beliefs that education is merely part of the game they have to play to succeed in life. Instead of polishing their resumes at the cost of their integrity, they would do better to skip college and learn instead to be honest and decent human beings.