NYTimes OP ED

September 9, 2003

By MARK EDMUNDSON

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va.

"Academic cheating is a major problem and has negative

results on everyone involved."

So goes the first sentence of a recently composed essay on

cheating in academia. To get the whole essay, though,

you'll need to pay for a membership at DirectEssays.com, an

Internet operation that promises access to "over 101,000

high-quality term papers and essays." For $19.95 a month,

you can see the anticheating tract in toto, and a lot more

besides. DirectEssays is one of several Internet operations

selling term papers that students hand in as their own

work, and business is booming.

Cheating, especially Internet cheating, is becoming more

and more the way of the academic world. A recent study

found that 38 percent of the students polled had committed

"cut and paste" plagiarism - that is, copying sentences or

even several paragraphs from the Internet and implanting

them in their own work. Forty percent of respondents

admitted to copying without attribution from written

sources - books, journals and the like - in the past year.

The study, which involved more than 18,000 students at

colleges and universities of virtually every sort, gave

evidence of a worrisome trend: in the last such survey,

taken three years ago, only 10 percent of students admitted

to cheating. As the new study's organizer, Donald L. McCabe

of Rutgers University, put it: "There are a lot of students

who are growing up with the Internet who are convinced that

anything you find on the Internet is public knowledge and

doesn't need to be cited."

No one likes academic cheating - apparently not even the

writer who was willing to sell his anti-cheating piece to

DirectEssays.com. The question is what to do about it. Many

professors, seeing the problem as integrally related to the

Internet, have looked for technological solutions. A

science professor at my university caught 45 cheating

students with what must have been a brilliant computer

program. Other professors use Web sites like turnitin.com,

which has programs to help detect student plagiarism.

Still, I think professors need to stop looking exclusively

for technological solutions to a problem that often stems,

in consequential ways, from the way we do our jobs. Perhaps

the current boom in electronic cheating can give professors

- especially in the humanities, as the sciences are often

bound to traditional test-giving and test-taking - a chance

to pause and think and ultimately to teach in a better way.

I'm not just talking about refusing to give the same exams

year after year, though that would surely help. (When

students call a course a "gut," often what they mean is

that the exams haven't changed in a decade, that all the

fraternities have them on file and that they're to be had

for the asking.) The rise of plagiarism should also get us

to reflect on what we are setting out to do in the first

place.

A good deal of what humanities professors now ask for from

students is analysis. In literary studies, professors are

prone to require close reading of major works. We cultivate

attentiveness to written words; careful consideration;

coaxing forth disparate meanings. We try to make students

responsive to the complexities of literary sense. And this

emphasis on attentiveness to words is now practiced not

only in the English departments, but also in philosophy and

religious studies and history.

We teach other scholarly disciplines as well: awareness of

historical context, the relation of the work at hand to

current theories. But most of all, I think, we teach

reading. The ultimate goal, one might say, is to help them

become more like what Henry James says every consequential

writer should be: someone on whom nothing is lost.

This is a fine thing. But it is not nearly enough. In

teaching only reading and the scholarly arts, humanities

professors do just half of their jobs. It's not enough to

ask for a careful description of erotic imagery in

"Romeo and Juliet" or of the version of nature that

Wordsworth develops in "Tintern Abbey." We need to go

further and ask if those works provide usable truths for

ourselves and our students.

Should we consider endorsing a religion of nature, as

Wordsworth did? Should we be willing to live out his faith

in the current world? These are not at all empty questions,

I think, when many take ecological issues to be among the

most consequential for the world at large. Is Shakespeare's

Juliet a confused and starry-eyed girl, lost in love, or a

figure of enhanced freedom, somehow vital and generous

despite coming of age in the brutish world of Capulets and

Montagues? Is she worthy of admiration and, maybe,

emulation?

I have been lucky enough to have teachers who were willing

to pose such questions (after offering rigorous analysis)

and it made a vast difference in my education. It was a

turning point in my life when a high school teacher looked

up from his copy of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and

asked whether the protocols of the mental hospital, as Ken

Kesey depicted them, might have had more than a little in

common with the grinding protocols of our own high school.

At that moment it became liberatingly clear to me that

books have a capacity to criticize and challenge life as it

is, and often to gesture toward something better.

But humanities teachers today are not likely to pose

questions about the bearing of books on immediate

experience. They prefer to operate at a safe and scholarly

distance from the works. The question of what actual human

value a work might have to the students sitting in the room

rarely arises. Condescending analysis is the order of the

day.

There are many reasons that professors are uneasy talking

of personal transformation, but a big one is the overall

shift among universities to making the object of a liberal

arts education not so much the development of the

individual's inner life as it is the acquisition of skills.

More and more we try to give our "customers" what they seem

to want: marketable knowledge, powers that will hold them

in good stead in the work force. Analytic powers are

economically negotiable in ways that self-knowledge can't

always be.

Unfortunately, there is nothing easier or more tempting to

plagiarize than assignments that are exclusively detached

and analytical. I'm sure that there are plenty of essays to

be had over the Internet on Wordsworthian nature and

Shakespearean eros. But you cannot buy your own opinion

from someone else. If professors asked students not only

for analysis, but also for personal reasoned responses,

they would, I trust, get fewer purloined papers. Students

would be more inclined to believe that the work had to be

theirs - and that what they had to say actually mattered.

I'm not naive enough to think that more personal and

immediate teaching would put DirectEssays.com out of

business. But it would make a difference, I'm sure.

Speaking of his exchange with his pupils, Socrates, the

founder of humanistic education, once observed: "What we're

engaged in here isn't a chance conversation but a dialogue

about the way we ought to live our lives." The closer we

professors come to following Socrates, the less cheating

we're likely to see.

Mark Edmundson, professor of English at the University of

Virginia, is author of "Teacher: The One Who Made the

Difference."