by:
  Michael Donnelly,
  Rebecca Ingalls,
  Tracy Ann Morse,
  Joanna Castner, and
  Anne Meade
  Stockdell-Giesler

  A Lack of Ethics

Higher education is increasingly seen as a commodity, an insurance policy of sorts. Students attend college not to gain intellectual enlightenment, but to ensure their future material success. As David Callahan notes in The Cheating Culture, the competition for material wealth is fierce and models of ethica l- and financially successful - citizens are scarce (2004). A. J. Sherman speaks of "the larger society with its yawning chasm between winners and losers" (p. 88) and the resultant erosion of:

our notions of an academic community . . . a place in which faculty and students are animated by the same search for knowledge, bound together by commonly accepted rules, obligations, and even a shared understanding about appropriate forms of discourse and standards of evidence and reasoned argument (p. 89).

Students will therefore take risks to outperform their peers when they believe their futures in the "real world" are at stake, especially in classes like first-year writing, which students routinely see as without value in the long term. The consequences of detection are outweighed by the risks since the course neither counts toward the major nor will the professor be likely to be writing any recommendations in the future, especially if that professor is a part-timer or teaching a first-year course outside the student's major.

But when we rely on products such as Turnitin's plagiarism prevention software, we run the risk of perpetuating the commoditization of education and we draw attention away from the ideals of integrity, ethics, and knowledge for the sake of themselves.

And herein lies the dilemma: while I acknowledge that plagiarism is rampant, I reject the use of plagiarism-detection software for that purpose alone; and yet I must also acknowledge that, based on the statistics (see Tracy Ann Morse's section below), I have surely encountered, and passed, plagiarized work unknowingly. However, I fear that all too often educational technology markets itself as a cure-all for what ails the busy instructor - and increasingly, that instructor may well be an itinerant adjunct with several employers and no real support other than meager stipends. Thus, the allure of such time-saving software is clear and the pressure to adhere to institutional policy is heavy (while the opportunity to instill or negotiate that policy does not exist). Just as students must learn that the word processor can't fix our spelling or our grammar, university administrators must understand that the computer cannot think for the professor.

Instead of seeking quick high-tech solutions to increasing demands on our time, we should consider the Gallup poll's revelation that Americans see that the biggest problems facing us today are education and a lack of ethics. Perhaps if we put those two together we will see that we have the answer. We must not view higher education as a meal ticket to a corporate corner office. We must not perpetuate the notion that college is a necessary "hoop" students must jump through to gain access to the more lucrative professions. In fact, we must try to destabilize as much as possible the consumerist part of our culture that greedily pushes aside integrity in exchange for material acquisition.

• Introduction: A Writing Program Director's Dilemma
• Flying, Finally
• The Role of the WPA
• The Problems with PDS
• May the Conversation Continue...
• Dissimulation in the Writing Classroom
• The Devaluing of Growth?
• A Lack of Ethics
• An Ethos of Academic Integrity
• Students Consenting to Turnitin.com: What Are We Asking When We Ask Them to Sign Away Their Work?
• The Concept of Intellectual Property
• Roots of Consent
• Why "Consent" May Not Be Sufficient
• Turnitin.com: A Teaching Tool
• Responsibility for Writing
• A Focus on Revision
• Turnitin: Oversimplified Answer to a Complex Problem
• Skill and Creativity
• Self-Fulfilling Prophesies
• A Stimulus to Creativity
• Engagement and Success
• Conclusion
• References
• print version