Negotiating the Paradox: Adjuncts & Writing

• The Plagiarism Problem: One Adjunct’s Experience

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  23 Jul 2009 /  plagiarism, teaching, time management
  Last week I gave an overview of the issues involved in the plagiarism question. This week I’m going to share a personal narrative of one adjunct’s experience dealing with plagiarism.

  Like many adjuncts, I teach for more than one school. Like many adjuncts, I do so for money, which is to say, less greed than making enough to cover bills and pay my own health insurance.

  I currently teach for four schools, all online. (I can’t imagine what it would be like to teach for more than one school in the traditional classroom, what with variable commuting time and parking situations. Those of you who do have my profound sympathy.) So that I don’t get fired, let’s call these schools College A, College B, College C, and College D, and follow plagiarized papers through the processing loop.

  A student paper comes in, and before I even read it, I can tell it is plagiarized by the shift in font size and color midway through the paper. Reading it makes the plagiarism even clearer. The writing shifts quality, style, and vocabulary at the place where the font color changed. That’s plagiarism. I’m sure.

  To be certain, I run the paper through Turnitin. I get a colorful report indicating substantial plagiarism. However, it doesn’t tag some of the sections I had spotted on my own, so I copy and paste them into Google. Sure enough, they are plagiarized too. I note the URLs and insert comments into Word indicating where each plagiarized section comes from.

  But what happens next depends on the school.

  Imagine the paper is written for College A. College A’s administration takes a hard line on plagiarism. The plagiarized paper gets an F. We’re done.

  Imagine the paper is written for College B. College B sees its role as guiding students to a better understanding of the research and citation process, so students must be asked to explain the apparent similarities between their work and work found online. Even if there’s a 100% match, they must be asked and given a chance to answer. No guidance is given on what constitutes a sufficient answer beyond “use your own judgment.” No guidance is given on how long to wait for an answer. When plagiarism charges are filed, I’m asked if I’m sure, and if I really want to do this for just X % of a paper. (Different numbers have floated around. I’ve heard numbers as low as 15%, and as high as 30%.)

  All students always have reasons they cheated. (No one ever plagiarizes, even on papers that are 100% plagiarized.) This means the discussion continues for an indefinite time.

  Imagine the paper is written for College C. College C holds to a strict honor code, and reviews each code violation independently. That’s great, but that review takes weeks, and until it is done, those students get incompletes on those assignments. That too is fine, but the school requires midterm notifications regarding students who are failing, and incompletes for pending honor code violations are not to be taken into account.

  Imagine the paper is written for College D. College D says it holds to a strict honor code, and even provides its own plagiarism checker for student and faculty use. However, of all the schools, plagiarism is most common at College D. What’s more, due to combination of faulty understanding of what plagiarism is and a weak plagiarism checker, students regularly respond to accusations of plagiarism not with “But this is completely my own work” but rather “But the plagiarism checker said this was okay.”

  When I explain that a paper can receive a 0% plagiarism report and still be 100% plagiarized by using materials not in the database, students get angry. Some file complaints.

  It gets worse. College A’s plagiarism report form is simple. Neither College B or C have formal forms; I just write up the offense and send it in. College D, however, has a web form with very specific boxes to complete. If incorrectly completed, it is rejected. (I’ve had a plagiarism charge rejected because I used Word’s comments feature to note the plagiarized sections instead of the highlighting feature. I was allowed, however, to re-file the complaint. Whew! There’s another 30 minutes of time spent on the same task!)

  It gets worse. College D gives students roughly two weeks to respond to each plagiarism charge. During that time before the response, any plagiarism counts as the first charge. (I can fail students, but students aren’t punished for those offenses by the school.)

   

  Plagiarism is embarrassing at any school, and it’s freaking tedious. I hate filing paperwork instead of teaching. But functionally, what plagiarism means for me varies incredibly according to which school it happens at.

  At College A? At College A I make darn sure students know what plagiarism is and how to avoid it, since the penalties are clear. Then, when it happens, there’s a spike of pain and pity for the students, and it’s over.

  Time penalty to me of student plagiarism? 5 minutes.

  At College B? At College B, a plagiarized paper plunges me into a morass of despair. Why do I have to ask these going through the motions questions? Why encourage lying? (When truth telling is penalized, lying is markedly more likely.)

  Time penalty to me? Unknown and unknowable, but usually about an hour per plagiarized paper.

  At College C? At College C, dealing with the plagiarism is straightforward on my end, but I feel dishonest. I can’t tell students who plagiarize they’re doing badly in the class because the report’s not back? Why?

  Time penalty? About 10 minutes to write things up and explain the incomplete.

  At College D? At College D, the mass of despair becomes some putrid abyss. I resent College B’s approach for the squishy dishonesty, but at this point in the process, I loath College D’s approach.

  Time penalty? Unknown and unknowable, but it starts at an hour per plagiarized paper and may go to several and drag out over weeks or months, depending on student complaints.

  For me, then, what plagiarism means depends on where it happens. And tracking these different approaches means juggling standards, and remembering what the rules and processes are where. And that means plagiarism determines how much time and mental energy I have left for my own writing.

  Tags: grading, Greg Beatty, plagiarism, Turnitin.com

• The Plagiarism Question

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  16 Jul 2009 /  plagiarism, teaching
  Ah, yes, time to touch on another painful topic: plagiarism. Just as mentioning tenure produces a stream of bile and frustration over one end of a broken system, so does mentioning plagiarism.

  Plagiarism is rampant, not just in higher education. In “Justice or Just Us? What to Do About Cheating” (collected in Guiding Students from Cheating and Plagiarism to Honesty and Integrity , which will be reviewed here), Jason M. Stephens indicates that roughly “two thirds of students cheat on tests and 90 percent cheat on homework” (2005, p. 33). If this many high school students cheat on their work in high school, how could anyone expect them to suddenly not cheat in college?

  While swapping test answers and snapping cell phone photos of exams to share with friends are threats possible for all subjects and modes of assignments, plagiarizing papers offers particular threats, and particular threats to adjuncts. Plagiarism is also harder for adjuncts to prevent and deal with.

  The threat of plagiarism is, I trust, fairly obvious. Many students don’t understand plagiarism well. They’re not particularly clear on why /how outside sources need to be cited, and how citing sources makes research legitimate when not citing it doesn’t. However, those challenges have skyrocketed since the advent of the Internet and the ease of copy and paste. In ye olden days, at least students might accidentally paraphrase an assignment when they retyped the encyclopedia entry. Now a control-A/ control-C/ control-V sequence means they’ve copied the whole document and pasted it into their papers.

  If that weren’t enough, bloggers snip from or link to one another’s blogs all the time, building habits that could lead to plagiarism. Then there are sites like Best Essays, who help students convince themselves that buying “custom written” and submitting them as your own isn’t plagiarism. Hey, it can’t be: it’s right there at the top of the website. (And if you want to know who writes these papers, and how term papers play into a flawed system, I recommend Nick Mamatas’s “The Term Paper Artist.” )

  But if plagiarism is so prevalent, it might not be as evident why or how it is more challenging for adjuncts. Start with prevention. One of the best ways to prevent plagiarism is to produce an academic culture which shares an ethos of honesty, and which applies consistent standards throughout the program. Let me state the obvious: this is much harder to do with adjuncts. Some of this comes from the essential nature of the employment. It is harder to integrate short term workers into institutional culture. Some of comes from current nature of adjunct employment. It is harder to take the time to even learn your institution’s culture if you’re racing from school to school. Let me try that again, more bluntly: you can’t be an integrated part of a culture if you’re a disposable part of four cultures.

  Another best practice for preventing plagiarism is building an emotional connection with students. If they can see you care about them, and they care about you, they will want to disappoint you less. (For a time I attended a school where an older Catholic monk taught. He radiated love—and no one wanted to disappoint him.) Is this possible for adjuncts? Yes, but less so. Racing off to the next school, etc., means less time for students as people.

  Other best practices for preventing plagiarism are changing assignments frequently, making them highly specific, and assigning papers to be graded in stages, so you can confirm that students are doing their own work. However, the more often you change assignments, and the more stages you assign, the less automated the grading process, and the more time and energy grading takes.

  Turning to catching plagiarists, I’ve been doing an informal survey for years among adjunct faculty. Many do punish students for plagiarism, but a substantial number don’t. When I ask them why, the answers always come down to time and money. As one adjunct put it, “They don’t pay me enough to fill out all those forms.”

  I’ve taught for schools where the institutional paperwork required to file a plagiarism charge took half an hour to complete per student. The week I had six plagiarists from that school my heart sank. That’s three hours of unpaid labor to uphold ethical standards…and risk low student evaluations for doing so. I’ve had other adjuncts tell me that if their teaching evaluations were too low, they wouldn’t be rehired…and that students who were caught plagiarizing always gave low teaching evaluations.

  Adjuncts who are willing to spend the time to catch plagiarists might want to use one of the various paid anti-plagiarism services, like Turnitin.com. However, as Kenneth H. Ryesky argued in “Part Time Soldiers,” “The working conditions of adjunct faculty members impact their ability and inclination to join the battle against student plagiarism” because some schools will not fund adjunct use of such software. If you want to use it at those schools, you pay for your own access. Ryesky also notes that because the institutional processes dealing with plagiarism may take a long time, students may escape punishment because adjuncts are no longer at the school the following session to pursue the matter.

  I could go on, but the conclusions are clear. If colleges want to prevent plagiarized papers and promote ethical behavior among student writers, they’d use fewer adjuncts and/or pay and treat them better.

  Tags: cheating, Greg Beatty, Jason M. Stephens, Kenneth H. Ryesky, Nick Mamatas, plagiarism, Turnitin.com

• Opening the Tenure Discussion = Opening a Wound?

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  09 Jul 2009 /  adjuncts, publishing, tenure
  I’ve avoided opening the discussion about how adjuncts can earn tenure because opening the tenure discussion often seems like opening a wound that never heals. It is actually easier to ask adjunct faculty members about what they earn and get straight answers than it is to open the discussion of who gets tenure and why without having it dissolve into bitter commentary, even flame wars. (To get a taste of these, visit The Chronicle’s forums on tenure track topics.) Nevertheless, since institutions depend so heavily on academic publications when making decisions for hiring and tenure, the discussion has to be opened and returned to. This week, I’m not going to be able to do much more than open the discussion, frame the issue, and sketch out some of the key talking points.

  Start, then, with the premise and the issue: traditionally, academic publications have been the coin of the realm in academia. To obtain a tenure-track position, one must publish. Primarily, one must publish in accepted scholarly journals of appropriate prestige and focus for your school and discipline. To facilitate those acts of scholarship, tenured faculty at research institutions receive time off from teaching, travel funds, etc.

  The tenure process at schools emphasizing teaching is different; teaching and community service receive considerable weight for tenure decisions. However— and here’s the issue— the academic labor market has shifted. Increasingly, positions are filled by adjuncts who are paid far less than tenure-track faculty. Most adjuncts are not eligible for course release or institutional fellowships, and so have less time for scholarship. Those who would prefer to teach at a small liberal arts school and focus on teaching find such positions tougher to land. A shift in academic hiring processes means that even these schools use adjuncts more frequently, and a crowded labor market means more applicants for those few positions. Academic writing becomes valued more highly at those schools as well, even if it is just as a way to sort the initial applicants.

  Adjuncts who want to become tenured faculty members therefore find themselves square in the middle of several dilemmas. They have less time to write than tenure-track faculty, but must compete with them for shrinking resources. They get less money for research, but…see above. A third dilemma external to academia is that publishing in general is mutating ferociously, even, to borrow a term from Calvin and Hobbes, transmogrifying.

  Add to that several factors. First, outdated attitudes about academics persist. For example, when I mentioned a concern about the job market to one of my graduate school advisors, she waved a hand and said, “Cream will rise.” Perhaps—if it doesn’t spoil due to improper handling. (A useful webpage on obtaining tenure contains a cartoon summing up common attitudes towards the distinction made between tenured and non-tenured. It’s nice because of the “The Lady or the Tiger” blindness with which academic choices must be made.) Another of these persistent attitudes, one that’s less insulting but perhaps as dangerous, is treating the tenure track as a pipeline. As the metaphor suggests, content (faculty) enter at one end (when hired) and leave from the other end (when tenured). Those who leave the pipeline disrupt the system. As “Dispelling the Pipeline Myth,” by Wolfinger, Mason, and Goulden shows, women are more likely to leave the pipeline due to having or caring for children, and so the system is gender-biased.

  Second, many schools won’t hire their adjuncts to the tenure-track. Third, what counts for tenure, and what is considered enough to earn tenure, varies from department to department, discipline to discipline, and school to school. When these factors are combined, the issue becomes complex indeed. I assume that people will be staying in the same disciplines as they attempt to move from adjunct to tenured faculty, but since they won’t be staying the same school or department, that means essentially trying to guess at standards from a distance. Yes, all applicants have to do this initially, but given the fractured attention of the adjunct, it seems markedly harder. How can you track the institutional culture at a new school for the signs that it’s the right place to seek tenure when you’re trying to track cultures at three schools already to see if you’ll be able to pay rent next month?

  I suspect that our contextual pressures puts all sorts of pressures on adjuncts as writers. For example, I suspect we write shorter pieces rather than longer, and pursue short-term research rather than long-term, precisely because of the organizational challenges involved and simply not knowing if we’ll be in the same place next semester or not. However, those are areas that can be followed up on through research. For now, I want to close by pointing readers to a few online conversations about who get tenure (found here, here, and here), and then to some tools for those seeking tenure.

  Getting Tenure collects a number of useful tools for those seeking tenure (and it’s nice to see this coming out of Geoscience.)

  This page collects a number of documents offering advice.

  Adventures in Ethics and Science shares thoughts on (and pictures of) a tenure dossier.

  And we’ll definitely return to this painful point in the future.

  Tags: Greg Beatty, publishing, tenure

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