I have recently queried colleagues at the American Library Association and academic librarians at two universities with this question: is there any evidence or data that suggests that there is more academic plagiarism now than there was, say, 15, 40, or 110 years ago?
Anecdotally, of course, plagiarism is one of the guaranteed fear inducers of contemporary academic culture. Due in large part to corporations such as turnitin.com—whose marketing-and-rhetorical strategy seems to be that they can both diagnose the disease and provide the cure—the culture of fear, anxiety, and mistrust toward students is palpable.
At any rate, I have been unable to locate data or evidence that suggests there is more academic plagiarism currently than there was, say, 15, 40, or 110 years ago. If you know of any, could you send me a citation? mmoore46@depaul.edu.
Thanks!
Update:
An excellent source, with data — Student dishonesty and its control in college. William Bowers 1964 Columbia University, Bureau of Applied Social Research. New York, NY.
An excellent followup to Bowers: Donald L. McCabe and Linda Klebe Trevino: “Faculty responses to academic dishonesty: The influence of student honor codes.” Research in Higher Education (1993) Volume: 34, Issue: 5, Pages: 647-658.
And from generous posters in response to my query on a Chronicle of Higher Education article
- “parneet“: “I’d suggest looking up Dan Ariely at http://danariely.com“
- Keith Williams: “I haven’t yet seen surveys focused specifically on online courses. I’m sure they are coming” and links to — “My journalism students conducted a survey on cheating last week and 65.8% of our high school students admitted to cheating before. Only 20.6% reported they hadn’t and 13.6% didn’t respond to the question.” http://edtechvision.org/?p=137
- “Eighty-four percent of students at a public research university believe students who cheat should be punished, yet two of every three admit to having cheated themselves.” http://www.insidehighered.com/…