German Joys alerts us to this highly interesting dialogue between a New York college professor (“T” for teacher) and a man who ghost-writes student essays for money (“C” for cheater). In the course of their conversation, T and C discuss the incentives for plagiarism in higher education:
C: Now, I’m not saying there’s no virtue in forcing people to take classes in things they aren’t interested in. But plagiarism is going to happen in a society in which you are told, “This is something you need to do in order to have the life you want, and in order to have the life you want there are things you must do that you don’t want to do, and may even be incapable of doing. Now, we don’t really care where you went to high school, and we can’t speak to the quality of your English professors. So, here, write a paper about philosophy. And if you cheat, we will fucking expel you.” But if you don’t cheat, you’ll get a D, which is as good as being expelled. And that’s a rock and a hard place.
T: I was discussing this very issue with a representative of my department, and that is indeed the case. In a rational choice model, it’s actually, in certain cases, if you get at all behind with your work—all of them have jobs, many of them have children, some of them are not native English speakers, so they’re already at a disadvantage relative to the course that’s being taught to them—and the course that’s being taught to them can’t be “dumbed down to their level” because then the degree becomes meaningless anyway… The rational choice model encourages cheating.
I think “C” is raising an important point here, one that has not been emphasised enough in the past and that certainly did not receive enough attention in the coverage of recent German plagiarism scandals. In a previous post, I have used the term Titlemania to describe Germany’s insane obsession with academic titles. For irrational reasons, the German professional world craves for job candidates with the letters D and R in front of their names, thus incentivising people to pursue doctoral degrees even if they have zero intention to work in academia afterwards. This, obviously, leads to universities being swamped with often mediocre dissertations, and to their staff having to waste their time with research attempts whose printed results are destined to end up in some library’s basement never to be consulted again. Now, “C” establishes a convincing link between a professional culture that values pretention (“you have to do/ to have X in order to get the job you want/ be successful/ become rich”) and plagiarism by noting that the degree of pretention and the frequency of cheating are likely to be positively correlated. A first step to remedy this problem could be for universities not to admit students to degree programs in whose contents they are not interested. Obviously, this would require a careful selection process, but the increase in quality of produced dissertations will eventually reflect the benefits of selection.
Comments