Response to Malesic: How Dumb Do They Think We Are

Adin Doyle

Jonathon Malesic approaches plagiarism from a more personal point of view. When he first started encountering it, he felt that the students were insulting his intelligence, because of how easy it was to spot what had been plagiarized and what was original. However, he came to find that many of his papers contained minimal plagiarism to some extent, with some students being more clever about where they hid their unoriginality and some being more blatant about it.

            Malesic then begs the obvious question: why do students plagiarize? With all the different kinds of plagiarism, many of it being unintentional, he determines that the ones who are more obvious about it simply do not care about learning the material, and simply want the grade that they thought they could get away with.

            I imagine that plagiarism was easier to get away with before the internet. As long as one didn’t use any books that the professor would be reading any time soon, one could have a much higher chance of getting away with it. With the coming of the internet comes tools such as Turnitin, which Susan Blum explains is a search engine used to test the legitimacy of students’ writing.

Perhaps the reason we see such inflation in student plagiarism is partially that it is now more difficult to get away with it. Another side to the internet factor is that perhaps some students do not think that some professors (more likely the older professors) properly know how to use and manipulate the internet in the way that they do, and therefore will not get caught. This could be one of the ways in which Malesic believes students, especially the smart ones who are capable of reading properly and composing well written essays, are insulting his intelligence by simply caring about the grade instead of the learning process.