These days it’s Wikipedia or stealthisessay.com. When I was in junior high, eons ago, it was World Book Encyclopedia. We learn this skill early, and it’s time we
learned how valuable it is. Plagiarism
can serve us well throughout college and life, regardless of the career we
choose.
The word “plagiarism” has been
around in English since 1621, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The idea that stealing someone else’s
creation is wrong is that old in English history. Its etymology goes back to late Latin, also
according to the OED, when it meant
“kidnapping,” certainly the worst kind of creation-snatching. So the concept is as old as the hills, to use
a saying whose origin I don’t want to look up but which Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable says means “very old
indeed” and which the OED tells me is
found first in 1898 in a source called Tit-Bits. Plagiarism has been bugging us for nearly
five hundred years.
It’s high time
that we ditched this silly attachment to an out-moded principle that only slows
us down and gets in the way of our enjoying life. Plagiarism brings huge advantages to both
teachers and students alike. It’s time
we recognized these and quit worrying about “giving credit where credit is due,”
a phrase which not even the internet gives a clue to the first use of. I mean, just think how much time you could
have saved if I hadn’t bother to credit all these sources here or distract you with
all these silly footnotes.
Teachers should be the first to hop
on this bandwagon. Plagiarism makes the teacher’s work so much easier! As soon as those smoothly flowing phrases
emerge in the student’s paper and the plagiarism light starts blinking in the
teacher’s mind, with a click or two on the internet, the teacher’s work is
done. No need to waste time reading the
work and belaboring the content, style, and mechanics. Just fling that zero on it, and move on to
the next. What a time-saver! The more students who rely on plagiarism, the
smaller the workload becomes.
As plagiarism gets more widely accepted, a
new grading system will have to be devised.
Instead of giving zeroes, the teacher can begin awarding high grades to
those who find the best work on the topic and the highest grades to those who
find work that best fits the student’s personality and skill and thus is
hardest to detect. Let’s encourage the skills that will help our students the most. Skillful use of plagiarism is surely
going to lead to the greatest success in life.
Of course, there is a danger here for the
teacher, suggested by the word “detect.” Teachers are curious by nature, and detection
of plagiarism can become a pastime of its own, a cat-and-mouse game. The teacher needs to realize that hours can
get frittered away in uncovering every source that the amateur plagiarist has
used. While these hours can be fun—the
piling up of those “Aha!” moments that are so rewarding—the teacher needs to be
wary of addiction to the discovery process.
There may be other pastimes that the teacher would enjoy more—china
painting or rugby, perhaps—or other family members that they maybe should be
spending some time with. The wise
teacher will not become addicted to the discovery of plagiarism. The wise teacher, in fact, may be able to
make even better use of this skill.
There may be a career in law enforcement, private-eye work, or even the
writing of detective fiction; vocational options abound for the astute teacher
who is tired of record keeping, faculty meetings, and cell phones in class.
In the mean time, before that new career can
be realized, there is a further advantage for the teacher. If all work is well plagiarized, the teacher
need not be bothered by developing any sort of relationship with the student. Since
the student’s own personality, interests, and needs can be totally concealed in
the plagiarized work, there is no getting to know students individually, no
being weighed down by hopes for them or by fears that they cannot write a
complete sentence of their own. It’s a
great emotional and moral burden off the teacher. Teacher and student can agree to leave each
other alone. The student can still get a
grade, and the teacher, a paycheck.
Benefits for the student are enormous, as
well, at every level of their college education. Freshmen clearly need plagiarism. Freshman year is packed with so many
important endeavors—sports, music, social events, games, movies, and various
addictions—any way that the freshman can save time and effort is bound to reap
benefits. Instead of eight hours spent
on a paper that will probably still have some errors in it, twenty minutes can
be spent finding a ready-made paper whose errors the student is not even
responsible for. What a saving in time
and responsibility! The student can get right
back to racking up fifty more kills on Call
of Duty. Moreover, freshman classes
are all those general ones that don’t relate to any major, so it doesn’t really
matter that the freshman isn’t learning anything.
Similarly, sophomores aren’t into many major
classes yet, so learning is not really a big deal. Sophomores also are dealing with the let-down
after freshman year, the notorious “sophomore slump,” so they often do not have
the emotional strength to be doing much.
Too drained to get out of bed, much less think, the sophomore needs help
to make it to junior year. After all, if
one does not make it through sophomore year, how will one graduate? In view of this, sophomores really have no other
option than plagiarism. Papers must be
turned in, after all; something is better than nothing.
In junior and senior years, the major is now
a main part of one’s curriculum, so now is the time to learn the tricks that
pertain to one’s career field. One might think that this means that plagiarism
must be laid aside. How foolish! Now is the time to perfect plagiarism in
one’s own field. Now is the time to
start preparing for a lifetime of relying on the best minds in the field. What
are the key reference works and the key online sources that will save hours of
reading? As Sparknotes is to the English
major, so must there be similar sources for psychology, education, business,
and even Bible. Seize the day. The work
has already been done for us. Citing
sources will only lead people to think we don’t know what we’re talking about.
The senior Bible major, moreover, needs to be
ready for senior sermon. With just a
little searching, the senior can find excellent sermons by the great preachers
throughout history—Whitefield, Spurgeon, Donne, Brooks, Graham. With just a few changes to update the
wording, the sermon can sound fresh and original, and most of the audience has
probably never read any of them anyway, so the senior is good to go. This method is also a great time-saver when
the senior is besieged with worries about the future: with huge life decisions
looming, the senior doesn’t need to be bogged down in the present, worrying
about a detail like a senior sermon.
Furthermore, this method is great practice
for heading into ministry. Sites like icanpreach4ru.dum can save a ton of hours
of thinking. Once settled at a local congregation, the novice preacher can line
up six years’ worth of sermons with just a few clicks. What a saving of time and thought! Moreover, when meeting up for coffee with
members of the congregation, the preacher won’t be tempted to get into ideas
that the parishioners don’t really want to hear about anyway because there will
be no ideas in mind.
Not only do Bible majors reap these benefits
but also every other major. Worship arts majors needn’t ever write an
original song. Everything that’s needed
is online. And churches are the last
places that want anything fresh and new; just sing the same old songs over and
over, and everyone will be happy. The
worship leader can then spend much more time in prayer or guitar practice.
Missions majors, too: when you’re overwhelmed
with the details of getting moved and settled into the ministry in a new
culture, you don’t have time to prepare original teaching materials that fit
the culture you’ve moved to. Just take
some stuff along that worked for Grandmother’s generation. It’ll probably work just fine.
Education majors can clearly benefit from
plagiarism. Isn’t education merely a
matter of passing on what other people have already figured out? It doesn’t matter
who thought up the ideas, just that the content get passed along. The students will think the teacher is much
smarter if the teacher appears to be the source of the ideas, not some old dead
guy whose name the class has never heard.
Education often includes coaching, of course, and coaches too can win a
lot more games by always stealing plays from others. The coach who relies on original plays will
soon be known for that style of play, making the patterns predictable. And thinking up new plays every game is
certainly going to be exhausting. Think of the advantage the coach has who
steals from a different coach for every game.
Psychology majors? Since psychology is about reading what is in
other people’s minds, about listening to their woes, isn’t it better if the
psychologist’s own mind is not cluttered up with original ideas? How much better to have one’s own mind
totally clear in order to listen well to the counselee.
It’s almost foolish to bring up the
usefulness of plagiarism to business majors.
Plagiarism is a form of stealing.
Duh. What else is a business
person going to do in life? Undergraduate school is thus the perfect place to
dull one’s conscience and become skilled in the essentials of one’s trade.
Some readers may be thinking, what is so hard
about citing your sources, since you have to take the time to find them? These readers are clearly missing the
point. Not only is citing a
time-consuming activity that kills the effectiveness by making the work sound
or look like an academic treatise that nobody wants to read or hear, but also
it undercuts the whole purpose. Isn’t
the purpose in all of writing and speaking to appear smart? If sources are cited all the time, it’s they
that will seem smart, not me. Isn’t this
all about me?
Dr. Hahlen likes to quote Coach John Wooden, formerly
of UCLA, who says, “Don’t learn the tricks of the trade; learn the trade.” Well, consider this, Coach Wooden: if the
tricks of the trade are learned well in college, just watch what we’ll be able
to pull off in real life.
