Academic Cheating and Internet File Sharing

This New York Times article describes widespread copying off the web without attribution in colleges across the country. It also makes a link between that and rampant piracy, which Matthew Yglesias takes issue with.

I think that the relationship between the two is highly exaggerated. As one of Yglesias' commenters pointed out, "It’s perfectly legal to submit “Paradise Lost” for your MFA thesis, but that wouldn’t get you anywhere with your committee chair." And it's perfectly legal to buy the copyright to a paper from someone else and submit it as your own, but it's still plagiarism in the academic sense.

I do think that nebulous authorship does have a lot to do with it, though. If the college does not adequately drill in to student's heads that they have to attribute everything, even things written collectively and especially even Wikipedia, it is easy to see yourself as a part of the collective and regard it as unnecessary to attribute. Besides, you might reasonably have some trouble figuring out how to attribute something like Wikipedia if your handbook isn't really good about websites.

Finally, I find this quote from the NYT article to be astonishingly stupid:

She contends that undergraduates are less interested in cultivating a unique and authentic identity — as their 1960s counterparts were — than in trying on many different personas, which the Web enables with social networking.

“If you are not so worried about presenting yourself as absolutely unique, then it’s O.K. if you say other people’s words, it’s O.K. if you say things you don’t believe, it’s O.K. if you write papers you couldn’t care less about because they accomplish the task, which is turning something in and getting a grade,” Ms. Blum said, voicing student attitudes. “And it’s O.K. if you put words out there without getting any credit.”

College itself requires you to put on personas and say things you don't believe. Tell me you've gone to college and never gotten a writing assignment that said, "Take a strong position on x and back it up with facts and arguments." where you still had to do it even if you didn't have a strong position on the chosen topic. Heck, we had to do that in my grade school where we were all split up into two teams to debate whether smoking should be illegal or not.

Oh, and social networking and Internet personas have nothing to do with "writ[ing] papers you couldn't care less about because they accomplish the task, which is turning something in and getting a grade". That also is an essential part of college. Not every assignment is going to be one that you care about for anything other than the grade it gives. That was just as true 100 years ago as it is today.

As for anonymity being a consequence of the alleged lack of uniqueness the Internet age engenders, I think the reason for it is actually tied to uniqueness of identity now as much as back in the era of Publius and the Federalist Papers: you write anonymously because you want to protect your unique identity, i.e., your reputation, and still speak in an unfettered manner.