Yes, you are certainly right that there exist various levels or kinds of plagiarism. I typically see them as either (1) plagiarism of ignorance or laziness (I either didn’t know what counted as plagiarism or didn’t cite diligently enough – what you call “unintentional” plagiarism) or (2) plagiarism of deception (I am taking the work of another and intentionally passing it off as my own – what you call “intentional” plagiarism). The later form is what I was trying to reflect upon in this experiment. I like you terminology of “intentional” and “unintentional”. Thanks for your thoughts.

As Norris Friesen noted though, there are other more pragmatic, or even more innocent reasons for plagiarism. Sometimes, students who are caught “plagiarizing” might have been caught because they:

1. have not been sufficiently taught how to footnote or reference a source;
2. do not understand what is considered sufficient paraphrasing;
3. come from cultures that have a broader understanding of ownership of knowledge.

Perhaps it would be helpful to distinguish between intentional and unintentional plagiarism?

Mere paraphrase would help; but would not change the essential borrowing. So I began entertaining the hypothesis that most of us are living on the accumlated knowledge of others in any case; why not accept this? And find creativity in the new post-modern genre: what was known in Modern Art, by French terms like “Pastiche.” Or “assemblage.” Assembling old parts … but in new ways?

If you’re not willing to do this: many universities now have programs, or even a staffer, whose job it is to take a suspect paper, and then search the internet for the source. But I doubt these are very successful. I never used these services myself; and my own efforts to do this on my own, were not too successful.

So: “post modern pastiche”? Even ask them to use five sources; with attributions. Then assemble them in their own original way?

Postmodern Pastiche.

[Teaching the Deadly Sins is good too though. What America needs more than anything, particularly, are millions of sermons on ... Gluttony. Which can be generalized, by examining gluttony, excessive consumption, of all sorts of different consumables.]

I think the chapel series is a great idea.

Check out the following pop-art rendition of the seven:

http://www.behance.net/gallery/7-Deadly-Monsters/836410

A student of mine found this during our God and Ethics course.

Norrie

Those are great questions. I am not at all sure how to answer them. Part of the problem is that there are so many different models of the good life–even at xian universities–that a discussion of the seven won’t make as much sense as we would like.

After teaching a lengthy section this past semester on the tradition of the seven I had to remind the students over and over again that we are talking about vices and virtues and not discrete unrepeated actions. They had a hard time seeing how itty-bitty sins could really lead to big sins (they act like they understand it for a time but their papers and comments seem to reveal that they do not).

So perhaps the best venue is an ethics course where the different ways of understanding ethics are explicitly considered. I am partial to McIntyre and Anscombe’s claim that the foundations of ethics have been removed (by the way, for an amazing new book on this same theme see Talbot Brewer’s _The Retrieval of Ethics_), that the virtue tradition is where to look to reestablish those foundations, and that a lot of work in other areas needs to be done to even begin to complete the job.

What are your thoughts here? I have a feeling that you’ve thought about this a bit and have some interesting ideas.

Your post, Kent, is a very interesting one, and I apologize for not saying so at the start.

By the way, plagiarism is almost impossible to prevent, in take-home papers, in the age of the Internet.

One of the reasons I stopped teaching at universities.

I am curious, what do you think it would it look like for a Christian University to talk about these issues with its students? In what settings would it be most effective? When? Etc.