Research shows (and our experience at Brookes confirms) that students are more likely to cheat if they feel a course is unimportant or badly taught. If they feel ignored or cannot understand the purpose of the assessment or believe they are being asked to reiterate well-worn ideas rather than create their own, they cut corners and the opportunities for doing so grow daily as more and more essay banks, 'cheat sites' and ghost writing services are created. So showing you are interested, constantly reviewing the course in response to student feedback, and have put effort into devising useful and creative assessment tasks will have benefits for plagiarism.
Most studies of terrorism focus on retail terrorism and ignore or downplay wholesale terrorism. Similarly, most studies of plagiarism focus exclusively on the competitive variety and ignore its institutionalized forms. The example of Joseph R. Biden, Jr. illustrates this. Biden was a U.S. presidential aspirant who in 1987 was exposed for having plagiarized the speeches of some other politicians, such as British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock. This caused much moralizing in the media (some of it ghostwritten) and contributed to Biden dropping out of the race for president. Yet the dependence of almost all leading politicians on speechwriters was little remarked. Biden was caught out in the sin of plagiarizing from other politicians (a type of competitive plagiarism), whereas plagiarizing from speechwriters was treated as acceptable because it was plagiarism of workers in a subordinate position (institutionalized plagiarism). Indeed, when Biden plagiarized from Robert Kennedy's speeches, it was actually the words of Kennedy's speechwriter Adam Walinsky that both used (Posner, 1988:19).
answered 1 year ago
by anonymous