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Huffington Post and Time magazine released stories this week with near-identical headlines: College Plagiarism Reaches All Time High: Pew Study (HuffPo) and Survey: College Plagiarism Is at an All-Time High (Time). But neither the study the two articles cite nor the press release that accompanies it makes that claim.
What the study does say is that fifty-five percent of American college and university presidents, when asked, estimated that plagiarism has risen in the last decade. (Forty percent say it’s stayed the same, two percent said it’d fallen, and thirteen percent had no opinion.) They weren’t asked, and they didn’t offer, their opinions on how this generation of students compares to earlier ones.
A 55-42 split is nothing huge, by the way. And there’s also reason to be skeptical about how informed college presidents are about rates of plagiarism. Even if reports of cheating have risen — and again, we don’t know that they have — that could reflect changes in professors’ tolerance, advances in policing of the practice, or simply the ease with which clumsily cut-and-pasted passages from online sources can be detected.
If you ask a group of senior faculty and administrators whether students are better (smarter, more committed, more ethical, whatever) than they were in years gone buy, you’re rarely going to get a positive answer. So this survey is, in the absence of actual supporting data, pretty close to meaningless. But even setting that aside, the story and its coverage bear almost no relationship to each other.
Which leads one to an uncomfortable question. If the survey made no reference to plagiarism reaching an “all-time high,” and two different headline-writers at two different news organizations both used at that same phrase to characterize it …
Is someone at Time or HuffPo plagiarizing stories about plagiarism?
Update | Time’s story went up yesterday, the Huffington Post’s this afternoon, so if there’s any plagiarism going on here, it would appear that Time isn’t the culprit.
What say you, HuffPo?
When I left off my report on the 2011 National Student Congress of the United States Student Association, students were walking out of the plenary. I’ll pick back up there…
The Association had just passed an amendment to its constitution giving every member State Student Association a seat on the USSA board of directors. The idea behind the amendment was that it would encourage SSA’s to join (and stay), help strengthen the SSA movement throughout the country, and maybe even lead to the growth of new State Student Associations in states where they don’t exist. On the premise that strong SSAs mean strong student governments (and vice versa), it was expected that the change could even help USSA expand its campus membership.
Not everybody saw it that way.
Some folks from states without SSAs viewed the move as a way of consolidating organizational power in the hands of the states that are already well-represented in the Association. There were even a few SSA representatives who opposed it, on the grounds that their SSAs — lacking the funds to send students to board meetings — would themselves be closed out of the new structure.
A solid supermajority of delegates to the Congress supported the SSA amendment — it garnered the votes of about three quarters of the delegates on the floor — but passage rankled a significant minority, some of whom were already perturbed by other developments. And so, with the body in recess, a sizable handful of delegates walked out.
When the plenary came back from recess and the vote was formally announced, vice presidential candidate Tiffany Loftin moved to reconsider the amendment in order to allow for continued discussion. That motion passed easily, and the body then continued on with the agenda. The number of students who had walked out wasn’t large, nor was the number who had followed them to try to sort things out, so quorum wasn’t a problem.
Soon it was time for dinner, though, and so the students went into recess again. When they came back, the students who had walked out — some of whom were, uncomfortably, from the Congress’s host campus — were still discussing the situation among themselves. An informal decision was reached by USSA leadership to see if some accommodation could be reached.
Discussions continued, in various configurations. Some of those who walked out met with USSA officers. Others met with sponsors of the SSA proposal. Meetings were held, formal and informal. And the non-protesting majority of the plenary just hung out and waited.
It was really quite extraordinary. The walkout had been small, and the position of the Congress majority had been clear and decisive. There was very little information available about what was being discussed, or what was likely to result. And yet the students just hung out, trusting the process, more than willing to cool their heels in the hope that some sort of consensus would emerge that would allow everyone to go forward as friends and allies.
In the end, they waited for more than six hours.
They chatted. They read the upcoming resolutions. They worked on their presentations for their various already-submitted proposals, and drafted new ones. They taught each other games. They hooked up the arena’s sound system to YouTube and taught each other line dances. A LOT of line dances.
And then, shortly before midnight, the walkers-out returned. A few short speeches were made, and everyone got back to work. The SSA amendment was re-introduced, with a few proposed changes. Two were approved easily, but a third — which would have given every state with a member campus its own board seat — was rejected decisively.
At that, one of the campuses which had walked out before walked out again. A couple of people urged them to stay, but most of the delegates seemed willing to let them make their own decision. They weren’t happy to see them go, but they weren’t going to chase them, either. They’d made their case, the body had considered their proposals, and if the compromise that had been arrived at wasn’t a compromise they could live with, then so be it. After the walkout, the SSA amendment passed a second and final time.
The plenary kept going after that, until something like 3:30 in the morning. (They’d have likely kept at it for longer, but the university told USSA that they had to leave the building by four.) And then, as before, the most startling fact of the gathering was its lack of ill-feeling.
This was a group which had gathered at nine in the morning, ready to work. It had faced delay after delay — by the time the plenary shut down for the night, it had worked for a total of eight hours, and waited to work for a total of ten and a half. And yet there was almost no grumpiness during the waits, almost no snippiness during the debates. Folks were there to work, there to work together, and so that’s what they did.
Next up: Plenary, Day Two.
The 2011 National Student Congress of the United States Student Association is winding down today — as I type this, the group’s newly elected 2011-12 Board of Directors is meeting for the first time. It’s been a whirlwind of a conference, so I haven’t had the chance to update as much as I’d have liked, but I’ll be compiling a full report here over the next few days.
The conference began with a couple of days of speeches and workshops and meetings. The Congress site was Florida A&M University, the first historically black college or university (HBCU) ever to host a USSA annual meeting, and they were wonderful hosts — it’s a hell of a campus, and a hell of a student body. If you’re ever down here, be sure to stop by their archives — it’s one of the best-curated university galleries I’ve ever visited, as well as being a gem of a small museum of the history of race and racism in the United States.
Nothing huge broke in the first few days of the Congress. No huge drama, no dramatic developments. The association’s sitting vice president, Victor Sanchez, drew one competitor in his race for USSA President, while National People of Color Student Coalition chair Tiffany Dena Loftin was unopposed for the vice presidency.
The Congress was looking like a quiet one as Monday broke, but Monday — plenary day — turned out to be a doozy.
The plenary was scheduled to begin at nine in the morning in the FAMU basketball stadium. Students entered down a long stairway past row after row of deeply raked seats, taking their positions on the parquet of the stadium’s center court. Technical glitches delayed the start of the session for a couple of hours, but spirits remained good as the group started work, held a brief session, and then boarded buses for a barbeque lunch, step show, and rousing speech by a Wisconsin union leader on that state’s recent student-labor uprising.
The group reconvened early in the afternoon, making its way through the agenda to the first contentious issue — a constitutional amendment altering the makeup of the USSA Board of Directors.
USSA’s board is based on a hybrid structure combining regional representatives and identity-based caucuses representing various student constituencies. Monday’s amendment proposed adding a designated seat for each member State Student Association, giving those organizations — which, along with USSA’s campus chapters, make up the Association’s membership — a direct role in the group’s governance for the first time.
In the eyes of the proposal’s authors, the change was intended to strengthen USSA’s relationship with its member SSAs, to encourage non-member SSAs to join, to foster the development of SSAs in states where none exist. To some opponents, though, it represented a power grab by already powerful factions within the Association.
The proposal was brought up Monday afternoon, and passed by a comfortable margin. After the vote was completed, but before it was announced, the body went into recess for fifteen minutes. During that time some simmering frustrations bubbled over, and several delegations who had opposed the amendment walked out of the meeting.
…and my flight has just been called. More soon.
I’ve just hit Tallahassee for the 61st annual National Student Congress of the United States Student Association, and I’ll be blogging from the ground here for the next six days.
USSA is the oldest and largest student-led national student organization in the United States. Founded in 1947, it’s a confederation of student governments and State Student Associations that prioritizes grass-roots organizing and legislative lobbying from its headquarters in Washington DC.
Much more about USSA, and this year’s Congress, to come…
The Department of Education recently issued new guidelines on campus policies on sexual assault, including a directive that judicial bodies investigating sexual assault allegations employ the “preponderance of the evidence” standard in their deliberations.
“Preponderance of the evidence” is the standard commonly used in resolving civil cases — lawsuits — in the United States. It basically means that the question at hand will be resolved by a determination of which party’s version of events is more likely to be true. (“Beyond a reasonable doubt” is the standard of guilt used in criminal cases in the US, and there are other standards used in other circumstances, too.)
I don’t yet have an opinion on the DOE’s directive, and I think it’s an important question, so I’ve been reading up on it. And I just noticed something really weird.
As I noted above, “preponderance of the evidence” basically means that the judicial body will determine which side of the case, based on the evidence, is more likely to be in the right. If they come down on the side of the complainant, even hesitantly, the defendant is found guilty. It makes no difference, in other words, whether they’re completely convinced or have major doubts — whichever side they think is more likely to be in the right is the side that wins.
A common way of explaining this is to say that preponderance of the evidence means that if even 51% of the evidence presented supports one party, that party gets the decision. It’s an arbitrary number, of course — there’s nothing magical about 51% as opposed to 55% or 50.623% — but it gets the concept across. Whoever has the stronger evidence wins. Period.
So you see the 51% thing a lot. It’s all over the place — the number 51 appears in about a quarter of all web hits for the phrase “preponderance of the evidence.” But occasionally you see other numbers, like 50.1%, or even 50.000001%. And here’s where it gets interesting.
The number 50.1 appears only rarely in Google hits on “preponderance of the evidence” — a few times per thousand. But in pages in which the word “rape” or one of its variants appear as well, 50.1 shows up almost three times as often. You see a similar bump for 50.01, 50.001, etc.
Those numbers aren’t that big. It doesn’t seem to be a complete glitch — the numbers go in the opposite direction when you add “civil law” to the search instead of “rape,” for instance — but the magnitude isn’t huge.
Check out what happens when you substitute “campus sexual assault” for rape, though. The number 50.01 shows up three times as often as you’d expect, and 50.0001 shows up nearly seven times as often. Plug in “Title IX,” the campus sex-discrimination law on which the ruling was based, and 50.0001 shows up more than fifteen times as often as it should.
What does all this mean?
Well, one thing it doesn’t mean is that a campus assault case in which 50.0001% of the evidence supports the complainant is going to result in a conviction. The very concept of “50.0001% of the evidence” is meaningless — the idea that you could quantify the evidence in a sexual assault case to a precision of two parts in a million is absurd.
And that, of course, is why “50.0001%” is a figure of speech that you hardly ever see in discussions of this legal standard. It’s not coherent. It’s not meaningful. It’s not illuminating of the issues at stake.
And that is precisely why it keeps coming up in discussions of Title IX and campus sexual assault. Because “preponderance of the evidence means the side with 50.0001% of the evidence wins” is a lot scarier than “preponderance of the evidence means that the relevant body looks at all the evidence and rules for the party it thinks has the stronger case.”
studentactivism.net 
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