the single worst thing about the hbomberguy video is that some of the comments i’m seeing from internet randos suggest the twelve billion “plagiarism is bad” lectures i was forced to attend in university might actually have been necessary for some people
“okay, but internet historian like, did something interesting with the essay. he clearly put a lot of passion into it”
i’m going to come into your home and steal your clothes and use them to make a funky mural which i then charge entry for. and if you complain, i will simply point out my Passion
some of you would never have survived first contact with turnitin. that’s all i’m saying
There is such a fundamental difference between essay writing assignments in high school and in college that I think it becomes incredibly obvious who has ONLY had exposure to the former and how it’s shaped their views on what constitutes plagiarism.
High school essays are predominately summary and regurgitation. For the most part, the point of a high school essay is not 1) to add new subject knowledge to the field or 2) to function as a subject matter expert of the field. If you’re lucky, you may develop the skills to reframe a subject through the lens of personal experience, but high school students are limited by their relative lack of life experience and will have a hard time, in general, accomplishing this with many topics. An AP lit course may introduce elements of critical thinking to high school essayists, where they will be expected to analyze literary technique and prose and support a textual thesis, but for the most part an essay in high school is a knowledge test. A summary. Yes, it is supposed to be in your own words and yes, it is supposed to be cited, but the focus on plagiarism is different and restricted to the most egregious use cases (at least, in my experience)
Speaking from experience, the transition into college essays can be a shock, even for high achieving students. I’d done so well in English in my (public, underfunded) high school , I didn’t spare a second thought for my college major: English. I remember my first research paper assignment. I chose teenage suicide in Japan as my topic. My sources were exhaustive, my bibliography two pages long. I turned in my first draft for feedback, certain it wasn’t even necessary, certain it was really final draft quality.
Instead, I got my paper back heavily marked up with red ink. A first in my academic writing career. ‘Citation’ was scribbled all over the margins. ‘CITE SUMMARIES!’ she’d written across the top. All caps. I was confused. I had to cite summarized information? But…that was my WHOLE paper!
Exactly.
In reality, I had nothing new to say about teenage suicide in Japan. My thesis boiled down to: teenage suicide is bad. I had no personal experience with suicidal ideation at the time, I had not lost a friend or a loved one to suicide, I had no capacity to get information from primary sources. Most importantly, I had no real curiosity on the topic as it related to a larger framework. I didn’t think to ask why teenage suicide rates differed between Japan and the US or investigate for myself what factors may have contributed to that discrepancy. I didn’t even think to explore the psychology of teen suicide, the sociological research. There was no hint of original thought in my paper.
I didn’t fix it. I dropped out instead. Later, I returned to major in Biology and had to retake the course. I wrote my research paper on the role of identity in Noh Drama and first person video games. This time around, I had a unique framework. I analyzed primary sources and used my personal experience playing Half Life 2 and watching and reading Noh drama. I had a solid thesis and something to say, I wanted to talk about how we represent audience identity in different mediums. For the first time, I wanted my opinions on the page.
But I wasn’t the first honors/AP high-achieving high school student who excelled in regurgitating information, not so much in actually thinking about it and I definitely wasn’t the last; I’ve met plenty throughout my academic career. And seeing the defenses of these creators, the claims that no, what they were doing was not original work but it was also, somehow, not plagiarism either, I have to think it is common enough high school educational outcome.
Creativity is difficult to cultivate. It takes hard work and a broad or thorough knowledge base to analyze and place information into a unique or relevant framework. Finding new primary sources is hard. Doing your own research and data collection is hard. Adding something NEW and not parroting someone else’s work is hard. But it’s a skill everyone should learn even if it’s not a skill most will ever be taught. I agree with Harris’s closing statement: plagiarism is ultimately cheating yourself out of your own individuality and development.
The only original idea plagiarized work actually conveys is that you don’t believe anyone will be interested in what you have to say.