Plagiarism and emerging models of intelligence

If intelligence is the ability to solve problems, why is plagiarism a problem?

From Pop Occulture:

I’ve posted on this in the past, but I just found a hilarious quote on a website called Turnitin.com. As far as I understand it, Turnitin is an electronic service which teachers can use to scan papers for plagiarism. I’m guessing it compares text to indexed web pages, or something like that, and then returns teachers with links to those sites along with the original source material which has been plagiarized.

Anyway, the testimonial that I find so amusing and ironic comes from a Dr. Gilbert Klajman, of Montclair State University. Klajman writes:

Turnitin once caught a 100 percent word-for-word plagiarized essay. It was of course already suspect, due to the extraordinarily high professional quality of the writing. But it did really help by sparing the effort of getting the proof.

So in other words, the professor was too lazy to go check and do the legwork for himself, and he decided to make use of new internet technology to help him speed along what would otherwise be a tedious time-consuming process.

HEY, WAIT A SECOND! Those are exactly the same reasons students plagiarize, you narc asshole!

Seriously though, plagiarism isn’t some kind of high moral crime. It’s simply that the models of knowledge that we use and the values we ascribe to information are changing / have already changed. You think kids who are raised with technology like file-sharing, blogs and RSS news aggregators are going to even think twice about the moral dilemma previous generations had with plagiarism? Not a fucking remote chance in hell! And more power to ‘em!

Besides that, all plagiarism says to me is that kids are learning how to solve problems. And the problems they are solving are not the ones their teachers want them to solve. Kids don’t learn how to know, they learn how to pass tests and get grades. Because that’s what they are measured by, not by their knowledge, skills or experience. That’s the root of this problem. Teachers need to get creative and think of solutions which won’t get them stuck on these archaic pointless problems. You don’t want kids to plagiarize research papers? Don’t make them do research papers! Make them do hands-on projects where they get to think and act and experience, instead of summarizing and regurgitating information that has nothing to do with them. Of course you’re going to get nothing but slop from that! Who the hell is surprised by any of this? Teach kids to make decisions, reason through problems and solve puzzles, and they’ll be so excited to research things that they won’t even think of copying somebody else’s work verbatim.

One of the big questions I’ve always had though is: is the kid who cheats and plagiarizes his way through school smarter than the kid who studies hard and gets good grades on his own? While the one kid may be an academic star who plays by the rules, the other kid understands something intangible and important about how the world works, and recognizes the relative importance of different facets of life, and knows how to prioritize among them. Those kids are displaying a kind of intelligence that we never even think to measure for, and that we certainly don’t teach towards. No wonder they are so good at gaming the system all throughout life, while meanwhile those of us who play by the rules hem and haw and stew in our own frustration while the cheaters climb all the way to the top with the greatest of ease.