This is an interesting article. Especially interesting to me is the suggestion that politicians have speech writers and executives have underlings writing things is “plagiarism”. Also interesting is that the author is able to cite specific cases of people suing for plagiarism in the US but cites no cases in Asia. (also interesting is the focus on the US vs. Asia, but I get that he said most of the info revolved around Asian international students at US universities).
I realize I was typing a lot of thoughts so I guess I’ll share them with whoever cares.
One thing that really stuck out to me was:
" Fundamentally, authors take aim at the idea that "[w]hat [Westerners] might call cheating, [students from Eastern cultures] might call … sharing. They contend that the truisms about Asian culture and plagiarism, such as the collectivist culture, learning by imitation, and strong respect for authority, while usually well-intentioned, spring “from a morally lethal combination of half truths and ideological assumptions.”
(pg 83. I’ll cite my sources since we are talking about plagiarism here…). This is interesting to me because in the context of writing a thesis or testing in to high school/college, it’s a load of 
to claim that you’re “sharing”. The only way that would work in the “collectivist culture view” would be if everyone in the “collectivist culture” was being equally shared that information and equally being given an opportunity to succeed. What is the point of having a test if cheating is expected? Is one’s ability to cheat the point of the test?? When I ask my students to write about a strange food THEY have eaten that THEY want to tell me about, do you really want to argue that it’s because of the “collectivist culture” that 22 out of 25 of the papers I received have exactly the same content (of varying grammar and spelling errors)? No, it’s because they know that my coteacher will tell them exactly what to write so that they don’t have to use their brains and consider what they know in order to put it down on paper. Another word for that is “laziness” and it does little to support their learning.
And then there’s this:
While Chinese students do rely on memorization to learn, this method is to learn how to write better and is not the same as copying work and claiming it as the writer’s own. In fact, if memorization is used as a tool for copying, it is condemned in the Chinese language because the word for that practice means, literally, "dead and inflexible memorization.
(pg 84) Which quite literally contradicts 100% of my experiences with people in Taiwan trying to learn to write essays, where they literally take a sample essay, a piece of paper and a writing utensil, and begin copying, word for word, repeatedly, until they are able to reproduce the essay on the exam. They are correct that it is dead and inflexible memorization. They fail to mention that it does nothing to boost writing skills – reading a lot is proven to expand one’s ability to write and it doesn’t make your hand hurt. And I have given up trying to explain that to people when it’s the only thing they want to do.
In sum, the author concluded that viewing the issue as one of culturally conditioning yields no pedagogical solutions, and the real culprit is lack of language proficiency and resources.
Starting to wonder if the author of this paper was paid by the CCP to make excuses for their cheating students who have been caught. You wanna study in another country that teaches in a language that isn’t your first language, you need language proficiency. A lack of language proficiency as an excuse for plagiarism is some top notch W.T.F. Students need a certain level of proficiency in the English language to get into an English-language university. These requirements are set so that students do not drown due to their lack of language skills. Students who cheat on the English proficiency exam in order to get into the English-language university then do not have the language proficiency needed to succeed. So they cheat on everything else due to a “lack of language skills”. There is a simple solution to this problem and that’s called if the students don’t cheat on the English language exam, they have the linguistic skills needed to succeed in the American university and there’s no “need” for them to cheat because they are already competent and capable beings. If they really did pass the exam and their English still isn’t good enough, the solution is to learn more English. How the heck is that difficult to comprehend?
(I can’t speak on the next part, since that’s Vietnam and I know little about the country)
In fact, as a young associate working for a large firm, I remember that when I first received an assignment to write a motion, my first question was to ask whether anyone had written a similar motion, so I could build off that prior motion. No one chastised me for asking this; this was considered a form of initiative
(pg 85) Does this person (lawyer) understand what “plagiarism” means in the academic sense/what people are up in arms against Asian students for? We’re talking about students copying text verbatim and passing it off as their own and then this person comes in and is like “well I base all my writing off the works of others”. Well, yeah, that’s called “doing your research”. The next page goes on to talk about how litigators constantly copy the work of others and that there’s nothing wrong with that in the legal community… ok…? This is up there with speech writers being used by politicians. Does any fully grown, voting age adult think that politicians write all their speeches themselves? I hope not. Just as everyone in the law community understands that everyone is copying and pasting from everyone else/previous cases/laws, etc. and that’s “just what you do”.
This is not understood to be self-evident when it comes to academic papers. To claim that Asians think copying is just “showing respect for authority” brings me back to “did the CCP finance this?”. The author literally said that the Vietnamese and Chinese universities do not accept plagiarism and teachers in the US make it explicitly clear what examples of plagiarism are. Where’s the confusion?
Based on both the multi-cultural differences that may exist on plagiarism, as well as the limited concept of plagiarism as it applies in the world of litigation, teachers should not view the issue as one of a war on the students but instead should collaborate with students in the classroom setting to build trust around plagiarism. Unfortunately, that attitude is not currently the prevailing one.
(pg 89) You are absolutely right. It will work when everyone comes to agreement on the specifics of what plagiarism is, constantly, and enforces it, consistently, throughout the globe. Best of luck. I’ll be over here in Taiwan giving up on explaining that copying and pasting from the internet serves a very different purpose than writing down your own ideas.
Plagiarism detection websites “operate on a presumption of guilt and essentially require students to prove their innocence.” This attitude creates a false red line between “good” and “bad” students, which is too simplistic.
I will not disagree with this statement. It is really not great to assume guilt in all students. But you can also start with explaining what cheating is and then actually doing something about it when it happens…
Educators can be more effective if they understand that there might be an issue without stereotyping students into one category or another.
pg 90. Nope. As a teacher in Taiwan I have to accept that Taiwanese students will and do cheat, often with the assistance of their teachers. It’s not all my students, but in nearly a decade, it’s most of them. Again, they absolutely do not see what they do as cheating, especially because the cheating often comes from the trusted adults. So I can decide if I, one person in a country of 23 million, want to fight against the culture, or simply accept that “it is what it is!”. And if I care about plagiarism (something I really put little thought into until this thread appeared) I will move back to the US where my students will be taught what cheating actually is, why it is wrong and there are academic and legal consequences if they choose to test that reality.
