1st Journal Entries Lead to a Lesson on Plagiarism

Plagiarism is a massive problem in Chinese colleges, but who can blame them? Most Deans and Professors let them get by with it. I hadn't assigned too much written work my first semester so I didn't notice it as much, but when I started assigning "English Journals" in my Changzhou courses the problem became glaringly obvious.

The first topic had been simple and introductory: "Write something unique about where you are from and/or something interesting about your family." Other than peculiar coincidence that everyone's family was "harmonious" and nearly every dad "humourous" (accursed Queen's English), their family stories were mostly original and often touching. These tales ranged from childhood recollections of swimming in the river next to the farm to sad accounts of fathers who must work in the bigger cities--rarely coming home.

However, when many described their hometowns they channeled travel guides instead of their own creativity. Whole paragraphs were ripped from bad online translations of city homepages and other tourist sites. Complex words like "systematic" and "sub-mountain climate" raised red flags. And so do a lot of unnecessarily-specific, even trivial facts, like the exact location of a famous Daoist mountain in relation to downtown Changshu, the main thoroughfares encircling the metropolitan area of Suzhou, or a list of the recognitions Taizhou has received ("Best Hygenic City", "National Comprehensive Economic Strength City", etc.)

Needless to say some of them received poor marks on the assignment and every class this week got an earful about the rampant copying. Even if the perpetrators weren't guilty of outright intellectual theft, they had completely missed that the point of the journal was to express your own thoughts, not borrow those of whoever it is that writes for those Chinese city-websites. But it's hard to teach them what is and what isn't normally acceptable in personal reflective writing, and even harder to justify adherence these principles. Whose to say you can't write anything you want in these kinds of assignments?

Leb Wohl