Egregious, Highly Risky Plagiarism

Euthanasia Machine

Putting a plagiarizing computer out of its misery...

(Image from Wikipedia)

What's a professor to do? I warn students that I can easily catch their plagiarism, for I can find by Google in an instant the same passage that they may have sought for hours, but despite my warnings, they download material from the internet.

One student of mine is writing on euthanasia and had previously copied material from online for the essay assignment's introductory paragraph:

The first gas chamber was designed by professors of psychiatry from 12 major German universities. Psychiatric patients were executed until the hospitals were almost empty. They were joined by some pediatricians, who began by emptying the institutions for handicapped children in 1939. By 1945 almost 300,000 Germans were killed. By then, these doctors were killing bed wetters, children with misshapen ears, and those with learning disabilities.

This passage had been borrowed from a website titled League for Life in Manitoba, which cites page 47 of Fredric Wertham's The German Euthanasia Program (Cincinnati, Ohio: Hayes Publishing Company, 1977), but neither of these sources had been cited in my student's assignment.

I gave the student an "F" for plagiarism and in turn received some green tea and a promise of no more plagiarism. The green tea was some sort of Confucian gesture intended to bring the student-teacher relation back into harmony (in the interests of a harmonious society, of course). The promise was a perfunctory expression of good will that I've learned to ignore.

And a good thing, too, for the first draft of this student's essay has this truly egregious instance of plagiarism:

The pain and suffering a person feels during a disease, even with pain relievers, can be incomprehensible to a person who has not gone through it. Even without considering the physical pain, it is often difficult for patients to overcome the emotional pain of losing their independence. Moreover, despite modern painkillers, there is little available to deal with the problem of 'breathlessness', which makes many ailing patients feel they will suffocate.

This passage comes word-for-word uncited from a section titled "Reasons given for voluntary euthanasia" in Wikipedia's entry on "Euthanasia" -- and that despite my having forbidden not only plagiarism entirely (of course) but even the use of Wikipedia as a source at all!

By the student's logic, this doubtless constituted a case of plagiarism made necessary to resolve a dilemma:

Teacher forbids plagiarism. Student needs Wikipedia passage. Teacher forbids Wikipedia. Student nevertheless needs Wikipedia passage. Teacher forbids Wikipedia. Student must plagiarize Wikipedia passage.

I must admire how the student has taken this load of bull by the horns and courageously plagiarized, for students must speak their minds even if their words are unutterably borrowed.

Yet, if these specific points about euthanasia were so necessary to make, why not go to Wikipedia's sources?

The Wikipedia entry cites the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for "Voluntary Euthanasia," which has the following passage in the fourth paragraph under point "2. Five Individually Necessary Conditions for Candidacy for Voluntary Euthanasia":

The third condition recognises what many who oppose the legalization of voluntary euthanasia do not, namely, that it is not only release from pain that leads people to want to be helped to die. In The Netherlands, for example, it has been found to be a less significant reason for requesting assistance with dying than other forms of suffering and frustration with loss of independence.

I found this source easily because the Wikipedia entry provides a link to it. Similarly, the entry also links to Jeremy Laurance's article, "Death on prescription?" The Independent (London, May 13, 1999), which says:

Dr Christopher Hindley, a GP in east London who works in a hospice, and claims to have assisted several patients to die at their request, says dealing with pain at the end of life has largely been solved. "It is amazing what we can do -- pain has ceased to be a major problem. What people fear most of all is breathlessness, not pain. They don't want to suffocate. The palliative care movement admits that that is a very difficult symptom to deal with."

These useful and legitimate sources were only two links away and would have quickly solved the student's 'dilemma' so much more elegantly.

Why, then, did the student not do this and thereby avoid this malingering, academic demise?