The Right Thing KAREN WENSLEY When is Plagiarism Cheating?
other things, severe penalties for plagiarism. Yet these pen- alties aren’t enough to convince some students to behave ethically — to identify cheaters, assignments must be submit- ted to a software program that will compare them to other student and published sources. The university rules make sense for practical as well as
A
ethical reasons. Universities are fundamentally about learn- ing, but they are also in the business of measuring student performance relative to each other. Allowing students to earn good marks from someone else’s work is unfair to those who don’t cheat and puts the system in jeopardy. Cheating reduces the value of university degrees for all students, if prospective employers can’t be sure the graduates who passed a course actually learned anything. But do students find the contrast between the academic
and business worlds confusing? Consider how an employee in an accounting firm is expected to produce good work. Need a note to the financial statements? Find a precedent and change the names. Produce a tax opinion? Check the data- bases for a previous document, double-check that the facts are similar and the law hasn’t changed, and copy as much as possible. Employers rightly do not want employees to dupli- cate research and writing that has already been done, and clients don’t want to pay for it. No one ever cites the original author (even if you could find one, because almost every opinion is based on a prior version). The notion of plagiarism, i.e., stealing someone else’s work, is irrelevant — the note or opinion is considered to come from the firm and not from an individual author. University students who purchase an essay from one of the
many online sources are guilty of an academic offence. But we all know that a CEO’s article in the National Post, a speech to shareholders at the annual meeting and memos to employ- ees were written by someone in the marketing and communi- cation department. The rationale is that the CEO has more important things to do, and presumably the ideas, if not the actual words, are his or hers. Even for a VIP, there are lines that can’t be crossed. It’s OK
to have a communications specialist write your speech, but not OK to copy word for word the speech of another CEO in a different country. Senior executives who write books (for
22 | CPA MAGAZINE | JUNE-JULY 2015
S I DEVELOP THE COURSE OUTLINE for the business ethics course I teach, I am reminded of the university’s academic integrity policy, which contains, among
example, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg) now acknowledge that they write them “with” another author (although does anyone remember Nell Scovell, Sandberg’s coauthor?). When I ask my students if they would cheat in a university
course to get a good grade if they could be sure they would not be caught, many of them are honest enough to admit they would. When I ask why, they explain that university grades are just another set of arbitrary rules, and the better your grades the more likely you are to get a good job. You do what you need to do to get ahead. The fact that cheating is defined dif- ferently depending on the context helps them justify their answer.
When I ask my students if they would cheat to get a good grade, many are honest enough to admit they would
We like to think that ethics is based on a set of fundamental
and universal principles, but it’s clear that rules like those against plagiarism are very context specific. It’s what makes the teaching of ethics so interesting — helping students learn to reason their way through the minefield of different motiva- tions, expectations and norms. Bribery is bad, but what about small gratuities to civil servants in foreign countries where everyone pays to get his or her paperwork processed? Lying to shareholders is bad, but what about smoothing out earnings to meet analysts’ expectations? Stiffing your suppliers is bad, but what about stretching out payments to improve your cash flow? Fiſty shades of gray, indeed.
KAREN WENSLEY, MBA, is a lecturer in professional ethics at the University of Waterloo and a retired partner of EY. She can be reached at
karen@wensley.ca
Photo: Jaime Hogge
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78