I’ve been noticing a phenomenom more and more in recent months. I shouldn’t go so far as to call it plagiarism, but it is something in a questionably shady realm of ethics. The phenomenom I’ve been noticing is academic plagiarism. When I say this, I’m not talking about the kind where you copy your friends math homework or cut-and-paste sections of wikipedia. I’m refering to plagiarism of teaching materials of university professors.

Now to a certain extent, much of this can be explained away as being a result of a very narrow topic being taught in very similar ways by professors who may very well know each other (due to it being a very narrow field). For instance, I noticed that one of my professors who taught a grad course in programming languages had a website that was extremely similar to the website of another professor at CMU. Also, several of the homework assignments were nearly identical to the homework assignments in that class. However, this was probably due to the professors having worked together on the same material.

In other scenarios, however, there are certain similarities between course material that seems harder to justify. Here is one example (no links, since I don’t want this URL showing up in their “referer” logs):
Slides from University of Notre Dame Computer Architecture Class : http://www.cse.nd.edu/courses/cse462/www/lectures/L14_Adders.pdf
Slides from Penn State Computer Architecture Class : http://www.cse.psu.edu/~cg431/slides/cse431-4and5mipsalu.pdf

Now if you’ve clicked on both of these links, the first thing that you will immediately notice is that the formatting is nearly identical. Same bullet points, font, and coloring. The second thing you will notice, is the attribution text immediately below the title (conveniently in the exact same place in both sets of slides). The ND slides are “Adapated” from Irwin and Narananan (two PSU profs, neither of which are currently teaching the computer architecture course at PSU), while the PSU slides are “Adapted” from Computer Orginization and Design, the textbook used in the course. So essentially, we have four sets of slides (or five, if you count the slides from CSE 331 at PSU) that all originated from the same material. And I find it unlikely that the slides I happened to come across on google were the only ones around.

Is this plagiarism? Well, technically it isn’t, since they did credit the source from which the material is adapted. Merriam Webster defines “to plagiarize” as “to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own : use (another’s production) without crediting the source”. While under this definition, these professors are not plagiarising, seeing this chain of copying and modification and attribution gives me the impression that something is not quite ethical going on. With this knowledge, what message does this send me, as a student in this class?

~Tim