pondering this plague of pervasive plagiarism

My TA responsibilities recently included marking an assignment for a 2nd year research methods course.  119 students read the same paper and answered the same questions about it (e.g. What were the hypotheses?  What were the dependent and independent variables? etc.)  A significant majority plagiarized.  I was instructed to give them zeros on questions for which their answers were plagiarized, which is a fairly light penalty under the university's plagiarism standards.  Still, the net effect was that the class average was close to failing.

I mention this because I've been fascinated by student response to accusations of violations of academic integrity.  I got many emails from students who plagiarized, and there were several very common responses:

• I am very upset
• I worked very hard
• I did not plagiarize
• I did the same thing on the last assignment and got a good grade
• I don't know how else to say what the authors said

 The first two seem to reveal feelings of entitlement.  If I work hard, I deserve a good grade regardless of the quality of my work.  If I don't get what I want, that makes me upset; if I'm upset, you better fix it.  These people have a very different idea of what "higher education" is supposed to be about than I do, but I'd have a hard time saying they're wrong about what it actually is.

Denial is fascinating to me, because it was clear that most of the deniers didn't even understand what they were accused of.  They just denied as their first instinct.  I'd already sent most of them a link to a university site that explains plagiarism quite thoroughly, which they seem to have completely ignored.  Often denials were accompanied by lame "proof" of their innocence, unambiguous and perfectly preserved electronic evidence notwithstanding.  Once I directed them to the specific section of the website that dealt with their specific form of plagiarism and showed them examples of how what they did is a perfect example, they usually stopped denying and switched to other tactics.  It was especially interesting when the strategy shifted from denial to the 4th response and/or 5th response.  "I didn't plagiarize... I always plagiarize... I don't know how to do anything other than plagiarize."

It became clear while I was marking these that the standard strategy employed by most students was to find the sentences or paragraphs in the paper where the authors came closest to answering each question and just copy what the authors wrote, despite instructions to "use your own words" and despite the general warning issued to the class after the previous assignment to familiarize themselves with university plagiarism guidelines..  Some especially inept students just straight-up copy and pasted words from the paper to their assignment, but most made at least a shitty effort to paraphrase.  (Closely paraphrasing without quoting is a form of plagiarism.)  That's generally a good strategy.  Unless the person marking the assignment knows the original paper inside and out (which starts to happen when you have to mark 119 assignments about it), it is difficult to detect paraphrased plagiarism.  I did find quite a bit of it on their first assignment, but I suspect I overlooked the vast majority.  So they generally face low risk of detection for this form of cheating, and they don't have to do all the hard work of fully understanding the research and expressing ideas in their own words.

This is all consistent with what I've observed for quite a while: undergraduate students are generally terrible at writing and critical thinking, and go to great lengths to avoid both.  And I can't really blame them, because that's a fairly rational response to the incentive structures they typically face.