In the ideal world, none of us would ever have to write a note on a student’s paper like the one in this photo. Since this isn’t the ideal world, we’re likely to have to deal with plagiarism every now and again. Dealing with instances of plagiarism will be the topic of my post for next week.
This week, I’d like to float a few ideas on preventing plagiarism.
The way we approach writing assignments can certainly make a difference. Most faculty are well aware that reusing the same essay prompts from one year to another is a bad idea, and asking students to submit longer papers in stages is useful for catching potential problems before they get a student into real trouble. (Incremental due dates may also reduce the temptation for students to plagiarize, since they force students to get started earlier.)
There are some good suggestions for instructors at pages maintained by the The University of Texas and The University of Alberta Libraries.
Further, I’m convinced that a lot (certainly not all) of the plagiarism committed by undergraduates is less than fully intentional, and that much of it stems from poor information-management practices.
That conviction has persuaded me that I need to change my approach to teaching students how to use Zotero. Some time ago, I wrote a post on teaching tech in Political Science. In that post, I mentioned introducing students to Zotero in order to emphasize the collaborative nature of scholarship and to make it easy for students to format their citations properly.
But Zotero is also a marvelous information-management system, and is therefore well-suited to avoiding the accidental plagiarism that results from not keeping good track of one’s sources. If students get into the habit of keeping both their sources and their notes in Zotero, they’re much less likely to inadvertently neglect to cite a source, or to accidentally cite something as a paraphrase or summary when it’s really a direct quote.
What strategies are you currently using for plagiarism prevention in your courses? Let’s hear from you in the comments.
[Image by Flickr user Digirebelle / Creative Commons licensed]
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23 Responses to Preventing Plagiarism
elainepaul - June 11, 2010 at 9:43 am
Great topic and good suggestions! Plagiarism is an information literacy issue, and thus academic librarians are trained to address it. Both of the university Web sites cited here were created by libraries. Collaborating with librarians in the classroom is not only a great way to help students understand what plagiarism is and how to avoid it, but also to emphasize the fact that there are experts on campus who are available to help students throughout the writing process, from researching to creating a bibliography.
acavender - June 11, 2010 at 10:45 am
@elainepaul Thanks for the reminder about the wonderful assistance librarians can provide! I always encourage my students to ask our wonderful librarians for help. Some of them do, happily.
samplereality - June 11, 2010 at 11:17 am
Not reusing the same writing assignments year after year is a good step toward preventing plagiarism, but I’d go a step farther and suggest not reusing the same reading assignments year after year. Mix up both the writing and the reading. Also, one thing I like to do is assign projects that are so unusual (like making a map of a book) that students have no choice but to do the work themselves, because it’s simply impossible to find existing sources to “borrow” from.
bonnieswoger - June 11, 2010 at 12:52 pm
@acavender: Of course, librarians can also help students in the classroom.I have worked with a professor to develop an in-class lesson to teach students about how to properly use in-text citations. Topics like: How they might insert citations after providing background information, or how to properly cite a source they are using as an example. The simple idea that they can refer to the authors of a paper by name in text (i.e. Smith (1999) indicated that…) is new to many students, even at upper levels. A lesson like this blends in nicely with a (more boring) lesson on formatting citations.By spending some time in class on the topic, it provides the students with more guidance on how to appropriately use the sources they find.
jsalmons - June 11, 2010 at 5:42 pm
I contributed a chapter to an excellent book, Student Plagiarism in an Online World, edited by Tim Roberts. If you are interested in this topic, take a look! (Just don’t plagiarize my chapter ;-)http://www.igi-global.com/Bookstore/TitleDetails.aspx?TitleId=956
infowrangler - June 11, 2010 at 6:20 pm
At Antioch University New England, we recommend to all of our students the book “They say/I say”: The Moves That Matter in Persuasive Writing (there’s also an earlier edition with the subtitle The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing). It’s a great intro to the conventions of academic writing, which helps those students with good intentions to work in and acknowledge the ideas of others in their writing.
philosophy - June 11, 2010 at 6:23 pm
Many faculty here use Blackboard’s Safe Assignment feature; it’s sort of like Turnitin, I gather. My impression is that Bb SA works fairly well; but any comments from others about that?Also some of us use the submission in stages (plus a conference on each stage) that Amy mentions,which helps with a lot of problems, not just plagiarism.
morningsider - June 11, 2010 at 10:45 pm
Diana Hacker’s A Writer’s Reference (Bedford/St Martin’s) has a useful online resource for teaching how to avoid unintentional plagiarism. http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/writersref5e/flash/rs_menu.aspIn several exercises, she provides examples and students must evaluate whether or not a paraphrase is plagiarism. I go through the questions in class on the screen; students are usually surprised by what constitutes plagiarism or incorrect attribution.
dabilock - June 11, 2010 at 11:27 pm
I’m a education consultant and, in my experience working in schools, people take one of two approaches: enforcement or education. Enforcement curbs behavior only while the “heat’s on.” A school-wide culture of attribution, an authentic purpose for citing (more than just for the grade), plus inquiry learning with an emphasis on mastery (see Carol Dweck’s book), plus encouraging student voice (see Susan Blum’s book) show the most long-term success. When they use a note-taking and citing program like NoodleTools that scaffolds reading comprehension and support into the software — where students get personal help 24/7 through an online question-answering service — they find that the plagiarism is minimal. Most important, the teacher can see and comment on students’ sources and notes (AND the author’s original words) so they can give timely feedback well before the essay is completed.
radoleg - June 12, 2010 at 4:33 am
In Russia we are using a very sofisticated checking machine at http://www.antiplagiat.ru that has been accumulating information from all possible sites with dissertations and abstracts, student papers etc. There is a public part and a special part that can be used only by University teachers. The latter is much more sofisticated and has a far better access to possible sources of scientific texts!
acavender - June 12, 2010 at 3:24 pm
Thanks to all for the additional suggestions about resources! I’ll have to check them out.As for SafeAssign: my understanding is that it works reasonably well. A colleague of mine has a comparison of SafeAssign and Google on their ability to detect plagiarism here: http://www.spurioustuples.net/?p=384That said, I personally have some real problems with both SafeAssign and Turnitin.com, and refuse to use them.
drnels - June 12, 2010 at 3:56 pm
In addition to what’s been mentioned, I often require students to use materials only recently published. I have a somewhat typical assignment for me where students write an opinion essay where they take something we read in class and connect it to something published after a certain date usually from the start of the semester. Sure, students can sitll pay someone to write the essays for them (which, apparently, grad students at a local university seem to be doing), but they usually can’t find anything that brings together something we read in class with something written in the past month.
chroniclebarnacle - June 12, 2010 at 4:11 pm
Interesting article and great comments by the posters. We use Safe Assignment and works very well as long as you dive into the report and actually look at what is matching. Some profs get upset because of the percentage but they must remember it matches such items as titles, authors, etc…harmless items actually. I look for what is matching in the content (body) of the work.
rosemaryfeal - June 13, 2010 at 8:41 am
At the Modern Language Association, we’ve developed a chapter of our MLA Handbook to explain plagiarism in terms students can understand. See http://www.mlahandbook.org. Interestingly, material from this chapter is often plagiarized by those seeking to explain plagiarism to others!Rosemary G. FealExecutive Director, MLA
m0lasses - June 13, 2010 at 3:33 pm
I would be curious to know what students can do to prevent supervisors from plagiarising them. Imagine reading an article and coming across of a portion of your own term paper :-(
mochacoffee - June 13, 2010 at 5:06 pm
molasses. Professors stealing students’ ideas is a fairly common problem these days and most of them go unpunished. I can drop a few names here if I want to. Some even go as far as stealing theses and dissertations. It’s ugly. Most of them do that for promotion, raise in salaries, and to show that they are up-to-date. What a shame.
george_h_williams - June 13, 2010 at 6:35 pm
@molasses: I’m not sure that professors plagiarizing students is common, but it’s certainly not unheard of. For grad students, one way of preventing (or at least discouraging) this is to present your work at conferences and to get it into print (or at least in circulation among editors). The more people associate particular topics and approaches with you, the less likely it is that someone else is going to be able to claim your work as their own.(See, for example, Matthew Kirschenbaum’s thoughts about sharing one’s ideas in the public sphere.)
philosophy - June 14, 2010 at 9:45 am
#13: yes, with SafeAssign you definitely have to go beyond the percentages. The nice thing about it is that students must submit their papers to SA themselves, and SA rather than the prof does the searching. With Google, I’d have to find suspicious passages and submit them to Google myself. And yes, the SA percentages can be rather misleading, especially for students(they can see the results) unless we explain why lots of the matches are trivial and of no concern. When the same or similar paper assignments are used repeatedly, a concern is that students may plagiarize from previous years’ papers; but SA keeps a database of all papers ever submitted to SA at a our institution.
educationfrontlines - June 14, 2010 at 10:12 am
1. Foreign students, coming from school cultures where the student/apprentice is to copy the teacher/master throughout earlier schooling, still have great difficulty understanding why they must reverse this practice they have learned. They often wrongly suspect it is an economic issue related to our copyright system and look at plagiarism as akin to pirating a TV cable line or downloading music without paying. 2. Very common among both professors and students is citing author B through a cited quote in intermediate work A without checking the original citation B. In science, important hedges are often lost when a small segment is re-cited, and failure to check with author B’s original work can lead to misleading or wrong quotation. Not quite plagiarism, but laziness…and wrong. 3. Some journal publishers have been running plagiarism-check software on supposedly new article submissions and turn up “self plagiarizing” where an author is using his/her same words across multiple submissions that are supposed to be new creative works; this violates rules where journals require material to be new, and wastes resources. 4. I am glad to see more real names signed to the comments in this thread than are usually found. This medium designed for comment and criticism allows, indeed promotes, authors hiding their identity. While not dishonest in the same manner as plagiarism, it does promote criticism without responsibility. This thread of discussion has been reasonable; many are not. I suggest that media that do not require writers to identify themselves promote a culture that weakens attribution, and this adds to our plagiarism problem. John Richard Schrock
11261897 - June 14, 2010 at 12:08 pm
Look into the work of Rebecca Moore Howard, Syracuse University. She was delving into this issue long before it became a hot-button item.
mcphslibrary - June 14, 2010 at 12:46 pm
Try this German anti-plagiarism pitch:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mwbw9KF-ACY&sns=em
mcphslibrary - June 14, 2010 at 3:06 pm
Oops–Norwegian, of course!
nacrandell - June 14, 2010 at 5:25 pm
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