Plagiarism--A Guide for Instructors

Definition: Often students, especially beginning students, don't know what plagiarism is. Here's a page of explanations for students.

Not all plagiarism is the same:

1. Adding a citation to a bibliography that wasn't used in the document.
2. Using one's own work submitted for another class without the instructor's approval
3. Paraphrasing without citation. Misconception about what is "common knowledge"
4. Copying structure, language, ideas without attribution
5. Submitting someone else's work as one's own
6. Buying a ready-made termpaper.
7. Assisting some else to do any of the above

Specific, practical tips on how not to plagiarize accidentally and an exercise in which the student decides what is and what is not plagiarism. from OWL, Purdue's Online Writing Lab

Some of the causes and contributing factors:

• Incomplete high school instruction
• Lack of knowledge of what plagiarism really is
• Lack of understanding about why it is unethical/immoral--definitions are not enough
• Lack of time (interim courses possibly) or procrastination
• Construing the assignments as irrelevant and useless
• Unreasonable expectations by the instructors
  • Student difficulty recognizing and reading "scholarly" books and articles
  • Student inexperience in the close reading of a text
  • Student inexperience in critical thinking
  • Student inexperience in deciphering academic "arguments"
  • Student inexperience with finding and using the library sources
• The difficulty of citing sources. (This is one we run into in the library all the time. Even the newest style guide editions are fuzzy about how to cite some electronic sources. It's easier for the student to just leave them out of the bibliography rather than getting graded down for "incorrect" citation styles.)
• Laziness
• Fear

Instructor's role in plagiarism:

• Assignment of broad, general paper topics
• The assignment of papers about "anything you are interested in"
• Assuming students know more than they do about research and writing
• Believing that academic ethics is taught in another course
• Difficulty of obtaining proof of plagiarism
• Lack of knowledge of departmental procedures for handling plagiarism cases
• Lack of departmental support for uncovering and punishing plagiarism
• The "official" punishment may be seen as too severe for the offense
• The "official" punishment may be seen as too insignificant to be worth the effort
• Fear that a student's permanent record will be damaged
• Length of time required to report and follow up
• Believing that plagiarism is a personal failure by the instructor

Plagiarizing is so easy these days because of:

• Computers
• Internet
• Wikipedia
• Full-text databases
• Ease of cutting-and-pasting
• Being given a broad topic or a choice of one's own topic
• A professor's inexperience or disinterest--see above
• An institution's disinterest
• Large class sizes
• The temptation of hundreds of "Term Paper Mills" See this list of 250 different mills from the librarians at Coastal Carolina University
• The greater temptation of even "specialized" sites that address specific topics. e.g. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight papers or Robert Frost essays.

• Lack of "academic" role models
• Other students are doing it and getting away with it
• Lack of discussion about plagiarism versus real educational goals
• Cultural emphasis on the value of the product, rather than the benefits of the process
• Lack of relevance of the course to one's educational goals; vocational aspirations versus true educational goals
• Consumer mentality; colleges are businesses--"you pays your money; you gets your grades"
• No personal financial investment in one's own education
• And the opposite--too much money invested to get a failing grade
• Importance of the grades above all else
• The fear of asking for help, because he/she thinks it shows ignorance
• The fear of failure

There IS debate about plagiarism and its punishments:

• "Four Reasons to be Happy about Internet Plagiarism" by Russell Hunt
• "Universal Plagiarism"David Bouchier NPR essay
• An article by "an academic call girl" making a living writing papers for students."This pen for hire: on grinding out papers for college students"

Recognizing plagiarism:

• Are most of the sources in the bibliography older than five years?
• Does the library own the books and journals in the Works Cited?
• Can you find the exact wording on the web by Googling a questionable phrase with quotes around it
• Other telltale signs:
  • different fonts in different sections of the paper from cutting and pasting
  • specialized vocabulary or jargon beyond that used in the text and class
  • perfect grammar
  • sophisticated phrasing
  • different writing style than previously exhibited
  • not quite on topic
  • not following the given directions
  • too beautifully or badly formatted
  • references to charts and graphs not included
  • information mentioned as current is really dated
  • web addresses left on page

Positive approaches:

• Talk to your students about plagiarism, academic ethics, and professional ethics--it is worth the time!
• http://www.wiu.edu/users/mfbhl/wiu/plagiarism.htm --Plagiarism and the Web

"Regarding advice on avoiding plagiarism: it's best to approach it as an issue of fair use and intellectual property. A discussion about the ways people use (and acknowledge) one another's ideas is better than an ex cathedra "Don't Plagiarize" rule. When presented as a "rule," it gets relegated to the list of other rules (use one inch margins, put commas between items in a list) and students are genuinely surprised when violation carries a stiffer penalty than the other rules!"

• Give assignments appropriate to the level of the students' intellectual development and skills
• Talk to your students about value of failure: learning as a process, not a product
• Talk about fairness to other students
• Schedule a library session for your students on finding information for an assignment or for your discipline
• Make clear the relevance of the assignment--to the discipline, to the development of critical thinking and writing
• Give extensive directions and encourage questions, both in class and privately
• Allow time and incentive for revisions
• Let them know that there are people on campus who can help them write and research--the Writing Center; the Reference librarians; you, their Instructor
• Help students format citations; they are seldom obvious, esp. with online sources--some online guides Documenting Sources on the Library Homepage.
• Help International students to understand the cultural difference in expectations. Here's one source of help.
• Guide them through the PROCESS on a schedule: e.g. focusing a topic, initial research, finding background info, reading books and articles, summarizing the arguments they find in these sources, putting together an annotated bibliography in correct format, turning in a first draft, peer reviewing, and turning in a final draft well before the end of the course.
• Require some of these:
  • Topic approval
  • Semester-long topics
  • One-of-a-Kind topics
  • Very current issues
  • Written proposals
  • A specific research question
  • Outlines
  • Research logs
  • Multiple drafts
  • Annotated bibliographies submitted early in the process
  • Correctly formatted citations for working bibliographies
  • Call numbers for books used
  • Photocopies/print outs of all sources or parts of sources
  • http://www.virtualsalt.com/antiplag.htm--Anti-Plagiarism Strategies for Research Papers
    • "Use of one or more sources written within the past year. A requirement like this will quickly outdate most paper mill products.
    • Use of one or more specific articles or books you name or provide. The articles could be available online (from the Web or one of your university's proprietary databases) to save the effort of photocopying and distribution.
    • Incorporation of some information you provide (for example, a data set).
    • A personal interview with an expert or authority. An interview creates both a current and a checkable source."

Negative approaches:

• Make students aware that you are savvy about ways of cheating and the proliferation of term paper mills (and educate yourself about them)
• Make sure they know that most term paper mills provide lousy papers. Evaluate some with your students
• Make sure they know that if they don't like what they paid for, they can't exactly sue the term paper source
• Set down clear rules and your punishment for those caught and stick to it. "Got Plagiarism. Try the Guillotine." Guilty-until-proven-innocent model by Dr. Robert Lee Mahon
• Let them know that you have resources available for tracking down plagiarism

Catching the deliberate plagiarist:

• Ask the student to produce evidence of research: notes, photocopies, early drafts
• Ask the student to write a 100 word abstract of the paper after it is turned in
• Ask the student to give an oral report to you/class discussing the issues and answering questions about the paper topic
• Compare the rhetoric of the paper with other writing assignments they have submitted.
• See the graphics below on using GOOGLE, InfoTrac, EBSCO, Science Direct or JSTOR to track it down.
• If the item was taken from the public Internet, then, by using an advanced search engine, an instructor can find suspect wording.
• If it was taken from a full-text article in a library database an instructor can search for a distinctive phrase using the full-text search option.
• See the examples below:

More Articles of Interest: [If you are off-campus, you will have to log-in before being able to access these database articles.]

CQ Researcher has a whole issue entitled "Combating Plagiarism."

Keep Your Eyes Off the Screen: Online Cheating and What Can We Do About It. Joseph Straw

 

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last modified 6/02/2009js