Understanding & Beating Plagiarism

Recently, the always generous & creative folks on Chaucernet had one of the finest discussions about plagiarism I’ve ever read. Here are a few of the highlights, including one of my own suggestions.   I've dressed up the copy just slightly so it's easier to follow.

Suggestion Number 1

In my teaching, I am trying to understand the student thinking that generates plagiarism. Here are my observations about students.

1).  As many on this listserve have pointed out, many students come to college or university to earn a degree, to get a job, to push all the right buttons to finish successfully. Courses are treated like computer programs or fast food operations: push set buttons and an A should come out. Recently, I heard one student saying, "I took notes on it. I can't understand why I got it wrong on the test."

2).  Students often compartmentalize their learning: they take an interest in one subject, but do not see how it connects to other subjects. They then jettison the other subjects and pay attention to the area(s) of interest, usually their major/minor. One of my students wrote a paper on the development of character in preparation for acting. I happened to be at a college production and I saw her acting in a play. She never used her own process of developing a role to illustrate her paper, which she could have done. Her acting class was a separate world.

3).  Students often lead parallel lives. One life is in the classroom: World 1. Another life is "real," focused on their relationships and activities outside the classroom. World 2 often involves much higher levels of motivation than World 1.

4).  For students used to audio/visual interactions, reading/writing are difficult activities. Thus, the "dudes" who had not read the _Aeneid_, or _Moby Dick_, have avoided what looked like a massively difficult project.

5).  Students who despair of their ability to communicate with the academic community will turn to whatever language sources they can find: ghostwriters, editors/proofreaders, other people's language in books and on the net, which they try to paste together into their papers, and hope that it will satisfy the requirement and that their absence will not be noticed.

6).  Some students will take notes and just mimic what the teacher says, again, to avoid any disclosure of their own language and ideas, for fear of being "wrong."

7).  Procrastination is the result of a task being placed low on a list of priorities. Students will set higher priorities for things that they enjoy. Why is "enjoyment" a prerequisite to doing anything?

None of the above excuses students from doing the required work! I am NOT advocating that we water down our subjects to please the masses. Instead, how do we raise the students up?

Resulting questions:

How can we help students to make connections before/during college, grounding them in solid practice in reading and writing?

How can we help them to learn the academic discourse needed to use the sources correctly, but to have confidence in their own arguments in response to the sources?

How can we help students to connect the parallel lives in college?

I am struggling to break these barriers in my students' thinking. Ideas? How do we teach students to take responsibility for their work, to do work that is not necessarily "fun," to work at areas of weakness, and, at the same time, how do we make the work as enjoyable as possible, so that the students can connect it, become one with it?

Elza C. Tiner

Suggestion Number 2

I think one of the things we can do to disrupt the circuit of untrouthe between students, web sources, paper mills, and other easily abused resources is to structure our assignments in ways that minimize a student's ability simply to turn in a "finished" paper for a grade.

I guess it's the years of teaching writing courses that have taught me to require students to submit various kinds of materials at different stages of completion, (1) including a project proposal, (2) rough drafts, and (2) critical summaries of research materials.

Then, and this is the kicker (and it's carefully detailed in my syllabi), students not only have to turn in the sources they use in the paper, they have to identify (usually with a highlighter) and to briefly annotate *on the photocopied page*

• (1) where that source appears in their essay and
• (2) how they have used it (whether quotation, paraphrase, or summary).
• Students know from the outset that I will not accept any paper without accompanying source material, properly documented.

I know it's a lot of paper (especially with 4 classes per term) and the folders can get really thick, but since the student is put in the place of showing *me* where the source appears and *how* it is used, all I really have to do is check rather than police the source. Plus, we have some very intense discussions about proper use and documentation of sources.

The plan isn't foolproof, but it certainly provides a number of disincentives for those looking for an easy way out.

Dan Kline
University of Alaska Anchorage

Suggestion Number 3

Henry Griffy asks 'what would be the best solution' to the problem of plagiarism--

We've had several very workable solutions offered already. It seems to me that the best way to deal with the problem is to use _all_ workable solutions at one time--at least those that would not involve someone in possible ethical or legal complications. I list a few that have caught my eye--but I might be forgetting a good one--because I think it would be good to compile a list of strategies. And I apologize because I will be forgetting, some of the time, who suggested what.

Strategies:

First, I'd like to say that, in the short run, some of the following will seem more time and energy consuming than one might wish, but that, in the long run, sponsoring true scholarship is a goal worth working towards.

If we don't teach scholarship, then what are we doing? If we teach subject matter _through_ these strategies--isn't this the goal we really want to reach?

1a.  Assign paper topics/types that can't have a ready-made paper somewhere on the net. If there's nothing, or not much on a topic, then the students will _have_ to do their own thinking or research. [I agree that this will stretch your imagination.]

1b.  Don't assign the same paper topics semester after semester.

2.  Foster independent student thinking in the classroom from day 1. Don't make a secret of that goal. Create a classroom climate that supports student thinking/contributions to the discussions. Ask open-ended questions. Don't jump in with "the" answer, but ask the kinds of questions that generate student answers. Let the students practice generating theses orally and backing them up orally, before just expecting them to do it in writing.

3.  Avoid the lecture mode as an _only_ or predominant teaching technique--lectures sponsor the idea that the professor has all of the answers and that it is enough for the student to just give those ideas back on tests or in papers. Students really can come up with the answers or with answers that are 'close' , and then it's very easy to supply the one or two details that give them the 'aha!' experience. Also--sometimes students have known more than I have on a topic, and _I_ had the 'aha!' experience. And sometimes the discussion is just a set-up for all of us to look a bit further and report back to the class, under 'old business.'

4.  Dan Kline's method of requiring xerox copies for everything that appears in a paper that was quoted, summarized, or paraphrased, with appropriate highlighting and annotation is one that I know from experience. It works. He also recommended that the _process_ of paper writing be checked at every stage. That, too, works. If the total grade for a paper is earned in increments for each stage, then it is a reinforcement for the idea that each stage of true scholarship is valuable in building a solid scholarly paper. Also--this method avoids the need for any professor to have to hunt down a source in the library. If anyone wants a copy of Dan's posting, I'm sure he'd send you one.

When I used to use this system, I told my students that they didn't have to footnote anything they could find in the Encyclopedia Britannica + one other encyclopedia of their choice [name had to be supplied]--that we'd call that "general knowledge." Other than that, the only other thing that didn't have to be footnoted was their thesis which then had to be supported by the substance of the rest of the paper.

5.  If you want scholarly papers from your students, you'll have to teach them exactly what constitutes scholarly." Don't expect them to already know. Some will/some won't. No need to wait until after the first paper which made abysmal reading for you and a "failure experience" for them. Begin day 1 teaching the parts of scholarship that are vital and give them plenty of actual practice in using them with your subject matter content. You want quotation marks?--then make them generate short paragraphs using them, not just once, but several different times—with the appropriate footnotes. Yes, they should already _know_ this--but it needs to be emphasized that nothing less is acceptable; as our good student listmember has already said: Don't accept anything less.

6. Alan Baragona's downloading of a canned paper and subsequent class analysis of its content and style sounds like a wonderful strategy. And the outcomes he listed certainly look good.

I know there were other suggestions that were good, but this is all I can recall right now.

LH

Laura F. Hodges

2.  Online Articles & Discussion About Plagiarism