More on Internet Plagiarism
The Christian Science Monitor has a new article about student plagiarism using services from the Internet, available at www.csmonitor.com/2004/0302/p12s01-legn.html. It’s not much new if you’ve read about plagiarism problems before, but covers the bases effectively. Schools are taking two approaches to dealing with plagiarism (actually, three, if you count ignoring it). The first is to use tools such as Turnitin (www.turnitin.com), which takes parts of student essays and searches for matches in a gigantic number of online papers collected from all over. The second is to emphasize a school culture of how to avoid innocent plagiarism and to not engage in plagiarism overtly.
I think a combination of the two is best. I heard a story about this issue from my daughter a couple of years ago while she was still in high school. The language arts teacher announced to the class that she had checked online for plagiarism in the papers she had recently received, and had found a significant number of them had been copied. She announced that the students who had turned in downloaded papers could admit to it and submit a new paper without penalty. Those whom she had caught that would not admit it, however, would receive a zero for their paper.
As the teacher in question is older and not the most technologically adept person you’ll meet, the students thought she was bluffing. All of the student plagiarists stood pat, expecting that they were safe.
She wasn’t bluffing. She had used one of the Internet services and had a number of the students dead-to-rights. They received failing grades for their projects, with no make-up allowed. I expect that a few events like this coupled with a direct effort to recognize plagiarism as an unnacceptable practice would hopefully reduce the practice. (Of course, making some effort to create assignments that the students actually care about would help, too. But that’s a different topic.)