T.H.E. Journal The Accidental Plagiarists
* By Susan McLester
* 01/25/11
Is it possible to commit involuntary plagiarism?
Heather Scott would say it is. In fact, she estimates that only half of the plagiarizing she sees in her English classes at Air Academy High School in Colorado Springs, CO is the result of students "trying to be tricky," as she says, while the other 50 percent may simply be an indication that students don't understand the difference between plagiarizing and paraphrasing or how and when to use quotes or cite credits and resources.
That may seem an unnecessary consideration--what more knowledge of plagiarism do they need other than the understanding that they better not do it? Yet Scott's notion that many student plagiarists are either uninformed or unaware, rather than calculating cheaters, doesn't lack support, including new research concluding that the more effective anti-plagiarism strategy is to increase knowledge on the subject rather than instill the fear of being caught.
For that reason, some educators are starting to rethink the use of plagiarism detection software. Scott herself has taken to using Turnitin, the popular, Web-based anti-plagiarism application from iParadigms, as a preventive tool as much as a punitive one. The solution is a three-part package, offering peer review and paperless grading features in addition to the standard originality check, which sniffs out cheating by matching content from a freshly uploaded essay against all the works already stored in its database.
"At first it was all about the originality check," Scott says, "but I discovered that if you use the whole system it empowers students."
Scott says she finds the software's paperless peer-editing function, which helps guide students in providing feedback to each other, a major reinforcement of writing skills. Students upload their papers and then read and edit each other's drafts online prior to making revisions and submitting them to Scott. A built-in palette of proofreading marks and sample comments offers guidance and training in editing skills.
"Kids used to say, 'You're out to catch us!' Scott says. "But once they got used to the feedback, they started looking forward to it."
A study released last year by the National Bureau of Economic Research added force to the idea that prevention efforts are better at deterring plagiarism than punishment is. In the study, students in half of the participating courses were required to complete an anti-plagiarism tutorial before submitting their papers. The study found that assignment to the treatment group substantially reduced the likelihood of plagiarism. The report concluded that "the intervention reduced plagiarism by increasing student knowledge rather than by increasing the perceived probabilities of detection and punishment."
Some plan of attack is certainly needed, as student plagiarism has been raging ever since the Web made it a simple three-step sequence of Googling, copying, and pasting. "It's so dramatically easier to plagiarize with the Internet," says David Townsend, an 11th-grade English teacher at Richardson High School in Richardson, TX.
Plus, a bustling market of online research-paper providers prods students to take the easy way out. Want to buy a term paper? A Web search lays out about 400 options if you're so inclined. AcademicTermPapers.com, for example, sells them for a mere $7 a page. Or there's OPPapers.com, which offers 50,000 free essays, term papers, and book reports, punctuated with this note on its home page: Life just got a little easier. If you'd prefer a service that will do your reading and critical thinking for you, try Pink Monkey, Cramster, and SparkNotes--all of which provide chapter summaries and analyses.
"The paper mill out there is incredible," Scott says, noting that, without help from Turnitin, "with 150 students there's no way I could stay on top of 'borrowed' content."
Another theory on the rise in plagiarism argues that it may just be a case of copycatting the copycatters. Students may be legitimately confused about what constitutes plagiarism because they have become so used to seeing material taken off the Web and co-opted freely. In an article on cheating in schools that ran last July in The New York Times, reporter Trip Gabriel paraphrased Suzanne Lovett, a psychology professor at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, ME: "... Internet-age students see so many examples of text, music, and images copied online without credit that they may not fully understand the idea of plagiarism."
Agreed, says Townsend, so the need for prevention-based interventions is even greater. The first move, he urges, is for teachers to step up and do their job, which is to educate students on the ethics of citing sources and giving credit where it's due. "You have to teach the kids that this is intellectual property," Townsend says. "It belongs to someone. Someone worked hard to come up with it; therefore, give him the credit for thinking it up in the first place."
Townsend says he instructs students on the way to cite sources along with the need to do it. He adds that a number of citation-creating tools, such as Landmark Project's Citation Machine and Microsoft Office's Source Manager, provide another layer of plagiarism deterrence. The user simply types the source information and the desired format into the referencing tool, and the technology does the rest, creating an alphabetized, correctly formatted works-cited page. "It's like doing math with a calculator," Townsend says. "It's that simple."
Like Scott, Townsend employs anti-plagiarism software to try to help students avert cheating before he has to catch them. He uses SafeAssign, a plagiarism detector that is part of the Blackboard learning management system. Like most programs, after receiving an uploaded essay and checking it for duplicated content against every other file in its database, it generates a report that identifies what percentage of the paper may be lifted from somewhere else. "For example, if a kid has taken something off of SparkNotes, it has a link to the exact page that it came from," Townsend says.
As a precaution, Townsend requires his students use the tool's "rough draft" feature, which allows them to upload a draft of their essay into the system and address whatever passages are flagged before submitting a final essay. "As long as they cite everything that comes up, they're okay," he says.
Both Townsend and Scott include anti-plagiarism software as a part of a wider effort. Along with instructing on the hows and whys of source citing, Townsend has his students sign a pledge not to commit plagiarism. Scott takes steps to try to limit areas where students are vulnerable to plagiarizing. She sees the sophomore year's research paper she assigns as a particular problem spot.
"It's the first major research paper they've had to do so far," she says, "and they haven't had a lot of practice citing sources, creating a bibliography, and so forth."
So Scott tries to tailor the paper in a way that is plagiarism proof. She has students turn in prep work--outlines, sources, drafts--in stages in advance of turning in the final paper. She also carefully crafts assignments. For instance, her end-of-semester final exam requires interviews, poetry, and other nontraditional content, which essentially rules out plagiarizing.
Townsend, however, says he believes that fear still has a significant influence on keeping students from straying. He maintains a strict zero-tolerance policy with respect to plagiarism--if you're caught, you're getting a zero. He says the severity of the problem calls for a combination of prevention and punishment.
"Why can't we do both?" he asks. "I've had students turn in papers where they've cut and pasted and haven't even changed the font. It'll be rocking along in Times New Roman, and then suddenly there's Helvetica, and then Times New Roman again. It's that flagrant and it happens all the time. You educate them that that's wrong and show them that they will be caught if they do it--and you reward them for doing it right. So you've got education, carrot, and stick."
How To Do It Right
A number of online tools can help guide students through the correct way to cite resources.
BibMe
Citation Machine
Citation Maker
EasyBib
KnightCite
NoodleTools
Source Manager
About the Author
Susan McLester is former editor-in-chief of Tech & Learning magazine.
9 comments:
True appreciation is felt for educators like Heather Scott who is described in detail in this article. Her proactive, deliberate approach to teaching her students the ins and outs of plagiarism is taking into consideration her students’ lack of knowledge for writing research papers that include proper citations, references, and bibliographies. There is a distinct, but close relationship between plagiarism and paraphrasing. Due to this, focused instruction to determine the differences and many opportunities to practice paraphrasing is critical to student success. Scott’s effective use of Turnitin shows how software of this type can benefit the quality of writing produced by students. While my own daughter is required to use this same software to submit papers online, she is not aware of the peer review and the editing capacity of this program.
Because of an experience that one of my nieces had last year at school, this article speaks to my heart not only as an aunt, but an educator that wants what is fair for students. My niece received a zero on a high stakes assignment for omitting a reference to a two sentence passage contained in a fifteen page research paper. Being an educator that holds high expectations for both students and educators, I felt that this zero was completely unfounded. The other fourteen pages of the paper included proper references and citations. With the protocol that Scott has outlined for her students this situation could have been completely avoided. Scott’s recognition that many students don’t intend to plagiarize, but instead need intentional instruction in learning how to effectively paraphrase speaks to her depth of care for student success and learning. Because writing is a complex skill that is difficult to teach, I agree with Scott’s view that students lack experience with writing research papers that lead to mistakes that appear as unintentional plagiarism.
If more educators could find time to use the range of tools available on the internet on the various free access software programs like Turnitin not only would students be submitting higher quality papers, but maybe the fear of a zero could be eliminated. Until students know that their teachers care about them like Heather Scott obviously cares about her students, they won’t care about what we have to teach them.
Kathy,
Thanks for sharing your detailed and insightful discussion on Heather Scott's article.
I couldn't have read this article at a better time! My eighth grade English classes will very soon be writing research papers. This is my first year teaching regular Language Arts classes, therefore it's my first time teaching a research paper. I know from talking to other teachers that plagiarizing is a common problem these days. The majority of the research (and maybe ALL of the research) that students do is on the Web. This article hit the problem right on the head with bringing up the ease of copying and pasting.
I will definitely be referencing this article/blog entry when it gets closer to time for my students to begin their paper. I love the resources it provides for teachers and students to help assure they are citing work. I agree with this article, that many students are not plagiarizing on purpose. They don't know HOW to do it. And quite frankly, I believe it takes practice to learn to cite properly. Students are not going to learn everything during their first two-week research paper project.
I applaud Heather Scott for focusing on teaching alternate, appropriate strategies for the all too often student relied upon plagiarism. I never thought plagiarism was accidental and always went the route of consequence rather than being proactive. After reading the article, I can see how plagiarism results from students not understanding how to document sources and use parenthetical citations. Growing up before the internet boom, I forget copying and pasting can be misunderstood as borrowing not plagiarizing. I see this often with students in my middle school. In addition, I agree with teaching students how to avoid plagiarizing materials found on the internet. Scott’s use of Turnitin is a powerful, preventative tool to enable students to check their work before the final product is submitted. I thought I was preventing plagiarism by insisting students write information on note cards instead of copying and pasting. Now I realize I need to teach students the correct way to take notes, write a paper, and award credit to the original author.
I applaud Heather Scott for focusing on teaching alternate, appropriate strategies for the all too often student relied upon plagiarism. I never thought plagiarism was accidental and always went the route of consequence rather than being proactive. After reading the article, I can see how plagiarism results from students not understanding how to document sources and use parenthetical citations. Growing up before the internet boom, I forget copying and pasting can be misunderstood as borrowing not plagiarizing. I see this often with students in my middle school. In addition, I agree with teaching students how to avoid plagiarizing materials found on the internet. Scott’s use of Turnitin is a powerful, preventative tool to enable students to check their work before the final product is submitted. I thought I was preventing plagiarism by insisting students write information on note cards instead of copying and pasting. Now I realize I need to teach students the correct way to take notes, write a paper, and award credit to the original author.
I must admit, sometimes I don't even understand how to cite things from particularly complicated sources despite the vast amount of information available for APA. I wonder how many times I've plagiarized without even knowing it. Now that anyone can be an author it seems like there is a pretty severe muddying of the plagiarism water. TurnItIn sounds like a great site that allows teachers to hold students accountable AND teach students where they need help with citations.
Jeff,
It is difficult ,as I recently tried out turnitin on a chapter on school leadership that I currently working on, and found that it was picking other on line writings that I written before on related topics.
Plagiarism is something I always fear when writing a paper that I might be doing it and not even realize I am. I liked the point that was made about holding our students accountable for something that many teachers struggle with on a daily basis. I have never heard of using these tools before the paper is submitted but it sounds like a great idea! It is wonderful to see that other teachers are using technology to equip their students to be better rather than solely using it for the purpose of catching them in an illegal act.
Plagiarism is definitely a problem that many teachers must deal with in their classrooms. I agree with the author that many of the students comitting plagiarism are not doing it intentionally, but more so because they do not fully understand how to properly cite sources they use in their paper.
Intentional or not, the punishment is usually quite severe, and can range anywhere from a zero on the assignment, or in the course, to possible expulsion from the specific program or school.
I enjoyed reading the article, and really like the idea of using some of the plagiarism detection software as a prevention tool, rather than just as a way to "catch plagiarists". I believe that if we can educate students about plagiarism and how to properly cite, and then give them the tools to "double-check" that they have not overlooked something, we are helping them to learn and be successful in their education. I would much rather be a part of helping students succeed, rather than waiting to see them fail.
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