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Speaking of plagiarism...

Submitted by Jim Brown on August 6, 2006 - 8:39pm

Matt Russell just forwarded this to me:

http://www.fratfiles.com/essays/index.php

Fratfiles.com offers students papers on many different topics - for a fee of course. There's been a bunch written in Composition studies about plagiarism - so I won't try to review the literature in a blog post. Kelly Ritter published a great article in CCC: "The Economics of Authorship: Online Paper Mills, Student Writers, and First-Year Composition"

I've always thought the best way to avoid plagiarism is through effective assignment design. If you make your assignments specific enough, it at least takes things like Fratfiles out of the equation (then again, many instructors I know have had very specific assignments where students copy/paste text from web pages into their paper). However, not much can stop a student from getting someone to write the paper for them.

The more I think about plagiarism in the classroom, the more I think that longer conversations about intellectual property need to happen in the first few days of class. Merely printing an academic dishonesty statement doesn't seem to be enough. Does anyone go beyond the legalese approach in their classroom? I'd be interested in some alternative strategies.

How to deal with plagiarism

Submitted by russell on August 6, 2006 - 9:35pm.

It is a serious subject. Here's just one study: "In a 1999 survey of American students conducted by the Center of Academic Integrity at Duke University, 68% of the 2,100 students polled said that they had committed at least one academic offence such as plagiarizing." Right now, we contractually bind our students to agree not to plagiarize; to this end, we emphasize the kinds of punishment they would receive. But is that enough? Personally, I think that plagiarism education should be integrated into the class syllabus throughout the semester, esp in computer classrooms where mouse-click plagiarism happens all the time (i.e., students just cut/paste without realizing how very wrong it is).

Here's a link for resources on plagiarism: http://www.library.uq.edu.au/training/plagiarism.html . What I really like about this is that it includes a section called, "Resources on Avoiding, Stopping and Detecting Plagiarism For Students." We need to create assignments, perhaps, that demonstrate to students how plagiarism negatively effects their own classroom experiences. Here's a good site from the University of Toronto: http://www.utoronto.ca/writing/plagsep.html.

What can we do? Dedicate a class day right before peer review to plagiarism-detection exercises; give them a quiz on a text about plagiarism, perhaps, to show them how serious we are about it. Having a day devoted to plagiarism right before peer review gets students in the spirit of close reading. Honestly, I think that most instances of plagiarism in our small classes do not come from things like FratFiles, which is obvious plagiarism, but from bad reading habits: students don't know that they are plagiarizing an idea or text from an author because, well, they just don't know how to correctly interpret or integrate that text into their own. So, make plagiarism a part of regular conversation in class and regular exercises to demonstrate our seriousness; this might also make it easier for students to discuss it with us if we remove the aura of threat/punishment from acts of plagiarism. Making it a regular part of class also gets them into thinking habitually about how they incorporate the text of others into their own.