Plagiarism--A Guide for Instructors

TABLE of CONTENTS

Definition;  Causes;  Technical ease;  Morally easy;   Instructor factors;  Recognizing plagiarism; Combat it; Catch it; Track it down using Google, InfoTrac, EBSCO, Science Direct or JSTOR; Suggestions from other websites;  Other articles of interest on the topic.

• Definition Often students, especially beginning students, don't know.Here's a page of explanations for students.

  • What's the difference between plagiarism and copyright violations?
  • Are there levels of severity?
    1. Adding a citation to a bibliography that wasn't used in the document.
    2. Using your 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. Assisting some else to do any of the above

  An exercise from OWL, Purdue's Online Writing Lab, in which you decide what is and what is not plagiarism.

  • Is there any debate about plagiarism and its punishments?

    "The Truth About Plagiarism" Richard Posner quotes and link
    "Four Reasons to be Happy about Internet Plagiarism" by Russell Hunt
    "Universal Plagiarism"David Bouchier NPR essay
    The other side of the story: "This pen for hire: on grinding out papers for college students" "an academic call girl" making a living writing papers for students.

Causes? Contributing factors:

• Incorrect 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 reading "scholarly" books and articles
• Student inexperience in close reading a text
• Student inexperience in critical thinking
• Student inexperience in deciphering academic "arguments"
• Difficulty finding and using the library sources
• Difficulty of citing electronic 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
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Why is it so technically easy?

• Computers
• WWW
• Full-text databases
• Ease of cutting-and-pasting
• A broad topic or choice of one's own topic
• A professor's inexperience or disinterest
• 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 in upper division courses (top of page)

What is it morally easy to justify?

• 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 (top)

Instructor factors 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
• 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(top)

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?
• Are there telltale signs:
  • different fonts in different sections of the paper from cutting and pasting;
  • extensive vocabulary or jargon;
  • 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;

Combating Plagiarism

• Talk to your students about plagiarism, academic ethics, and professional ethics--it is worth the time!
• Talk to your students about value of failure and learning as a process, not a product
• Talk about fairness to other students
• Set down clear rules and your punishment for those caught and stick to it. "Got Plagiarism. Try the Guillotine." Excellent article in InfoTrac by Dr. Robert Lee Mahon
• Give assignments appropriate to the level of the students' intellectual development
• 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
• 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 bad 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
• Let them know that you have resources available for tracking down plagiarism
• 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
• Schedule a library session for your students on finding information for an assignment or for your discipline
• Help students format citations; they are seldom obvious, esp. with online sources--some online guides Bedford-St. Martin's Research and Documentation Online; "Style Guides for Writers" from Library Homepage under "Reference Sources"; Sauer's guides to MLA and APA online styles for USA classes. (top)
• 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

"And that rule, once more with feeling: relax, be candid, lay down the law, do your homework, trust your judgement and pull the trigger when you have to". From the Mahon article cited above.

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Catching the plagiarist:

• Can the student produce evidence of research: notes, photocopies, early drafts
• Can the students write a 100 word abstract of the paper after it is turned in
• Can the student/students 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.
• Track it down using GOOGLE, InfoTrac, EBSCO, Science Direct or JSTOR

  Just as it is easy to plagiarize from the Web, the Web can make it easy to track down plagiarized papers, paragraphs and even particular sentences.

  • If the item was taken from the public Internet, then, by using a search engine, an instructor can find offending words.
  • If it was taken from a full-text article on a library database. you can search for a distinctive phrase using the full-text search option on many of these. (top)

 

Suggestions from other instructors and librarians on how pre-empt, catch, and punish plagiarism

http://www.wiu.edu/users/mfbhl/wiu/plagiarism.htm --Plagiarism and the Web

http://www.virtualsalt.com/antiplag.htm --Anti-Plagiarism Strategies for Research Papers

http://alexia.lis.uiuc.edu/%7Ejanicke/plagiary.htm --Cut and Paste Plagiarism: Preventing, Detecting and Tracking Online Plagiarism -- from a library instructor

http://www.indiana.edu/%7Ewts/wts/plagiarism.html --Plagiarism: What It is and How to Recognize and Avoid It--examples for students

http://www.csubak.edu/ssric/Modules/Other/plagiarism.htm -- More examples for students

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Articles of Interest

10/23/2003--CQ Researcher has a whole issue entitled "Combating Plagiarism."

On InfoTrac

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

On the Public Internet

Downloadable Term Papers: What's a Prof. to Do?

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N.B. I will be glad to come to your office and demonstrate some of these ways of tracking plagiarism. E-mail me here. JS

University of South Alabama. Mobile, Alabama, 36688
TELEPHONE (251) 460-6045; on campus 6-6045
This page is at: http://www.usouthal.edu/univlib/sauer/plagiarism.html
page compiled by Jan Sauer, Instructional Services Librarian, 460-6045
last modified August, 2007