"Literary theft. Plagiarism occurs when a writer duplicates another writer's language or ideas and then calls the work his or her own. Copyright laws protect writers' words as their legal property. To avoid the charge of plagiarism, writers take care to credit those from whom they borrow and quote ("Plagiarism | Define Plagiarism at Dictionary.com," n.d.).
In order to prevent or at least mitigate incidence of plagiarism, it is important to first determine why students might be plagiarizing and then address these reasons. In some cases, the student may not understand they are plagiarizing. One example of this was an example shared by Dr. Palloff (Laureate Education, 2010) where a student resubmitted an academic paper from a previous course into her current course. Even though the student was the original author, resubmitting a paper previously submitted without saying so is considered plagiarism. According to wikipaedia it is know as “self-plagiarism” or “recycling fraud”. “The reuse of significant, identical, or nearly identical portions of one's own work without acknowledging that one is doing so or citing the original work is sometimes described as "self-plagiarism ("Plagiarism," n.d.)." In this scenario the student was totally unaware and had inadvertently committed academic dishonesty. To mitigate this unintended academic dishonesty, instructors need to make sure they clearly define plagiarism and the consequences in their online course. According to The definitions can be different from instructor to instructor or institution to institution. In addition, instructors should model proper citations by giving examples of how and when to credit the work of others when used in their writing. This will help those students who strive to be honest to avoid costly mistakes.
For other students, the internet is a temptation to take shortcuts and becomes an easy way to avoid intimidating writing tasks. Some students have learned about study sites like Course Hero, Cliff Notes, Study Blue, and Pink Monkey where students upload complete papers and other assignments in the guise of sharing studying materials with those who come after. However, students are known to reuse the papers and assignments with only a name change. Instructors who are unaware of such sites or who have multiple sections resulting in more than a hundred students’ papers to read and grade, may not catch on that the papers are being recycled. Recently this occurred in my college when a co-worker caught one of his students submitting a verbatim paper the instructor himself had written some years earlier while in his undergraduate program. His student had found the paper on one of the aforementioned student collaborative “study sites”.
Even if the work had not been his own, this instructor uses plagiarism detection software which would have hopefully detected that the paper submitted was plagiarized. In this case the instructor used TurnItIn to check for plagiarism. There is a plethora of plagiarism detection software which can be used by both the student who wants to check their writing assignment prior to turning it in to ensure they have actually not missed something inadvertently and the instructor who is trying to ensure students are adhering to academic honesty policies. Dupli Checker is a free plagiarism checker software for use by both educators and students. While PaperRater is free as well and uses artificial intelligence to provide plagiarism checking, automatic proofreading, grammar checks, and automated scoring according to their website. The problem with any of these detection software is that they are not 100% accurate nor dependable. Some of the detection software like TurnItIn uses their own enourmous databases with academic papers and scan student submissions against them. Other plagiarism detection software such as Unplag uses a real time web index to check against (Yarborough, 2016).
It has always been my contention that the best way to mitigate the prevention of academic dishonesty in assessments is to use authentic assessments instead of low level, knowledge recall tests. Mueller describes authentic assessments as “a form of assessment in which students are asked to perform real-world tasks that demonstrate meaningful application of essential knowledge and skills (Mueller, 2005)”. Authentic assessments for the online course can include discussion boards with rubrics, role playing, case studies, problem-based and scenario-based learning, online journaling, peer reviews and self-assessments. These authentic assessments help prepare students for real world application of knowledge while also giving them work related experiences they can use in starting or furthering their careers as they can readily apply knowledge gleaned.
Carnegie Mellon University Office of Teaching Excellence & Educational Innovation also contends instructors should create original assignments. ”The more unusual an assignment (e.g., taking a different perspective on a problem, question, or reading), the less likely students will be able to find something (from the internet or their peers) to submit as their own work. In addition, an assignment that has multiple parts may reduce the likelihood of plagiarism (("How to prevent plagiarism-Teaching Excellence & Educational Innovation - Carnegie Mellon University," 2015).”
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Academic Dishonesty in distance higher education: Challenges and models for moral education in the digital era. Turkish Online Journal of Distance Education, 14(4), 176-195. How to prevent plagiarism-Teaching Excellence & Educational Innovation - Carnegie Mellon University. (2015). Retrieved October 4, 2016, from https://www.cmu.edu/teaching/designteach/design/instructionalstrategies/writing/preventplagiarism.html
Laureate Education (Producer). (2010). Plagiarism and cheating [Video file]. Baltimore, MD: Author.
Mueller, J. (2005). JOLT - Journal of Online Learning and Teaching. Retrieved from http://jolt.merlot.org/vol1no1/mueller.htm
plagiarism. (n.d.). The American Heritage® New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition. Retrieved October 5, 2016 from Dictionary.com website http://www.dictionary.com/browse/plagiarism
Plagiarism. (n.d.). In Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved October 6, 2016, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism#Common_forms_of_student_plagiarism
Yarborough, M. (2016, September). A Closer Look at the Unplag Plagiarism Checker. eLearn Magazine. Retrieved from http://elearnmag.acm.org/archive.cfm?aid=2994257
