Dealing with Plagiarism Issues

This page is organized into four major sections:

• Defining the Problem
• Teaching-Oriented Sites
• Detecting Plagiarism
• Suggestions for Preventing Plagiarism

Defining the Problem

• A Faculty Guide to Cyber-Plagiarism
  from the University of Alberta.
• Articles on plagiarism
  collected by Turnitin.com.
• Cheating, Plagiarism (and other questionable practices)
  from the University of Wisconsin Women's Studies librarian.
• The New Plagiarism: Seven Antidotes to Prevent Highway Robbery in an Electronic Age
  A "must read" article by Jamie McKenzie. Note his ideas on differentiating copied text from original thoughts.
• Plagiarism Detectives
  This resource from Colorado College has many links on where students can find papers for sale, identifying plagiarism, and the like.

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Teaching-Oriented Sites

• Anti-Piracy
  SIIA has a number of educational materials and resources available on copyright law and anti-piracy information.
• Borrowing? Fraud? Plagiarism?: An Internet Sampler.
  The purpose of this Web page is to give you a sampling of some of the aspects of Plagiarism. Each of the activities asks you to take a closer look at the way you read research material and take that material to a product.
• How to Recognize Plagiarism
  This short tutorial on recognizing plagiarism was created by Ted Frick and Elizabeth Boling at Indiana University, Bloomington. The Overview, Cases, Examples, and Practice sections will be most applicable to individuals outside of Indiana University.
• Identifying and Avoiding Plagiarism
  This unit on plagiarism from the University of Hong Kong comes with a self test.
• Plagiarism
  This Web site contains a wealth of information about plagiarism, including articles, guides, case studies, detection tools, term paper sites, and much more.
• Plagiarism Workshop
  A WebQuest designed by Janice Cooper for high school students, including an introduction to plagiarism, copyright and fair use, and techniques to avoid plagiarism.
• Plagiarized.com
  The Instructor's Guide to Internet Plagiarism. Look specifically at the section called "Dead Giveaways", and then let your students know that you are aware of these signs of cheating.
• Probing for Plagiarism in the Virtual classroom
  May 2003 article in Syllabus magazine, By Lindsey S. Hamlin and William T. Ryan.
• What Constitutes Plagiarism?
  This is a student-created Web site that explains plagiarism and its consequences.

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Detecting Plagiarism

• Turnitin.com
• EVE 2
• Glatt Plagiarism Services

Another useful strategy is to enter a text string (a fairly lengthy phrase, usually set off by quotation marks) in either Google or AltaVista and then search for it. That may turn up an original article whose content was then copied verbatim and included in a student paper or report. Some search engines have incredible search features such as finding pages with images having a specific filename, pages that contain the specified word or phrase in the page title, or pages with a specific word or phrase in the URL.

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Suggestions for Preventing Plagiarism

from Jack Paulus of truthmapping.com:

Teachers, Beware! You need to know where your students are finding ads to sites that encourage plagiarism. Here are some of the sites that encourage academic fraud through the sale of pre-written and made to order team papers and essays:

• Cheathouse
• Perfect Essays
• Direct Essays
• Monster Papers

Useful suggestions from teachers:

• Provide class time for writing. Don't allow students to write reports completely outside of class.
• Provide time for peer review and response groups.
• Surround students with information about how to cite sources (APA format, MLA format, posters, handouts, Web sites, etc.) See APA Online for the latest information on APA format for document citations.
• Develop a system for differentiating between copied text and original thoughts (i.e., Jamie McKenzie's method of colored text.)
• Use mind-mapping software like Inspiration to help students think and plan before they write.
• Make sure assignments encourage critical thinking rather than recitation of facts: compare, contrast, select the best, etc.
• Use content-specific software that promotes critical thinking rather than "drill and kill" or memorization.
• Create a class database and encourage students to use it to draw conclusions.

Robert Eiffert, a librarian at Image Elementary in Vancouver Washington, adds two more items to this list:

• Get some background information first. That will help with search terms and give a framework to hang the new knowledge on. Online encyclopedias are a great place to start. Many offer links to quality Web sites for further information.
• Evaluate the resource for quality and accuracy of information. This is a vitally important information literacy skill.

Some advice from other teachers:

• The ultimate goal should not be to produce a 10 page paper. It is to produce a product of coherent thoughts woven together to make sense and inform about a particular topic or question, to address issues, and to qualify the resources used to produce that paper.
  -- KCStarguy@aol.com

• Instead of asking students to write about "What were the factors that led up to the French Revolution" or some other historical event, why not ask them to write about "Why did an equivalent event during the same historical period NOT happen?" Few marketable papers exist on such topics. Another idea would be to develop a Web Quest about the issue you would like your students to explore.
  -- Susan Harris

• I always tell my students, "I know you can buy term papers from cheathouse.com, but did you know that places that sell papers to students also sell those students' names to US?" That usually stops them.
  --Susan Tannenbaum

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