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How can you fight it?
After struggling with such dishonesty for years, Halonen and other psychology faculty suggest specific steps professors can take to keep plagiarism at bay:
Clear up the confusion. Explain to students up-front what plagiarism is, in all its forms, to prevent students from doing it inadvertently, say Halonen and Davis. Students also need to know that plagiarism is cheating and that it's wrong, says Davis. "There's a new ethic that runs, 'If I buy this paper it's my property, and I am turning in my property to the professor,'" he says. "Students need to be set straight on that."
Davis also suggests giving students the philosophical background that cheating is unfair to one's peers, and ultimately, to oneself: "Some students say cheating in high school is for grades and in college it's for their career," says Davis. "You need to point out, if they haven't learned anything, what types of jobs will they be able to hold?"
As for more accidental forms of plagiarism, the best inoculation is simply giving students more guidance, says Perilou Goddard, PhD, who teaches a psychology of writing course at Northern Kentucky University. "Students often don't realize that it kind of glows in the dark when they don't paraphrase," Goddard says. She advises walking students through APA style on citation (see pages 348-349 of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association) and teaching them to paraphrase from articles in their notes, so they don't repeat exact phrases.
Set rules. Spell out what happens when students plagiarize, suggests Frostburg State's Baxter. Professors might even wish to establish different consequences to fit plagiarism's different forms, she says. Or they may favor a simple, flat penalty, as used by Roig at St. John's University. In his classes, students get an automatic F if they plagiarize--often enough to make them fail the course. Also, in an effort to prevent students from using Internet paper mills, Roig forbids them to use the Web in their research.
Ask that students highlight cited text. Yet another way to pre-empt plagiarism is requiring students to submit all the articles used for a paper--with the sections they've cited clearly marked. The method is especially helpful when students cite material from obscure sources, says Roig. Limit the sources students use. Professors can also direct students to specific sources for their papers, making it easier to tell when students "lift" material. For example, Baxter assigns her students a paper on sex differences in book-carrying behavior--a topic covered by limited research articles that Baxter knows well. Baxter gathers the articles and puts them on reserve for her students in the library. Professors wishing to give students more latitude might let them find the articles themselves. Assign phased papers. Another strategy is requiring students to write just one paper over the course of a semester and having them submit the papers in stages, from the initial outline through several drafts. This way, a professor can catch students' citation problems and help them correct the problems in subsequent drafts, says Barbara Nodine, PhD, writing expert and psychology chair at Arcadia University (formerly Beaver College). "The goal here is teaching students authorship--how to take ideas and make them your own," says Nodine. By doing so, professors support students' development, rather than policing them, she says. Check students' work. If students know you check, they're less likely to cheat, says Roig. He, for example, requires students to submit their papers electronically, so that he can run an electronic plagiarism-detection program on them. The type he uses checks scanned-in original papers against students' papers, looking for duplicate strings of six consecutive words. More comprehensive detection programs that check students' papers against extensive databanks of original papers are available on the Internet. The old-fashioned alternative, says Halonen, is the Cloze procedure, in which a professor types up a suspicious passage from a student's paper, leaving a blank for every fifth word. The professor then meets with the student and asks him or her to fill in the blanks. "If the student can't at least give you the meaning, it means it's gone straight from their eyes to their fingertips without going to their brains," says Halonen. "They haven't grasped the idea that when we're teaching them writing, we're teaching them thinking." Article Sidebar
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