plagiarism in an online world

IDC 2001-2002 Presented by:

Jessica Hand, Mile End, EMSBSabine Cossette, EMSB RECIT

A special thank you to Alex Roberts, a teacher with the Halifax Regional School Board,

for allowing us to use parts of his power point presentation.

Click, Click, Cut, Paste… Student Plagiarism in an Online World

Alex Roberts – Halifax Regional School Board

• Plagiarism is an issue that will arise given the access to the WWW

• But the WWW has value and many resources

• Students need to learn to respect intellectual

property

http://www.ozline.com/webquests/intro.html

Quotable…“Recent studies indicate that approximately 30 percent of all students may be plagiarizing on every written assignment they complete.”

- Turnitin.com


http://www.turnitin.com/

http://www.turnitin.com/

Game Plan… Awareness

Prevention Strategies Detection Strategies Resources


Graphic Evidence …In a recent survey (Who’s Who Among American High School Students)

80 percent of high achieving high schoolers admitted to having cheated at least once

Half said they did not believe cheating was necessarily wrong


95% of cheaters said they had never been caught.

Three in four admitted to plagiarizing at least some parts of term papers.


Plagiarism n. act of taking ideas, passages etc. from an author and presenting them as one’s own - plagiarize or -ise v.

-Standard dictionary definition


Model referencing:

• Students have to learn about citation

• E.g. keep an Internet log (finished product)

Some students feel their writing skills are inadequate

Some students try to rationalize copying or buying material from the Web as a form of “research” Alex Roberts – Halifax Regional School Board

Quotable…“When you take stuff from one writer it’s plagiarism. When you take it from many writers it’s called research.”

-Wilson Mizner


Tip…“Junior high and high school students are more likely to crib copy from CD-ROM encyclopedias or take pieces of research whole cloth off a Web page rather than buy a term paper.”

- Jane Healey, educational psychologist


Suggestion:

• On a ped day take 2 hours

• Look at the resources online

as well as CDs

http://www.emsb.qc.ca/recit/plagiarism/resources.htm

Common forms of online plagiarism Downloading a free research paper

Buying a paper from a commercial “paper mill” e.g. Termpapers.com

Copying an article from the Web (e.g. an online database)


Most common:

•Outline sites

•Anything not to read the book

•The “Coles Notes” approach

“Cutting and pasting” to create a paper from several sites or sources – AKA the “assembly-kit” approach.


Faking a “citation” or making up quotations

Quoting less than all the words copied. (i.e missing quotation marks or premature end quotation marks.)


TIP…

Do spot checks on quotations.

Research shows that cheaters :

•tend to be better students, since they were often under the most academic pressure to succeed

•were more likely to have access to the Internet at home

Tip…


Quotable…“Prevention is the most important element in the fight against plagiarism.”

- Plagiarizeddot.comAlex Roberts – Halifax Regional School Board

Prevention

http://vm.robcol.k12.tr/~jroyce/detecting.htm

http://vm.robcol.k12.tr/~jroyce/detecting.htm

Strategies for Prevention Establish a “digital code of ethics” at the beginning of the year

Make the penalties clear

Educate your students about plagiarism


Provide a list of specific topics (the narrower the better)

Example: ClassicNotes

Run background checks on major topics

Visit some of the favourite reference sites e.g. Microsoft’s Encarta Encyclopedia


Require oral reports of student papers

Require specific components in the paper

Have students include an annotated bibliography


TIP…

Start small - Have students:

•Use Image logs

•Learn about Netcitation

Tip…Requirements that will strongly inhibit plagiarism, include:

Use of one or more sources written within the past year

Use of one or more articles or books that YOU provideAlex Roberts – Halifax Regional School Board

Incorporation of some information or data YOU provide

A personal interview with an expert or authority

Require a meta-learning essay

Not allowing students to pick their “own” topic. (See www.Papers123.com)


TIP…

•Keep it student centered by having students come up with a focused research question.

•The final draft should not be the first time you see the paper!

•Try WebQuests

TIP…

Request hardcopies and/or electronic copies of the project at different stages in the research

For example:

•Outlines

•Plans

•Drafts

Strategies for Detecting Plagiarized Work Writing style and level i.e. is the student’s work consistent with the student’s previous work?

Size matters

Lack of references or quotations


Signs of datedness

Off the topic

Anachronisms

Anomalies of diction


Smoking guns AKA “blunders of the clueless” e.g. URL’s, “graphic omitted,” whiteout, etc.

Anomalies of style e.g. a mixture of British and American spelling


Tip…If possible, require students to pass in projects and essays backed up on disk. Acts as a deterrent and makes detection easier.


Strange/poor layout (the “print right away brigade”)

The ultimate in naiveté – printed right from the Internet Browser – Oh my!


Tip…To find an exact match for a specific phrase (string), conduct a “string search” by putting quotation marks around the phrase. Use a “string search site” such as Altavista, Lycos or Metacrawler.


Yet Another Tip…Use illogical combinations. Eg. “globalism” and “free trade” returned 6,789 hits on Altavista .com To catch a plagiarist make your searches illogical by combining a rare word from the essay with an operative word e.g. “globalism” and “beanie babies” returned 3 hits.


For difficult to detect plagiarism… Use Findsame. It will return a list of matching pages, ranked by percent of sameness. www.Findsame.com

Or try a large-database, full-text search engine like Google, Northern Light or Fastsearch


"Since I began using Turnitin.com in my classes, the incidence of plagiarism has dropped to almost zero. The level of trust in my classroom has gone up 100 percent, not only between teacher and student but also among my students themselves."

David Presti, Professor of Neurobiology, UC Berkeley Taken from Turnitin.com, November 15, 2001, http://www.turnitin.com/

USERNAME: [email protected]: scy694bzq

Visit the the term paper sites

Use a commercial plagiarism detector such as www.Plagiarism.org.


plagiarism in an online world

Documents

american high school

resources students

better students

free research paper

pieces of research

commercial paper

student plagiarism

web page