Carol Briggs

SLM 521

6/11/09

Elective 4

Internet Plagiarism: What Teachers Should Know

Nature and Scope of Problem

With so many readily available digital sources of information, it is easy and tempting for students to plagiarize these days. Unfortunately, the problem seems to be a fairly widespread one. The website Plagiarism.org states: "A national survey published in Education Week found that 54% of students admitted to plagiarizing from the internet; 74% of students admitted that at least once during the past school year they had engaged in "serious" cheating; and 47% of students believe their teachers sometimes choose to ignore students who are cheating." (Plagiarism.org, 2009).

How do students usually plagiarize? What can teachers do about it? It is important for teachers to know. This handout gives teachers information. Throughout this handout, you will see websites mentioned. Please look at these websites to increase your understanding of the problem and solutions.

Here are a few ways students can plagiarize from the internet:

--Download a free paper from the internet (Harris, 2009). There are a number of websites where students can simply download a free research paper. Two examples of such sites are "123 Student" (http://www.123student.com/and "4 Free Essays" (http://www.4freeessays.com/).

--Buy a paper from a “paper mill.” These sites often sell both stock papers and custom papers. Oftentimes, custom papers become stock papers before long (Harris, 2009). One site that is an example of this is "Papermasters" (http://www.papermasters.com/).

--Copy an article (or pieces of articles) from the web. If an entire article is copied from the web it may not have the kinds of citations that an academic paper is expected to have (Harris, 2009). Does the writing style seem like the student’s or not? While there are many examples of places on the web where students might copy an article, a good example is "Spark Notes" (http://sparknotes.com/). Sometimes students will cut and paste from several sources on the web. Does the writing style and citation style seem to vary? These might be indications of a cut-n-paste job (Harris, 2009).

Remedies

--Teach students what plagiarism is (Harris, 2009). Teach students what is an acceptable use of information and what is not. An excellent resource to talk about this with students is Indiana University's Writing Tutorial Services site: http://www.indiana.edu/~wts/pamphlets/plagiarism.shtml.

--Require steps to the research process. Set several different due dates for different steps in the research paper process. Ask them to turn in a topic proposal, a bibliography, an outline, a rough draft and a final draft (Harris, 2009). This makes plagiarism much more difficult. In Robert Harris' excellent article "Anti-Plagiarism Strategies for Research Papers" (http://www.virtualsalt.com/antiplag.htm) he goes into more detail about how to do this.

--Look it up on web. Teachers can take a distinct 5-10 word phrase from the student's paper and plug it into a search engine (such as Google) and sometimes locate the source that the student copied (Lincoln, 2002). Part 3 of Margaret Lincoln's article about plagiarism gives teachers more details about how to do this. Please look to this webpage for more information: http://www.infotoday.com/MMSchools/jan02/lincoln.htm.

Works Cited (and excellent resources to look at!):

Harris, Robert. (2009). Anti-Plagiarism Strategies for Research Papers. Retrieved June 11, 2009 from

http://www.virtualsalt.com/antiplag.htm.

Indiana University. (2004). Plagiarism: What it is and How to Recognize and Avoid it. Retrieved June

11, 2009 from http://www.indiana.edu/~wts/pamphlets/plagiarism.shtml.

Lincoln, Margaret. (2002). Internet Plagiarism: An Agenda for Staff Inservice and Student Awareness.

Retrieved June 11, 2009 from http://www.infotoday.com/MMSchools/jan02/lincoln.htm.

Plagiarism.org. (2009). Facts About Plagiarism. Retrieved June 11, 2009 from

http://www.plagiarism.org/plag_facts.html.