Plagiarism

What is it? –

Plagiarism is cheating!!! When a student takes someone else’s original work and uses it as their own, they are plagiarizing. This has become much easier now that there is access to the World Wide Web. Kids are able to simply Copy and Paste work from the Internet and put it into their own projects. They are also able to go to websites that offer whole papers written by other students and use it in their classes.

How do we prevent it? –

There are numerous tips on how to prevent plagiarism. They range from making a list of topics that the students have to choose from to making your students write an essay explaining what they learned while completing the project. In order to assure that our students do not have the opportunity to take another student’s work, we need to change our projects and topics from year to year.

Here are some websites with suggestions on how to prevent plagiarism:

Anti-plagiarism Strategies for Research Papers - http://www.virtualsalt.com/antiplag.htm

Copy These Strategies to Stop Plagiarism by Students - http://www.chron.com/content/chronicle/editorial/97/09/29/galles.0-0.html

University of Alberta –

http://www.library.ualberta.ca/guides/plagiarism/preventing/index.cfm

How do we catch them at it? –

Since “cyber-plagiarism” has become such a problem, there are new resources for us to use to find out if a student has cheated. There are a few things you can do to check a questionable paper although there is still no full proof way of catching them.

1. You can type the questionable phrase into a search engine such as Yahoo, Google, or Dogpile.com. If the search engine recognizes the phrase, it will provide you with a link to it.
2. There are websites out there that have large databases to check through such as www.directessays.com.
3. Another option is to either find free software or purchase software that contains a database of 1000s of written works. A free software site is Plagiarism Resource Site Home Page from the Univ. of Virginia.