Connie Lippenholz

LS521, Su02

7/16/02

Elective - Plagiarism (Legal)

Preventing Internet Plagiarism

Introduction: With the hundreds of websites on the internet dedicated to helping students cheat on their assignments, how do you know if your student has actually written the paper submitted? Below are some strategies you as an educator can employ to help students avoid "Internet Plagarism."

 

What is Internet Plagarism? The availability of information on the internet makes it extremely more simplified to copy whole sentences, paragraphs and essays to claim as their own. For example, when I conducted an exact phrase search for "Antietam shocked both sides" through Google, I found two web sites that had used the following paragraph:

"The loss of human life at Antietam shocked both sides doing battle that day. And it nearly resulted in Lee's entire army, with its back to the Potomac River, being cut off from retreat across the Potomac (through Shepherdstown) and being captured by the stronger Union forces."

Therefore we have to assume that one site copied the other without placing the phrase in quotations or giving credit where it is due. In addition, through the internet, students now have access to hundreds of sites that will give them someone's paper, or write their papers, often for a hefty price.

 

How to Prevent Internet Plagarism:

Robert Harris, author of The Plagarism Handbook, has outlined 8 strategies to prevent plagarism:

  1. "Make the assignment clear" - The students must understand what is expected of them in order to present it in their assignment. Be as specific about your expectations as possible.
  2. "Provide a list of specific topics" - Make sure you have chosen topics that will be interesting and/or useful to the students, or allow the student to request a customtopic with your prior approval. Also, Harris recommends that you change your required topics periodically.
  3. "Require specific components" - Specify how many of each type of source you want utilized. You can narrow your requirements even further by specifiying a particular resource or resources that are less than a year old. Other components, such as graphs and personal interviews also limit the opportunities for plagarism.
  4. "Require process steps" - Break the paper-writing process down into smaller steps with incremental due dates. This will help those procrastinators who cheat because they've run out of time. This also allows you to provide learning opportunities for the student as you increase his/her writing skills.
  5. "Require oral reports" - Either one-on-one meetings or in-class presentations of their paper will dissuade most students from cheating, as it will seriously limit their knowledge of the topic. By asking questions outside of the paper's content, you can determine the level of research the student conducted.
  6. "Have students include an annotated bibliography" - Requiring additional information about their sources will require the students to assess the quality of their research. Require inclusion of information such as summaries, evaluations and locations of the sources (call number,URL, etc.)
  7. "Require most references to be up-to-date" - This will eliminate many of the "off-the-shelf" term papers students can purchase, because most of them are quite old. But don't be too limiting... it may not be plausible to require all the resources of a certain age, as that can limit the quality of research sources.
  8. "Require a meta-learning essay" - Ask your students what they learned from this project, what challenges they overcame, etc. This will help them to reflect on their learning. This also provides you as their teacher with information about their knowledge of their paper and a sample of their writing for comparison.

Harris has summarized these strategies in an article entitled "Anti-Plagiarism Strategies for Research Papers". <http://www.virtualsalt.com/antiplag.htm>

 

Detecting Internet Plagarism:

Harris goes on in his article to outline four methods of detecting plagarism:

  1. "Look for the clues" - For example:
    1. Mixed citation styles
    2. Absence of quotations
    3. Skewed format
    4. Dated references or terminology
    5. Blatant errors such as the original writer's name on the corner of a page
  2. "Know where the sources of papers are":
    1. Where could your students obtain materials for their project from? The "Internet Paper Mills" site <http://www.coastal.edu/library/mills2.htm> gives a listing of "over 225 general sites" that will supply or sell papers and essays that were active as of March 2002.
    2. Also, be familiar with how to search the "visible" (searchable public pages) and "invisible" (unsearchable database or pubication-specific) portions of the web for projects.
  3. "Search for the paper online":
    1. Conduct an exact phrase search of four to six unusual words using search engines such as Google, NorthernLight, or FastSearch (note: you'll have to check several search engines to be thorough - see my example above of a Google search)
    2. Search on-line database or publication-specific sites based on the subject matter and writing style
  4. "Use a plagarism detector" - If you have been unable to find proof of plagarism, but you are still unsure, there are commercial services that Harris outlines that can do further research for you, such as Plagiarism.org or Eve.

This resource is a summarization of "Anti-Plagarism Strategies for Research Papers" by Robert Harris, VirtualSalt. Accessed 16 July 2002. <http://www.virtualsalt.com/antiplag.htm>.

 

Additional information can be obtained at the following site:

Cut-and-Paste Plagiarism: Preventing, Detecting and Tracking Online Plagiarism, by Lisa Hinchliffe <http://alexia.lis.uiuc.edu/%7Ejanicke/plagiary.htm>

 

 

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