Now Student Needs Lecture Again on Plagiarism

Students may plagiarize for many reasons, ranging from laziness to sloppiness to a lack of understanding about the reason for citations, but teachers can utilize a series of strategies to prevent problems while also teaching students good scholarly practices.

#10. They are lazy.

While every instructor has entertaining stories about students who hand in papers that still have other students' names on them, these cases are relatively rare. Most students practice not plagiarize intentionally. In fact, in a study of students at the college where I teach, many mentioned that they were worried virtually unintentionally plagiarizing. Sam said she was in a "panic about plagiarism." Aubrey, who had notebooks full of her creative writing, believed she was not good at enquiry papers because, "I was really scared almost plagiarizing." Withal, for students who are looking for the like shooting fish in a barrel style out of your assignment, the all-time fashion to keep them from plagiarizing is to make doing so too much work.

What you tin can do:

• Permit students know the consequences of plagiarizing. Students are less likely to plagiarize deliberately if they perceive the cost of getting caught as too high. Brand sure to have a clear statement in your syllabus, and let students know that you use Turn-It-In, Google, or some other method of checking their sources.
• Make it then hard to plagiarize that they might just every bit well write the newspaper. For example, y'all can require them to document their writing process by handing in a paper proposal, an outline, an annotated bibliography, multiple drafts, a copy of i or more of their sources, and/or a reflection piece on their writing. Requesting these things does not mean yous necessarily have a whole lot more work to do. Yous can utilise a peer response exercise or in-class piece of work for quick reviews of many of these items. If you inquire for multiple drafts, only cheque for a few things on each draft (for example, only for main idea and basic structure on the first typhoon or just for citation format on a 2d draft). Besides preventing plagiarism, collecting these documents tin can help yous assess pupil learning and, when necessary, arbitrate before the bitter stop.
• Make it hard to plagiarize past designing assignments around specific, focused questions or issues. Avert general topics like character in Hemingway. In that location are then many papers on the internet on such topics that the temptation may be also groovy.
• Students are less likely to plagiarize if they feel continued to a school through bonding with young man students and teachers, through small classes, and through fresh assignments thatrequire original idea rather than the rehashing of old debates (Ashworth & Bannister, 1997).

#9. They panic.

Some students volition deliberately plagiarize when they feel themselves backed into a corner in a loftier-pressure situation with a low gamble of beingness caught. Oftentimes, this behavior is a effect of poor fourth dimension management and arrangement skills. Information technology frequently happens when students are new to the kind of work they are being asked to do considering they are less likely to know how to organize themselves, may have unrealistic expectations about what they can exercise, and are less invested in the process. As a result, you lot might expect this behavior non only in incoming students but also when students are first asked to footstep up to a new level of work such every bit their first extended research project.

What y'all tin can do:

• Help students acquire how to pace themselves and organize their work, especially if the task yous have given them is circuitous, and they are novices. This can exist done by warning them of common process problems at the start, past assigning intermediate steps, by conducting an ongoing word of their process (online discussion groups are practiced for this and practice not have grade time), and past modeling your process.
• Explicitly hash out with students why the assignment is important in the context of the class and of their learning. Tell them what transferable skills and noesis they will gain from doing this assignment.
• Finally, equally in #ten, make the risks and consequences of being caught clear.

#8. They lack confidence.

Fifty-fifty students who are confident well-nigh their ideas may be tempted to borrow an author'southward words because the author "says it better than I can." Students may not be familiar with the jargon that'due south used in some academic areas that are new to them. They may feel awkward nearly trying to incorporate those words and phrases into their writing.

While Sophia did not plagiarize, she exemplifies this thinking when she explains why she used simply straight quotes from authors to speak for her: "So many times, I'll read things and go, 'oh, that sounds really, that'due south just how I feel.' . . .  you can't plagiarize, as nosotros know, so I'm merely similar, 'oh somebody had said that,' . . . I detest to say it's easier, but it'due south more cautious to practice that." Sophia repeated the words of academics that best matched her feelings, but in doing so she did not give herself a take chances to develop her ain ideas or her voice.

What you can do:

• Help students see how they already accept expertise in many areas, such as movie reviews, their favorite music, sports, or leisure activity, and equate learning bookish jargon with the learning they have already done to master these other topics.
• Take students write downward their ideas before, during, and after enquiry. The student who has put down their guesses about what they will observe and who has written a response immediately subsequently reading a source volition exist less likely to human activity as a passive collector of information.

#7. They think they're supposed to reproduce what the experts have said.

Students may be under the impression that scholarly publications are just repositories of facts, places they can go to find the truth of the thing, just as they might go to a dictionary to wait up a definition or the correct spelling of a give-and-take. Thus, they may assume there'southward no need to cite ideas and arguments from research sources, whatsoever more than i needs to cite Webster's after looking up how to spell a give-and-take (Lipson & Reindl, 2003).

Similarly, many students think learning is a passive procedure, whereby they're supposed to let other people fill up their heads with cognition, like vessels being filled with water. Thus, they may assume that the indicate of doing enquiry for a paper is to collect ideas, quotes, and evidence from experts. Then, to show what they've learned, they will reproduce it in the form of quotations, summaries, and paraphrases, possibly knitting together those pieces with some brief transitions. These are students who, after you explain a plagiarism policy, will say, "So y'all want me to cite every sentence?" They are most probable to plagiarize by failing to cite paraphrases and summaries, although they do tend to cite direct quotes (Lipson & Reindl, 2003; Ashworth & Bannister, 1997). For instance, one of my college students — who counseled teenage mothers and had been one herself — turned in a paper on teenage pregnancy that was almost entirely pasted together from online sources. When asked why she didn't utilize her ain experience or limited her well-adult opinions, she replied that she thought she could simply use the words of "experts."

What you lot can do:

• Require students to generate a hypothesis earlier they begin researching. Situate research as the attempt to test and refine their hypothesis.
• Show students examples of student papers with uncited summaries and paraphrases and require them to identify and correct the problem.
• When a paper is handed in, requite it a quick scan. If the pupil only cited direct quotes, he or she may be neglecting summaries and paraphrases.

#6. They take difficulty integrating source material into their ain exposition or argument.

It'due south not easy to write an constructive summary, paraphrase without plagiarizing, and weave quotations into one'south own text. This is particularly true if students are simultaneously figuring out what they think and learning how to formulate their statement co-ordinate to the conventions of a detail field. Like the students in #7, these students are likely to summarize or paraphrase without appropriately citing their sources.

What yous can do:

• Teach students to put their source fabric out of sight when they write their summaries so they are not tempted by the lovely words of the writer.
• Discourage paraphrase as much as possible since information technology tin can very easily lead to the haemorrhage of the author's words and phrases into the student'southward linguistic communication.
• Await for papers in which the citations only come at the end of paragraphs. This is often a sign that the student thinks the citation in the last sentence covers all borrowing from the source anywhere in the paragraph.

#five. They exercise not understand why people brand such a fuss near sources.

Some students feel that their feel is enough to support their claims. Others run into collecting sources as an improver task. These students volition ask, "If the source says the aforementioned thing I'chiliad maxim, do I take to cite it?" or "Do I demand to cite my own ideas if I detect that someone else has thought them?" These students do non see themselves equally members of a scholarly community that is collectively building knowledge but, rather, as islands of self-contained knowledge or as outsiders who are just trying to get through this ordeal (Ashworth & Bannister, 1997). To them, the conventions about citing sources may seem overly fussy and secondary to the procedure of learning (Ashworth & Bannister, 1997).

Their annoyance with these conventions is heightened when they detect that commendation rules can sometimes be contradictory or incomplete. In addition, some of their teachers may not require that they cite sources at all, while others haven't kept up with recent changes in citation styles. Every bit a upshot, the rules of commendation may seem to change from class to class.

What you can do:

• Explicitly discuss with students the goals of their research.
• Stress their membership in a customs of scholars to which they are besides contributing as well as borrowing knowledge (Ashworth & Bannister, 1997).
• Acknowledge up front that citation styles, especially for cyberspace sources, are in flux.
• Work with other teachers in your schoolhouse (or better nonetheless, your district) to develop citation rules that govern all student piece of work, and use those rules consistently from teacher to teacher and bailiwick to subject.
• Help students learn how to extrapolate from the examples presented in style manuals to craft citations for unusual sources.

#iv. They are sloppy.

Even professional writers and researchers tin be sloppy in their annotation taking, leaving them confused about what they wrote themselves and what they copied down from a source. (For example, the well-known historian Doris Kearns Goodwin was accused of plagiarizing portions of a few of her books; she claims that she did so inadvertently by relying on notes that she thought were her own words.) This confusion can get muddled non just on newspaper simply also in writers' minds. For example, one of my students told me that when she is actually focused on a projection, her brain will get like a record recorder — a week or two after reading sources, she'll recall words verbatim, but she won't recall whose words they were. She is not alone. A written report of English university students reported that "It was considered [by the students] highly feasible for a phrase or sentence from a text to gild in one'due south hidden and be reproduced discussion-for-word in an assignment" (Ashworth & Bannister, 1997).

What you tin can do:

• Teach students strategies for organizing their notes.
• Insist that students include citations in all drafts. Students often will say they volition put the citations in later, but and so they forget where they go. Tell them they can work on formatting citations in afterward drafts, but all drafts must be cited.

#three. They exercise not sympathize that they demand to cite facts, figures, and ideas, non but quotations.

These students are not trying to slip something past you lot. If they were, they wouldn't have gone to all the effort of including citations for every quotation they've included in their papers. Very often, students are merely dislocated about which kinds of data need to exist cited, or they assume that a citation placed at the end of a paragraph is sufficient to cover all of the sources they relied on in before sentences.

What y'all can practice:

• Brand sure every source in the references corresponds to a citation in the text. If there are more sources in the references than in the text, enquire where the source appears in the text.
• Run across as well the suggestions for # vi and #7 higher up.

#2. They are learning.

Some scholars of writing composition argue that students who corruption paraphrasing by simply inverting word order or changing word forms are just trying to digest new fabric. Such "patchwriting," they say, is office of a long tradition of learning to write by copying more expert writers, imitating them equally a way to begin processing and absorbing new content and skills (Howard, 1995). Consider, for example, Benjamin Franklin'south (1788) method of pedagogy himself to write: "I thought the writing [inThe Spectator] splendid, and wished, if possible, to imitate it. With this view I took some of the papers, and, making curt hints of the sentiment in each judgement, laid them by a few days, and then, without looking at the book, try'd to compleat the papers once more, by expressing each hinted sentiment at length, and equally fully as it had been expressed earlier, in whatever suitable words that should come to hand."

What you tin can do:

• Considerpatchwrittenpapers as early drafts.
• Hash out with students the need to digest and clarify material in more sophisticated ways.
• Work with them on summarizing rather than paraphrasing.

AND THE #1 REASON STUDENTS PLAGIARIZE IS . . .

#ane. They are used to a collaborative model of noesis production.

For students who have grown up with sampled music and video mashups, who come from certain cultural backgrounds, or who've experienced certain kinds of collaborative learning, it can be confusing to be told that they are supposed to distinguish their ain thoughts and ideas from those of their friends and family members (Price, 2002). Where does 1 depict the line between the two? Does one need to admit parental influence on the development of one's thinking? What about a peer'southward suggestion to add together an instance to a paper? And what nearly clergy who echo phrases and ideas that many others have used before them? Are they plagiarizing their sermons, or are they taking advantage of a shared resource?

Virtually composition scholars writing on plagiarism will indicate out that information technology is largely a mod idea, which arose with romantic individualism and capitalist notions of individual property (Bowden, 1996; Howard, 1995; Woodmansee & Jaszi, 1995). In contempo years, research into the socially synthetic nature of knowledge has profoundly challenged the view of the writer as a singular, discrete artistic force, able to come upwards with "original" words and ideas (Bowden, 1996; Howard, 1995; Woodmansee & Jaszi, 1995). As Bowden (1996) puts information technology, "Plagiarism is perhaps one of the foremost and richest of postmodern dilemmas."

What you lot tin can do:

• Discuss gray expanse cases with students.
• Discuss and ensure that students understand the reasons for citing sources.
• Foreground and discuss with students the context-specific nature of what does and does not count as plagiarism (Price, 2002).

References

Ashworth, P. & Bannister, P. (1997). Guilty in whose eyes? University students' perceptions of cheating and plagiarism in bookish work and assessment.Studies in Higher Education, 22, 187-204.

Bowden, D. (1996). Coming to terms: Plagiarism.English Journal, 85 (4), 82-85.

Franklin, B. (1788).The autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.https://wwnorton.com/college/history/america-essential-learning/docs/BFranklin-Autobiography-1788.pdf

Howard, R.Thousand. (1995). Plagiarisms, authorships, and the bookish capital punishment.College English language, 57,788-807.

Lipson, A. & Reindl, S.K. (2003, July-August). The responsible plagiarist: Agreement students who misuse sources.About Campus, 7-fourteen.

Toll, M. (2002). Beyond 'gotcha': Situating plagiarism in policy and teaching.College Composition and Advice, 54(ane), 88-116.

Woodmansee, Chiliad. & Jaszi, P. (1995). The police force of texts: Copyright in the academy. Higher English, 57,769-788.

Citation:Cleary, K.N. (2017). Top ten reasons students plagiarize & what teachers tin can do nearly information technology (with apologies to David Letterman).Phi Delta Kappan 99 (4), 66-71.

MICHELLE NAVARRE CLEARY (michelle.navarre@depaul.edu) is an associate professor in the Schoolhouse for New Learning, DePaul University, Chicago, Sick.

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Source: https://kappanonline.org/cleary-top-10-reasons-students-plagiarize/

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