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By
Marty Knepper
"Morningside
College cultivates a passion for life-long learning and a
dedication to ethical leadership and civic responsibility"
To
fulfill the college's mission statement, students need to
learn the joys and methods of research and understand why
presenting others' writing and research as one's own is a
breach of academic ethics.
Unfortunately,
there are any number of web sites, some sponsored by corporations,
that offer papers as "study aids." Students can simply plug
in the topic or work on which they need a paper, and-voila!
Often, there is no charge. For a student under stress or a
student who doesn't full understand the ethical issues involved,
the temptation is strong.
Fortunately,
plagiarism busters like Turn It In have evolved that do an
excellent and rapid job of identifying plagiarism in papers.
Turn It In can tell you, within about 24 hours, what lines
are taken from what specific sources and can rate the degree
of plagiarism from 1 to 5. Since so much written material
is on the World Wide Web, Turn It In can detect most plagiarism.
The
advantage of using plagiarism busters is that faculty members
don't have to spend time finding sources or playing the prosecuting
attorney role, trying to get a confession. When the Turn It
In results are there, and the plagiarism is obvious to faculty
and students, the faculty member and student can, instead,
talk about how the situation came about and the consequences.
Defining
Plagiarism in Plagiarism Policies
Most
professors in their plagiarism policies leave themselves some
wiggle room to make distinctions between dishonest plagiarism
that involves turning in others' work as one's own and plagiarism
that results from not understanding how to correctly document
sources according to MLA, APA, or another academic style manual.
This is an important distinction to make.
Discouraging
Plagiarism
The
best way to "deal with" plagiarism is to keep it from happening-first,
by explaining what it is, the penalties for it, and the sophistication
of plagiarism detection software; and second, by generating
assignments that make plagiarized papers unworkable. Some
faculty use these methods:
1. Require an annotated works cited.
2. Require stages of the paper to be turned in periodically
throughout the semester: research plans, outlines, rough drafts,
peer responses, etc.
3. Require unconventional research as part of the paper: interviews,
observations, surveys, study of primary source materials.
4. Require submission of copies of all secondary sources used
in paper.
5. Require topic approval and periodic conference
Anti-Plagiarism
Website
Morningside
College has a subscription to www.turnitin.com
. This portal has both information about Internet plagiarism
and a database of written work to check student papers against.
The site also features a procedure where students can submit
papers, view and re-view each other's work, and get formal
repsonses from you, the instructor. For directions on how
to use TurnItIn, call Robert Anderson at 274-5295.
Other
Anti-Plagiarism Resources
T
he University of Alberta Libraries' "A
Faculty Guide to Cyber-Plagiarism"
T
he Department of English at Northern Illinois University's
Plagiarism:
A MUST Read is a good explaination for students.
(the
following sites provided and annotated by Long, Phillip D.,
Plagiarism: IT-Enabled Tools for Deceit?, Syllabus Magazine,
Syllabus.com, January 2002)
"FORGET
ABOUT POLICING PLAGIARISM. JUST TEACH"
(The Chronicle of Higher Education, 48, issue 12, November
16, 2001, p. B24) by Rebecca Moore Howard, associate professor
of writing and rhetoric, and director of the writing program,
at Syracuse University.
Howard
argues that "[i]n our stampede to fight what The New York
Times calls a 'plague' of plagiarism, we risk becoming the
enemies rather than the mentors of our students; we are replacing
the student-teacher relationship with the criminal-police
relationship. Further, by thinking of plagiarism as a unitary
act rather than a collection of disparate activities, we risk
categorizing all of our students as criminals. Worst of all,
we risk not recognizing that our own pedagogy needs reform.
Big reform." The article is online to CHE subscribers at http://chronicle.com/weekly/v48/i12/12b02401.htm
[ from: CIT INFOBITS November 2001 No. 41 ISSN 1521-9275]
PLAGIARISM
DETECTION SOFTWARE MORE SOPHISTICATED
(Emily Easkin, The New York Times. "Stop, Historians! Don't
Copy That Passage! Computers Are Watching" Yahoo! News, January
26, 2002)
Over the last decade, plagiarism detection has gone high-tech.
Antiplagiarism software is routinely used by colleges, universities
and high schools on student work. At one end of the spectrum
are companies like Turnitin.com, based in Oakland, California,
which uses a software program to check the content of student
work against millions of sites around the Web and a database
of papers from online term-paper mills. At the other end are
companies like Glatt Plagiarism Services in Chicago, which
draw on techniques from cognitive theory to verify authorship.
The Glatt Plagiarism Screening program, for example, relies
on a method called the "Cloze procedure," originally used
in the reading comprehension portion of standardized intelligence
tests. Sample passages from a suspect work, which can range
in size from a single essay to an entire book, are scanned
into a computer, which, following the Cloze procedure, removes
every fifth word. The sample passages are then returned to
the author, who is asked to fill in the missing words. Glatt's
founder and president, Dr. Barbara Glatt, says that if the
work is authentic, the author will be able to recall most
of the missing words. A plagiarist, on the other hand, will
invariably flunk the test, or else fess up before taking it.
[ from: CIT INFOBITS November 2001 No. 41 ISSN 1521-9275]
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