Addressing Plagiarism in the Schools

By -


In the classic movie Back to the Future, in a scene that takes place in 1955, Biff “the bully” is seen demanding that Marty McFly’s father (the classic nerd) do his homework for him, but he is smart enough to know what to do so he won’t get caught cheating. “I gotta have time to recopy it. Do you realize what would happen if I handed in my homework in your handwriting? I'll get kicked out of school. You wouldn't want that to happen would you?,” he explains to Marty’s dad one day when he gave him the homework assignment late.

Plagiarism is not a new issue, but with the rise of resources available to students on the web, it has become a whole new game of cat and mouse between students and teachers. It has become very easy for students to simply cut and paste directly from the web into a document that they could submit as their own work. Plagiarism, the act of submitting work that is not one’s own, continues to be a concern that schools, both high schools and colleges, need to address proactively.

Back in 2011, Mind/Shift writer Audrey Watters talked about Plagiarism Differences in High School and College Students. She referenced a report that had been published by the plagiarism software company TurnItIn that noted Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers as two of the most popular places that students used to steal content. Interestingly, the report went on to suggest that plagiarism habits differ slightly between high school and college students. High school students make more use of social media and content sharing sites while college students gravitate more to content from cheat sites and paper mills.  

Many schools are gravitating towards services like TurnItIn to help them combat the growing issue. TurnItIn offers users, typically teachers, the ability to have student work analyzed against a large web-based comparison database to be checked for originality. The database has over 45 million pages of digital content. The software will highlight passages in a piece of student-work that match or have a high degree of similarity to similar passage in its database. The student work then gets added to the database for the future, thus eliminating the chance that a student could give their work to a student in another class with a different teacher.

Recently, Edudemic writer Kristen Hicks talked about the 5 Best Plagiarism Detection Tools for Educators. In addition to TurnItIn, Hicks talked about these detection tools: Plagiarismchecker.com is a free site developed by middle school teachers. It works a lot like TurnItIn, but it doesn’t draw from the same digital database. Instead, this tool checks small phrases in a paper against resources available in sites like Google or Yahoo.  SafeAssign is a service that is available only for clients who use the management software BlackBoard. Plagscan is a web-based plagiarism detection tool that works much like TurnItIn, giving papers a score of red, yellow, or green which corresponds to the level of originally that the paper contains. Finally, the Plagiarism Checker, a tool first developed by a college student, offers a simple copy and paste function that matches student work against digital content from the web. 

The question of what to do with students who plagiarize has also changed over the years. When I was in high school, the solution was simple: If you cheat, you get a zero on the assignment. Many schools, however, have moved away from tying academic behaviors to academic grades, and so other consequences must be assigned. At my high school in southern New Hampshire, we have adopted an Academic Integrity policy which clearly articulates what will happen if a student plagiarizes work. They are always required to resubmit the assignment, because at our school we believe that they should never be off the hook from doing the work. For their actions they may lose privileges like parking or sports participation, or they may be asked to complete a digital citizenship online unit that the school uses to teach students why plagiarism is such a big deal. Many of the plagiarism detector tools, like TurnItIn, offer similar plagiarism education modules through their service for their users.

Will we ever reach the day when plagiarism is gone? We probably won’t. But if we can teach our students how to be responsible digital citizens who hold themselves to high levels of academic integrity and honesty, we will be taking a step in the right direction towards helping them to be honest, productive members of society.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Speech to the NHS Inductees on Scholarship

By -
Image
Tonight, I will be speaking to you about scholarship, one of the four pillars of the National Honor Society. Scholarship is one of those words that we all can identify with, but it isn’t that easy to define. Dictionaries often define it to mean “academic achievement, learning; or the qualities of a scholar.” The qualities of a scholar --- well my ninth grade English teacher Mr. Tomallo never would have allowed me to use the word I was trying to define in the definition, so I have to dig deeper. What is a scholar? Again I turn to the dictionary, and I find the following: “A scholar is a learned person, someone who attends school or studies with a teacher.” I’m still not satisfied with this result. It seems the online dictionaries that Google has offered me are not helping me summarize what should be an easy-definable concept, scholarship. Perhaps I will need to research some examples of scholarship to help us better understand the concept.   In preparation for this speech...
Read more

Does Your School Facility Need a Makeover?

By -
Image
Does your school facility need a makeover? According to this 2012 report by the National Center for Education Statistics, 53% of American schools are due for such an upgrade. Upgrades can be done in ways to fit almost any school budget. The key for school principals is to stretch the financial resources they have to provide the biggest rate of return possible to enhance student learning and overall school culture.   At a recent visit to my child’s middle school, the principal took me on a tour of recent upgrades made to their front entrance lobby. The building, built quickly and cheaply in the 1970’s has long since reached the status of obsolete in our community, yet we as a voting community just aren’t ready to support a project to build a new middle school. Like so many other principals from coast to coast in this situation, the principal had to look for small ways to make facility upgrades that would have a big impact. The lobby project was this kind of a project. Much...
Read more

My Speech to the NHS Inductees on Character

By -
Image
Character is perhaps the most abstract of the four National Honor Society pillars, and that perhaps makes it the most difficult to quantify and speak about. Most of us would say that we know good character when we see it. We identify with examples of strong character. Consider this situation: Four friends from out of state are passing through Kingston on their way to a vacation in the White Mountains. Their names are Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer. Yes, for those of you who recognize this story I am talking about the 4 main characters from the television series Seinfeld and this is the famous “final episode.” They witness a robbery in broad daylight. The robber has his hand in his pocket, and the victim shouts that the man has a gun. As soon as the robber runs away, a Kingston policeman appears on the scene; but instead of pursuing the robber, he arrests Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer for having violated the "Good Samaritan" law. Since the four of them spent ...
Read more