Preventing and Detecting Plagiarism

 

SUNY Cortland Academic Integrity Policy

The policy, including disciplinary action, is outlined in Chapter 340 of official SUNY Cortland College Handbook. Here is the excerpt from the handbook.

 

Preventing Plagiarism: Tips for Faculty

 

What is the first thing you should do?
Put your expectations on your syllabus.

 

Is that enough?
No. At the beginning of the semester, discuss academic honesty in class. Make students aware of the nature of academic writing, i.e., the fact that it engages other writers’ ideas and follows certain conventions and customs. Point out that knowledge of these conventions (paraphrase, quotation, summary, documentation of sources, etc.) is not tacit. The conventions have to be learned. Explain the concepts of intellectual property, copyright, and fair use. Point out that plagiarism is a legal issue as well as an ethical and moral one. Give students a list of examples of different types of plagiarism. Tell them about penalties and discuss some past cases.

 

Can you assume that students have learned the conventions of academic writing?
If students took CPN 100 Academic Writing I and CPN 101 Academic Writing II at Cortland, they were taught the features and rules of academic writing. Their knowledge and skill may have atrophied if they have not had much writing practice outside of or since the composition course.

Transfer students may have taken composition courses that focused on expressive writing or writing that does not require the student to engage reading sources. The best approach is to educate students about plagiarism. Do this yourself or refer them to handbooks and web sites.

 

How can you design assignments that will reduce the likelihood of plagiarism?

    • Be sure your expectations are clear.
    • Contextualize the assignments. Specify topic, purpose, audience, and genre. Everyone does not have to do the same assignment. Give a list of prompts. Use topics that are innovative, unique, current, and local, or have students reply to a thesis statement or quotation.
    • Distribute a handout with clear instructions. Include a guide for documenting sources in your discipline. Two excellent sites are the University of Wisconsin library and the Purdue University online writing lab.
    • Require, at an early stage, an annotated bibliography, with call numbers and complete URLs (title, author, organization, title of broader work, date created or modified, date of student access, full URL).
    • Require students to submit photocopies of the sources or the page from which the material was taken.
    • Specify the types of sources students may include:

- use only material published in the last 5 years
- use only material placed on reserve in the library
- use only certain types, e.g., “at least 2 books, 3 articles, 1 Internet site.”
- include one or more readings that have been assigned in the course
- include data from interviews

    • Monitor work in progress. Make sure work is handed in before the end of the semester.
    • adopt a Process Writing approach and have students follow a sequence of prewriting, drafting, revising and editing,
    • require students to submit papers in stages: prospectus/outline, annotated bibliography, summaries of select sources,
    • Do not allow last minute changes of topic, and do not accept one-shot final draft copies.
    • Do not repeat assignments.

 

Is there anything else you can do?

    • Create a database of student writing
    • Require students to submit their work to www.turnitin.com
    • Require them to send you electronic versions of their papers so that you can create your own searchable file

 

Detecting Plagiarism

Here are some resources to help you combat plagiarism.

    • Plagiarism.com lists detailed information on the technologies behind Turnitin.com, facts about Internet plagiarism, and a report on the growth of "cheatsites" Online.
    • Coastal Carolina University lists active Internet paper mills and was compiled as part of a teaching effectiveness seminar on cheating, plagiarism and Internet paper mills. When this list started in March 1999, it had 35 sites on it. There are now more than 250.
    • Lemoyne College has a great plagiarism site that contains all the information one could want to know about the subject.
    • Council of Writing Program Administrators. Click on Position Statements for an excellent resource, Defining and Avoiding Plagiarism: The WPA Statement on Best Practices.
    • Cheating 101: a comprehensive list of the sites students use to purchase papers, a list of plagiarism detection sites, and helpful advice for detecting plagiarized papers.
    • Virtual Salt is maintained by Robert Harris, who has written an excellent book on the subject of plagiarism, The Plagiarism Handbook. The site is an excellent resource for teachers that helps them educate students on the subject, detect plagiarism, prevent it, and even discuss the subject with students who may or may not be guilty of academic dishonesty.
    • Bedford/St.Martins has a site that includes handouts that are designed to be used as a quick reference for both students and instructors dealing with plagiarism. Instructors are permitted to distribute the handouts.
    • University of Alberta provides a comprehensive site for detecting plagiarism.
    • Iowa State University lists strategies for deterring plagiarism.

 

Using Turnitin.com

SUNY-Cortland has purchased a subscription to Turnitin.com. To use the service, one must first register with the SUNY-Cortland account on Turnitin.com. It involves two steps: 1) At Turnitin.com’s homepage, click “Create User Profile.” Follow the on-screen directions. 2) After registering and logging in under the username and password just established, click “Join Account.” At the prompt, one will be required to provide Cortland’s subscription information: Account ID and Password. For the Cortland account number and password, please contact Shawn Van Etten, Director of Institutional Research and Assessment, 753-5565, vanettens@cortland.edu. This information is not needed again after an instructor has successfully joined Cortland’s Turnitin.com account. Please note: The instructor’s students do NOT use this administrative information when they enroll in a class. After an instructor registers with Turnitin.com and joins Cortland’s account, the instructor must then create separate accounts for his/her classes. At the instructor’s main page (after logging in), there is a link to “Add a Class.” Only one class can be added at a time. Each class is given an ID #, and the instructor must establish a unique password for each class. (This is the information that will be given to students when they enroll in a class.) Once classes are added, the instructor can create assignments, change preferences, and use other features such as the calendar.

 

After assignments are set up by the instructor, student essays can be submitted to Turnitin.com in two ways: 1) An instructor uploads student assignments (one at a time or in batches) or 2) Students submit their own essays. Regardless of which method an instructor chooses, students must first be registered within that instructor’s class.

 

Students register with the site (“Create a user profile”) and then enroll in their designated class (“Join Account”) by entering the class ID# and password that the instructor set up for each class. When each student enrolls, she creates her own username and password, and once she joins her designated section, only then can she begin using the student features of Turnitin.com.

 

It is easy for students to submit their own essays to the site. At the individual class homepage, a list of assignments set up by the instructor will be visible. To the right of each assignment name is a “Submit” button. Students can either upload a document (for example, as an MS Word document) or copy-and-paste a document. Students should be warned that copying-and-pasting erases the formatting and stylistics of the original document. If the instructor wants to print a copy of a student’s essay and expects the line spacing and other conventions to be as in the original, then students should be told not to cut-and-paste.

 

After an essay is submitted, the essay is scanned by Turnitin.com’s plagiarism detection system. Depending on what an instructor designates (under “Preferences” on the class homepage), the plagiarism analysis can be done in a matter of minutes (“Fast track turnaround”) or within 24 hours. The system scans each essay and compares it to documents on the internet and within the site’s own databases (which consist of thousands of other student essays submitted to Turnitin.com).

 

All essays are given “Originality Reports” after the plagiarism scan is complete. (If an instructor does not want his/her students to see the reports generated for their essays, one should check the appropriate box under “Preferences.”) The report will be color-coded (according to severity or percentage of similarity), and will mark the lines in the essay that are identical to a source on the internet or within a database. However, it is the instructor’s responsibility to know how to read and analyze the originality reports. One should not rely only on the color-code designation, because of several possibilities:

    • The plagiarism detection system does not distinguish properly attributed direct quotations as such. A paper that contains several direct quotations, even if they are documented and perfectly acceptable, will come back with a “High” percentage and color-code (green, yellow or red). Before accusing a student of plagiarism, an instructor should go through the originality report, compare it with the student’s original document, and verify that all direct quotations have indeed been documented properly.
    • Essays submitted by students who are writing essays on the same sources, and who therefore have identical Works Cited pages (assuming they have been done correctly), can also trigger a false plagiarism detection alert.
    • No plagiarism service is infallible, and Turnitin.com should not take the place of an instructor’s own set of eyes and awareness of his/her students’ writing styles. Obviously, what is not on the internet or within an online database can not be scanned by Turnitin.com, so many plagiarized papers will go undetected if a student has taken ideas and wording from a book or a print journal, or from a student in another class whose instructor does not use Turnitin.com.

Nonetheless, Turnitin.com is a user-friendly service that is effective when used regularly. And, in the event of a plagiarized paper, the originality report is additional documentation for an instructor who proceeds with a charge of Academic Dishonesty against a student.

 

- Amy Burtner