A common complaint of tutors in the digital era is the ease with which students can now plagiarise. How simple it is today for learners to copy and paste whole sentences, paragraphs, or even assignments, and pass them off as their own work!
Educating your learners about plagiarism
Perhaps the most important factor about plagiarism is that, while all learners have heard of it, and just about everybody knows it is ‘wrong’, a lot of learners do not fully understand what plagiarism is. The most important thing you can do to prevent plagiarism is educating your learners about it. Websites such as www.plagiarism.org have a great deal of useful information for educators and students about plagiarism.
Originality-checking sites
Apart from educating your learners about plagiarism, you also need to be alert to the signs of plagiarism. If your institution has a subscription to a web-based originality-checking site (such as www.turnitin.com), you will find this enormously helpful in both alerting you to plagiarism, and making your learners more aware of unintentional plagiarism.
Detecting plagiarism with Google
If your institution does not subscribe to such a service, it is still relatively easy to confirm if you think a learner has copied and pasted material from the Internet: simply type in a whole sentence from the assignment into a search engine such as Google, with quotation marks at the beginning and end, and the 'Results' page will instantly provide you with links to any articles that have that exact sentence in them.
It is important to type the sentence exactly as it appears in the assignment, and to place double quotation marks (“...”) around the sentence in the search box. This ensures that the search engine only looks for an exact match to the whole sentence, rather than searching for individual words in the sentence.
This is a highly effective method of identifying plagiarism from sources on the Internet if you find that whole sections of a learner’s work seem to be written in a different style from the learner’s own style.
Fair use, 'remixing' and attribution
Before jumping to conclusions that your learners have plagiarised, you need to be aware of the sources that they have copied text from. In the spirit of openness (See Unit 2, 'Empowering learners through open learning'), many authors today allow their materials to be copied or 'remixed' under certain conditions. For example, this Supporting Distance Learners site, which is published under a Creative Commons license, may be used and modified, but only with attribution and not for commercial purposes.
If you find your students engaging in the 'remix culture' in their use of original sources, you might want to ask yourself the following questions:
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Have they accurately attributed their sources?
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Has the cutting and pasting been a cognitive process or a mindless copying process?
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Has learning happened?
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Has the learner forged something new from what s/he has read and experienced?
If all else fails...
In the end, if learners do plagiarise, you need to be sure that both you and your learners are aware of your institution’s policy on plagiarism, so that you can take the required measures. At least, if you have spent time discussing plagiarism with your learners and have given them guidelines on how to avoid it, you will be able to reduce the number of unintentional or accidental acts of plagiarism on the students’ part.
Reflection
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Is plagiarism a problem in your institution? Do you have any tips you can share with other tutors on how to prevent it?
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What do you think your learners understand by the term 'plagiarism'? What could you do to help them understand the issue - and why it matters - more deeply?
References and additional resources
For more information about the use of Creative Commons licenses in making your materials freely available to other people to use and modify, see www.creativecommons.org.
For very clear and helpful information about plagiarism, see www.plagiarism.org.