Plagiarism In An Online World

1. Plagiarism In An Online World IDC 2001-2002 Presented by: Jessica Hand, Mile End, EMSB Sabine Cossette, EMSB RECIT A special thank you to Alex Roberts, a teacher with the Halifax Regional School Board, for allowing us to use parts of his power point presentation.

2. Click, Click, Cut, Paste…Student Plagiarism in an Online World Alex Roberts – Halifax Regional School Board

3. Plagiarism is an issue that will arise given the access to the WWW • But the WWW has value and many resources • Students need to learn to respect intellectual property

4. Quotable… “Recent studies indicate that approximately 30 percent of all students may be plagiarizing on every written assignment they complete.” - Turnitin.com Alex Roberts – Halifax Regional School Board

5. Game Plan… • Awareness • Prevention Strategies • Detection Strategies • Resources Alex Roberts – Halifax Regional School Board

6. Graphic Evidence … Ina recent survey (Who’s Who Among American High School Students) • 80 percent of high achieving high schoolers admitted to having cheated at least once • Half said they did not believe cheating was necessarily wrong Alex Roberts – Halifax Regional School Board

7. 95% of cheaters said they had never been caught. • Three in four admitted to plagiarizing at least some parts of term papers. Alex Roberts – Halifax Regional School Board

8. Plagiarismn. act of taking ideas, passages etc. from an author and presenting them as one’s own - plagiarize or -isev. -Standard dictionary definition Alex Roberts – Halifax Regional School Board

9. Awareness • Model referencing: • Students have to learn about citation • E.g. keep an Internet log (finished product)

10. Some students feel their writing skills are inadequate • Some students try to rationalize copying or buying material from the Web as a form of “research” Alex Roberts – Halifax Regional School Board

11. Quotable… “When you take stuff from one writer it’s plagiarism. When you take it from many writers it’s called research.” -Wilson Mizner Alex Roberts – Halifax Regional School Board

12. Tip… “Junior high and high school students are more likely to crib copy from CD-ROM encyclopedias or take pieces of research whole cloth off a Web page rather than buy a term paper.” - Jane Healey, educational psychologist Alex Roberts – Halifax Regional School Board

13. Suggestion: • On a ped day take 2 hours • Look at the resources online as well as CDs

14. Common forms of online plagiarism • Downloading a free research paper • Buying a paper from a commercial “paper mill” e.g. Termpapers.com • Copying an article from the Web (e.g. an online database) Alex Roberts – Halifax Regional School Board

15. Most common: • Outline sites • Anything not to read the book • The “Coles Notes” approach

16. “Cutting and pasting” to create a paper from several sites or sources – AKA the “assembly-kit” approach. Alex Roberts – Halifax Regional School Board

17. Faking a “citation” or making up quotations • Quoting less than all the words copied. (i.e missing quotation marks or premature end quotation marks.) Alex Roberts – Halifax Regional School Board

18. TIP… Do spot checks on quotations.

19. Tip… • Research shows that cheaters : • tend to be better students, since they were often under the most academic pressure to succeed • were more likely to have access to the Internet at home Alex Roberts – Halifax Regional School Board

20. Prevention Quotable… “Prevention is the most important element in the fight against plagiarism.” - Plagiarizeddot.com Alex Roberts – Halifax Regional School Board

21. Strategies for Prevention • Establish a “digital code of ethics” at the beginning of the year • Make the penalties clear • Educate your students about plagiarism Alex Roberts – Halifax Regional School Board

22. Provide a list of specific topics (the narrower the better) • Example:ClassicNotes • Run background checks on major topics • Visit some of the favourite reference sites e.g. Microsoft’s Encarta Encyclopedia Alex Roberts – Halifax Regional School Board

23. Require oral reports of student papers • Require specific components in the paper • Have students include an annotated bibliography Alex Roberts – Halifax Regional School Board

24. TIP… • Start small - Have students: • Use Image logs • Learn about Netcitation

25. Tip… Requirements that will strongly inhibit plagiarism, include: • Use of one or more sources written within the past year • Use of one or more articles or books that YOU provide Alex Roberts – Halifax Regional School Board

26. Incorporation of some information or data YOU provide • A personal interview with an expert or authority • Require a meta-learning essay • Not allowing students to pick their “own” topic. (See www.Papers123.com) Alex Roberts – Halifax Regional School Board

27. TIP… • Keep it student centered by having students come up with a focused research question. • The final draft should not be the first time you see the paper! • Try WebQuests

28. TIP… • Request hardcopies and/or electronic copies of the project at different stages in the research • For example: • Outlines • Plans • Drafts

29. Strategies for Detecting Plagiarized Work • Writing style and level i.e. is the student’s work consistent with the student’s previous work? • Size matters • Lack of references or quotations Alex Roberts – Halifax Regional School Board

30. Signs of datedness • Off the topic • Anachronisms • Anomalies of diction Alex Roberts – Halifax Regional School Board

31. Smoking guns AKA “blunders of the clueless” e.g. URL’s, “graphic omitted,” whiteout, etc. • Anomalies of style e.g. a mixture of British and American spelling Alex Roberts – Halifax Regional School Board

32. Tip… If possible, require students to pass in projects and essays backed up on disk. Acts as a deterrent and makes detection easier. Alex Roberts – Halifax Regional School Board

33. Strange/poor layout (the “print right away brigade”) • The ultimate in naiveté – printed right from the Internet Browser – Oh my! Alex Roberts – Halifax Regional School Board

34. Tip… To find an exact match for a specific phrase (string), conduct a “string search” by putting quotation marks around the phrase. Use a “string search site” such as Altavista, Lycos or Metacrawler. Alex Roberts – Halifax Regional School Board

35. Yet Another Tip… Use illogical combinations. Eg. “globalism” and “free trade” returned 6,789 hits on Altavista .com To catch a plagiarist make your searches illogical by combining a rare word from the essay with an operative word e.g. “globalism” and “beanie babies” returned 3 hits. Alex Roberts – Halifax Regional School Board

36. For difficult to detect plagiarism… • Use Findsame. It will return a list of matching pages, ranked by percent of sameness. www.Findsame.com • Or try a large-database, full-text search engine like Google, Northern Lightor Fastsearch Alex Roberts – Halifax Regional School Board

37. "Since I began using Turnitin.com in my classes, the incidence of plagiarism has dropped to almost zero. The level of trust in my classroom has gone up 100 percent, not only between teacher and student but also among my students themselves." David Presti, Professor of Neurobiology, UC Berkeley Taken from Turnitin.com, November 15, 2001, http://www.turnitin.com/ USERNAME: scossette@emsb.qc.ca PASSWORD: scy694bzq

38. Visit the the term paper sites • Use a commercial plagiarism detector such as www.Plagiarism.org. Alex Roberts – Halifax Regional School Board