Expect Originality! Using Taxonomies to Structure Assignments that Support Original Work

The online world offers opportunities to appropriate others’ work, while simultaneously offering opportunities for valuable research and creative exchange. The use of secondary research materials in academic writing can be represented as a continuum, with "plagiarism" on one end and "original work" on the other. Educators can take steps to prevent plagiarism by designing assignments that expect learners to respect others’ ideas and strive toward creating their own original work. Educational taxonomies, including the Cognitive and Affective Domains of Bloom’s Taxonomy, and the author’s Taxonomy of Collaborative E-learning, can serve as conceptual frameworks for designing assignments that 1) expect learners to present original work; 2) provide opportunities for learners to develop new ideas through meaningful online interaction; and 3) value learners’ ideas while respecting published authors’ intellectual property.

Plagiarism and the Community College

Although plagiarism is a problem in all educational institutions, the diversity of the community college student population and of the community college mission creates even more challenges. The purpose of this chapter is to discuss characteristics of community college students, define intentional and unintentional plagiarism, and provide methods that faculty can use to help students avoid both kinds of plagiarism.

Minimizing Plagiarism by Redesigning the Learning Environment and Assessment

In this chapter we have raised a number of questions and made attempts to respond. These question are: Can plagiarism be stopped? Should we stop students from using the information available on the internet? Is it enough if the students just acknowledge the sources in their work? What action is required to minimize the harmful, and maximize the useful, aspects of internet use in the educational setting? We want our students to learn, and demonstrate their learning with honesty and integrity. In the institutions of higher education students learning is judged through assessment tasks in the form of assignments, tests, and examinations. We have to ensure that high stakes assessments do not act as an inspiration to cheating in the form of plagiarism. We have provided arguments in support of the integration of process approach with deliverables at the end of the course for assessment of students learning.

Plagiarism, Instruction, and Blogs

This article takes as its point of departure the Colby, Bates, and Bowdoin Plagiarism Project (http://leeds.bates.edu/cbb), which sought to approach the problem of undergraduate plagiarism as a pedagogical challenge. By revisiting the decision to publish the project’s content by means of a weblog, the article considers the ways in which weblogs provide a reflective tool and medium for engaging plagiarism. It considers weblog practice and use and offers examples that attest to the instructional value of weblogs, especially their ability to foster learning communities and to promote the appropriate use of information and intellectual property.

International Students

This chapter addresses the incidence of unintentional plagiarism among international students whose native language is not English. Terminology widely used in plagiarism policies and in the literature indicates an overriding view of plagiarism as an offence. I have developed a conceptual framework to present an alternative position. The framework provides a matrix for tracing the progress of an international student’s induction into the culture and language of academic research. Based on insights from this framework, undergraduate students would be regarded as apprentice researchers who require guidance in developing skills and language for scholarly writing. During the early phases of their apprenticeship, students would be shown the use of genre analysis for ‘harvesting’ genre-specific language. Feedback on instances of inadvertent plagiarism would be non-judgmental, constructive and formative. I suggest that this approach should be adopted in the core curriculum so that all students can benefit from an academic apprenticeship and so avoid unintentional plagiarism.

Dealing with Plagiarism as an Ethical Issue

This chapter outlines various strategies employed to reduce plagiarism both at a departmental and an institutional level. A detailed description and evaluation is given of two workshops that were designed specifically to educate students about the nature of plagiarism. The workshops also aim to provide students with alternatives to plagiarism by improving their writing skills. Most importantly we believe that students should learn about plagiarism in the context of professional ethics and an ethical attitude should be promoted throughout their study. By using both an ethical and educational approach to dealing with plagiarism, we hope that students will learn that they have nothing to gain from plagiarising and be confident in their own skills.

International Students and Plagiarism Detection Systems

This paper explores the question of plagiarism by international students (non-native speakers). It argues that the inappropriate use of electronic plagiarism detection systems (such as Turnitin) could lead to the unfair and unjust construction of international students as plagiarists. We argue that the use of detection systems should take into account the writing practices used by those who write as novices in a non-native language as well as the way ‘plagiarism’ or plagiaristic forms of writing are valued in other cultures. It calls for a move away from a punitive legalistic approach to plagiarism that equates copying to plagiarism and move to a progressive and formative approach. If taken up such an approach will have very important implications for the way universities in the west deal with plagiarism in their learning and teaching practice as well as their disciplinary procedures.

Students and the Internet

This chapter explores the information revolution represented by the Internet. It argues that a number of contemporary debates over the nature of authorship and the ownership of ideas and information present serious challenges to traditional concepts of plagiarism. Especially considered are students’ many types of interactions with digital technologies and the effect of a “flat world” on their thinking and information-gathering practices. The author then offers suggestions for improving faculty and student understanding of the new information environment and for sustaining academic integrity in the midst of a knowledge revolution.

Substantial, Verbatim, Unattributed, Misleading

This chapter examines how to measure textual plagiarism more precisely, using as basis the four criteria of the American-based Office of Research Integrity’s definition of plagiarism: to what extent is the reuse of someone else’s text substantial, (nearly) verbatim, unattributed and misleading? Each of these criteria is studied in its variables, leading to the proposal of a scale. Next the implications for the verdict are discussed. This criterion-based approach does not claim to offer an easily workable solution in all cases, but at least stresses the need to achieve greater consensus and impartiality in assessing alleged plagiarism. Indeed, such cases are often handled very differently in terms of disclosure, assessment, and decision-making. For the sake of fairness, an allegation as serious as plagiarism requires the establishment and acceptance of more solid criteria.

Prevention is Better than Cure

This chapter adopts a four aspect model to address cheating and plagiarism in universities – education, prevention, detection and consequence. The research focussed on the two aspects of education and prevention as the authors feel that this area has not been considered in detail by the research. Building on past research, a series of eight focus groups (72 students) were conducted with students from information technology degrees at an Australian university. The students were asked to comment and discuss the phenomenon of cheating from their perspective. The chapter presents in detail the responses of the students as analysed by the researchers and then builds a set of guidelines for educators to use in the areas of education and prevention in relation to student cheating.