Updated: 01/23/08

Combating Plagiarism

In the era of SparkNotes can we hope to keep students from taking shortcuts in doing assignments?

Early in my college teaching career when I was still pretty green and naïve I recall being particularly impressed one semester by a well written and extensively footnoted research paper.

After flipping through it in class, I remarked how impressed I was, and asked the student to tell the class about her research.

She gave me a rather blank and apprehensive stare. Assuming that she was a bit shy about speaking out, I asked her a very basic question about her research. Still no reply.

Finally, seeing that the title of the paper summarized the basic idea of the research, I asked her to tell us the topic of her paper. She didn't know.

Of course, long before that final question everyone in the class (except me) realized that she had purchased the paper and turned it in without even bothering to read it.

At this point, of course, instructors faced with a difficult question. We can't accuse a student of plagiarizing a paper, with all the consequences for the student that can follow at many schools, without having some solid evidence.

When faced with expulsion, students are known to rush their cases to sympathetic review committees, or even to enlist the aid of a lawyer.

To prove plagiarism prior to the Internet it was necessary to spend a couple hours in the library trying run down the student's original sources.

I recall that one student with a highly questionable paper had cited many obscure sources, none of which were in our library. She explained that they were all from her father's personal library.

Faced with such difficulties, many professors would just give up and reluctantly give credit for what is clearly a plagiarized paper.

When it comes to plagiarism the Internet has been both a blessing and a curse. The "curse" is that there are hundreds-of-thousands of research and term papers available for downloading—typically for a fee. All you have to do is locate the paper you need, download the file, fill in your name and pertinent class information, print it out, and hand it in.

While the Internet may make plagiarism easy, the Internet also makes it easy to run down plagiarized work. Turnitin.com, which we've mentioned, has more than three million papers on file. The site regularly analyzes between 5,000 and 10,000 a day for originality. Plagiarism.org is more of an information portal to resources such as turnitin.com.

The University of Maryland University College (UMUC) has courses for both students and professors dealing with doing research, and recognizing and avoiding plagiarism issues. Information on this can be found at www.umuc.edu. The student version of the course, which is a required course and available on-line, is titled, "Information Literacy and Research Methods."

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