Using A Student's Individuality to Combat Plagiarism

What is plagiarism, really?

Teachers may look at this question and answer, "passing off another's work as one's own." However, students who consider themselves as parts of the collaborative cyberspace community are less sure about that answer. A student may think, "If this information is available to everyone including me, can it really be stolen?"

As the Internet continues to play an increasingly large part in the classroom of earlier and earlier grades, the definition of plagiarism has become a hot button issue.

A recent article by eSchool News exposed an increase in the usage of content-sharing and Q&A sites as sources of unattributed material for assignments. In the article, an employee of the popular plagiarism-checking site Turnitin, says that teachers should be the ones to define plagiarism for their students.

An article in USA Today highlights another possibility. In this article, academic integrity experts say that students grasp the concept of plagiarism but are trying to redefine it by using not only social media sites but also websites such as WriteCheck, a site that shows a student how to reword borrowed content–essentially making his or her work undetectable to services like Turnitin. Unintentional or not, websites like WriteCheck are promoting a student mindset of, “If it’s not word for word, it’s not plagiarism."

So what's the problem?

The pressure on students to get it right and the ease and availability of social media are keeping students from expressing their inner voices, says Steve Johnson, author of Digital Tools for Teaching.

Johnson believes that students have forgotten the importance of originality because of past reliance on grades, tests, and bubble sheets. "Kids have been told for quite a while now that there is one right answer to everything and one way to solve a problem,” says Johnson. “That of course, is far from the real world truth."

Thus, Johnson's definition for plagiarism is slightly different—it's when students "take the path of least resistance." So what can educators do to break the plagiarism cycle?

Johnson says in order to bulwark against plagiarism, teachers must give assignments that encourage students to seek answers that can only be found in one place: their brains. These are assignments that require independent, creative, and critical thinking. For example, he suggests an assignment that asks students to analyze two things together, such as a comparison between a past and present event.

Johnson believes teachers should communicate to their students that opinions and self-propelled growth matter more to them than "getting the right answer."

"If you get something from a student and you can't tell which student created it, then that is a problem," says Johnson. "It should scream their name!"