Plagiarism in the online environment

/

http://beyondtheclassroom.wikidot.com/sarah-johnston
@t_eloise Dr. Eloise Tan, Learning Innovation Unit,
Dublin City University

LI502: Assessment and Feedback in the
Online Environment


Plagiarism and the online
environment


Overview
 What is plagiarism?
 Plagiarism and online culture
 Why do students plagiarise?
 Preventing plagiarism
 Detecting plagiarism


What is plagiarism? Your
perspectives

 What is plagiarism?: Chat
box
 Have you encountered it?:
yes/no poll

What is plagiarism?: DCU definition
“Dublin City University defines plagiarism as follows: it is the deliberate act of
taking and using another person’s work as your own. It includes absent
references, reproducing the work (even with small changes) of another, taken
from books, journals, articles, TV programmes, the Internet, lecture notes
and so on. It also includes self plagiarism, i.e. submitting own work for more
than one assessment, copying another person’s work, with or without his/her
consent. Also included is collusion where a group of people collaborate or
collude to present an assessment or a substantial part thereof, when the
examiner required individual research and outcome.”

DCU Plagiarism Policy:
http://www.dcu.ie/registry/examinations/plagiarism.pdf


Do you include a statement on
plagiarism in your syllabus?
 Yes/No


What is plagiarism?: Examples
 Submitting someone else’s whole work
 Copying sections of someone else’s work without referencing it
 Paraphrasing someone else’s work without referencing it
 Buying work from “Cheat sites”: essay banks and bespoke assignment services
 Self plagiarism: resubmitting the same piece of work more than once
 Fabricating research results
 Collusion
 ** Plagiarism is not exclusive to text, it can be visuals as well

Have you experienced confronting a student about plagiarism? Talk button


Why is plagiarism important to us?
 Academic integrity – giving due credit to authors
 Academic conventions – citing and referencing are strongly
valued in the academic community, induction for students
into research skills
 Learning – if students are copying then they aren’t learning
(or are they?)
 We value originality (or do we?)


The relationship between plagiarism and the online
environment
 Is plagiarism in the internet age ‘new’?


Related to last webinar:
 Social, collaborative
activity rather than an
online repository of
information


No… but…
 Internet makes it easy to copy and paste
 File sharing, proliferation of information
 Remix culture: “To combine or edit materials to produce
something new”
http://www.everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series/
 With online courses, how do we know WHO is taking the
course? (See Palloff and Pratt, p.46)


Web tour: Statistics on plagiarism
 http://www.plagiarism.org/plag_article_did_you_know.html
 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/education/02cheat.htm


Webquest: Take 5 minutes to see what online resources exist
for students to plagiarise in your discipline


Cheat sites: essay banks and bespoke services

Taylor, M. & Butt R. (2006)
Q: How do you make £1.6m a year and drive a
Ferrari?
A: Sell essays for £400

 Market for online plagiarism estimated to be worth
£200 million.
 “The owner of one online organisation says he
employs 3,500 specialist writers who have written
more than 15,000 essays for students wanting a leg-
up in university courses. The company made £90,000
in one week in May and the owner has a Ferrari and a
Lamborghini in his garage.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/jul/29/highereducation.education

Cheat sites: essay banks and bespoke services

‘Write My Assignments’ is a Wicklow based
company that is centered on educational
progression….Your assignment will be
completed by a postgraduate mentor who
has completed your specific course which
ensures an understanding of what is
required to achieve optimum results. “

http://www.siliconrepublic.com/start-ups/item/20589-write-my-assignments-an-o

http://writemyassignments.com/

Why do students plagiarise?
 Chat box / Talk button: Discuss why you think students plagiarise in your discipline.


Why do students plagiarise?

 Ignorance: Lack of understanding of academic
requirements/citing and referencing
 Pressure/lack of time
 Cultural differences
 To improve marks
 Can get away with it
 Overassessed

Note
 First years:
 Generally have never had to paraphrase or summarise
 Have never read a scholarly article/journal
 Have never traced an idea or theory through the literature
 Have very little disciplinary knowledge
 Have never used an academic library
 Cannot be assumed to have critical thinking or analytical skills
 Tend to copy for accuracy – often lose sight of what is theirs and
what is from other sources
(Adapted from University of Minnesota)


Prevention vs. Detection


Preventing plagiarism? (1): Raising student awareness
 Inform students of plagiarism policy
 Tell students that their work will be checked for plagiarism
 Let students know that you are aware of essay writing services etc
 Provide guidance on academic writing and on citing/referencing:
 DCU ‘LETs’ tutorial: http://www.library.dcu.ie/lets/index.htm


Make sure they know
 You may need to explain plagiarism in detail, preferably with
examples of good/bad practice

 Use positive reinforcement
 Give guidelines with each assignment
 Use Turnitin as a ‘Health Check’ rather than a ‘Gotcha’
mechanism


Assessment type
 Consider alternatives to the ‘essay’: e.g: Portfolios, presentations, blogs, poster
presentation, online journals, student created audio/video podcasts etc…
 When using essays consider if you set up your assessment to look for critical original
thinking, or primarily for collation of information.

 For example, Discuss the differences between democratic and autocratic leadership
styles in management studies.

 Could become… ?


Assessment type
 Group work: consider allocating marks towards the
process (editing, contributing, sharing, reviewing).
 Related to social learning reading: are you assessing for
process or product?


Assessment design

 Involve students in assessment design
 Avoid using the same assessment year after year
 Request drafts, lists of sources, progress reports etc in
advance of the assessment
 ‘Personalise’ assignments: ask students to draw on their
own experiences o/ select a personally relevant topic
 Give each student/groups of students unique data sets or
contexts
 Avoid designing assessments where there is one correct
answer
 Avoid designing assessments that simply ask students to
“describe’ or ‘explain’: ask them to: critique. justify,
evaluate, interpret, invent, create, revise etc.

How can we improve these
assignments?
 Group task: Create a 20 minute presentation on the Irish
banking crisis

 Essay: 2500 words on the history of Irish education


Detecting plagiarism
Warning signs:

 A sense that something is just not right
 Inconsistencies in writing style
 Inconsistencies in font/layout
 Very high standard of work, or changes in the standard of work
 American spellings/phraseology
 Citing sources that are not available locally
 Out of date sources (on topical issues)
 Lack of non-Irish examples, irrelevant examples
 Failure to answer the question
 Student absent from all/most classes, or has not participated in class activities, yet
submits a ‘perfect’ assignment

Detecting plagiarism

 Provides a more objective view on plagiarism
 Compares a student’s work with Internet sources, journal articles
and other students’ work

How does Turnitin work?

Assignment
Student compared with Originality report
assignment database:
•Web
•Journals
•E-books
•Other student
assignments

How can Turnitin relate to: Principles of
effective online assessment (p.30)
 Learner-centred
 Encourage self reflection
 Include rubrics for discussion / assignments / collaboration
 Encourage self and peer assessment
 Contextual and aligned to learning outcomes
 Include learner input


(Palloff and Pratt, 2009,
p.47)

“Rather than using the tools punitively, having
students run their own work through the software
and then using the report generated as a teaching tool”


Avoidance
 The goal is to enable students to demonstrate what they
know/understand

 Make it harder to plagiarise

 Good citing and referencing are skills that must be
learned – they are not automatic

 Try to ensure that inadvertent plagiarism is minimised so
that anything that looks like plagiarism is deliberate


Tips: Research Papers(1)
 Have students submit their bibliography in advance of the paper
 An annotated bibliography is a list of citations to books, articles, and
documents. Each citation is followed by a brief (usually about 150 words)
descriptive and evaluative paragraph, the annotation. The purpose of the
annotation is to inform the reader of the relevance, accuracy, and quality of
the sources cited.
(www.library.cornell.edu/olinuris/ref/research/skill28.htm)

 This could even be an assignment in its own right or the first part
of a two-part assignment

 Try to incorporate thinking/opinions in assignments


 Oral presentation/marking
 Assign papers less than 6 pages (Paper mill lower limit!)
 Restrict sources to a small number
 Add a ‘personal’/’tailored’ section worth a few marks on its
own but as a determinant of understanding and of final grade
 Have a number of staggered deliverables
 Use a research log/journal


 Change topics regularly
 Try to specify topics narrowly in the early years
 Use debating techniques – takes sides on something quite
local
 Incorporate current affairs/media commentary,
local/national matters
 Require papers to be mapped to topics being studied


Tips: Research Papers (4)
 Use detection techniques up front:
 Ask for photocopies of sources quoted
 Say an oral interview may/will be used to finalise marks
 Say students will be chosen randomly for interview/oral
presentation
 Add a small number of personalised questions which can only
be answered if the work was done by the student


Some useful demos: turnitin
 Turnitin Training videos
http://
www.youtube.com/user/TurnitinAcademy?feature=watch
 Using Peer Mark (Peer assessment) through Turnitin
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvvjcBGFS-4


Current Featured Resource on Moodle
 www.plagiarismadvice.org


Questions?


Plagiarism in the online environment

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

Featured

Featured (20)

Plagiarism in the online environment