Plagiarism In An Online World

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

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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
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Game Plan

• Awareness

• Prevention Strategies

• Detection Strategies

• Resources

Alex Roberts Halifax Regional School Board
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Graphic Evidence

• In a recent survey (Whos 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
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• 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
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Plagiarism n. act of taking ideas, passages etc.
from an author and presenting them as ones own -
plagiarize or -ise v. -Standard dictionary
definition
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Awareness

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

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• 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
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Quotable When you take stuff from one writer
its plagiarism. When you take it from many
writers its called research.
-Wilson Mizner
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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
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• Suggestion
• On a ped day take 2 hours
• Look at the resources online as well as CDs

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• 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
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• Most common
• Outline sites
• Anything not to read the book
• The Coles Notes approach

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• Cutting and pasting to create a paper from
  several sites or sources AKA the assembly-kit
  approach.

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

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TIP Do spot checks on quotations.
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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
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Prevention
Quotable Prevention is the most important
element in the fight against plagiarism.
- Plagiarizeddot.com
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Strategies for Prevention

• Establish a digital code of ethics at the
  beginning of the year
• Make the penalties clear
• Educate your students about plagiarism

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• 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.
  Microsofts Encarta Encyclopedia

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• Require oral reports of student papers
• Require specific components in the paper
• Have students include an annotated bibliography

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• TIP
• Start small - Have students
• Use Image logs
• Learn about Netcitation

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• 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

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• 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)

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• 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

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TIP Request hardcopies and/or electronic copies
of the project at different stages in the
research

• For example
• Outlines
• Plans
• Drafts

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Strategies for Detecting Plagiarized Work

• Writing style and level i.e. is the students
  work consistent with the students previous work?
• Size matters
• Lack of references or quotations

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• Signs of datedness
• Off the topic
• Anachronisms
• Anomalies of diction

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• Smoking guns AKA blunders of the clueless e.g.
  URLs, graphic omitted, whiteout, etc.
• Anomalies of style e.g. a mixture of British and
  American spelling

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Tip If possible, require students to pass in
projects and essays backed up on disk. Acts as a
deterrent and makes detection easier.
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• Strange/poor layout (the print right away
  brigade)
• The ultimate in naiveté printed right from the
  Internet Browser Oh my!

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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.
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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.
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• 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 Light or Fastsearch

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"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_at_emsb.qc.ca PASSWORD
scy694bzq
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• Visit the the term paper sites
• Use a commercial plagiarism detector such as
  www.Plagiarism.org.

Alex Roberts Halifax Regional School Board