Plagiarism or Poor Writing Skills? Part 2

This is the second in a two part look at plagiarism. 
____

What can we do about a student's improper use of another's words in written assignments?  In my August 9, 2015 post, I distinguish between intentional and unintentional use of another's work and posit causes of the latter. Here I discuss strategies for detection of plagiarism and teaching about original writing.

Detection

The instructor's judgement. An instructor may quickly gain a feel for their students' writing.  A post or assignment submission containing phrases that are uncharacteristic of the student's writing, will alert the attentive teacher that a student may be plagiarizing.

Blackboard's SafeAssign. For essay type assignments the institution's learning management system (LMS) may have an integrated originality checker. 

In Blackboard this is the SafeAssign tool. During setup of the writing assignment, the SafeAssign feature (or LMS equivalent) can be enabled. 

To use Safe Assign check the box under Plagiarism tools in the assignment setup.

Turnitin Assignment. Your school may have a third party add-on to your LMS for checking student originality. Linfield College uses Turnitin as another option for faculty. In Blackboard instructors can choose to create an "assignment" with or without SafeAssign enabled. Or we can create a "Turnitin assignment."

Under Optional Settings the instructor can determine whether the student may view the report and resubmit.

These are helpful and automatic screening tools. But plagiarism detection tools are not infallible. Instructors may find examples of another's words in student submissions that passed the originality test. A recent issue of  Inside Higher Ed reported on a several-year study that suggests that the combination of the instructor's judgement and Google search produce far more accurate results than SafeAssign, Turnitin and their competitors. If you have concerns about a particular student or a particular piece of writing, try using Google to check your concern.

Teaching Writing

At many institutions faculty from all disciplines have taken on the shared responsibility for improving student writing skills. A great place to start is to use written assignments as an opportunity to revisit what we mean by original writing, paraphrasing and the effective use of quotations. Here are some strategies that may help.

• Include guidelines for writing in your syllabus or course expectations. Expand on your institutions plagiarism policy with your own specific definitions and behavioral standards.
• Use the features of "SafeAssign" and "Turnitin" that support self correction (allow students to see the report and make multiple submissions) favoring improvement over punishment.
• Look for unexpected phrasing and vocabulary in student's posts.
• Address examples of un-cited use of another's words or inappropriate quotation. Communicate with the students directly and require their work to be rewritten in their own words. 
• Be prepared to provide direct instruction on note-taking, paraphrasing, quotation and citation to the class or individual students. Ask students to distinguish between proper and improper examples of each.

It may take a student some instruction and a couple of rewrites before s/he understands the problem and the solution. Using a combination of clear expectations, early detection and teaching strategies, we may offer students tools to become effective, original writers and avoid the severe consequences to which academic/professional integrity violations lead.

---
Straumsheim, C. (2015). What Is detected? News. Inside Higher Education. Retrieved on 7-30-15 from https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/07/14/turnitin-faces-new-questions-about-efficacy-plagiarism-detection-software

Plagiarism or Poor Writing Skills? Part 1

image licensed for sharing by Tennessee Tuxedo

This is the first in a two part look at plagiarism. In this first part I seek to define the problem and identify causes. In part two, I will offer some solutions.
____

As an instructor, I frequently run into examples of student writing that contain key phrases, entire sentences, and even entire paragraphs that were written by someone else -- not cited by the student. I have also, though far less frequently, received a paper or final project that was written entirely by someone else.

Both of these can be viewed as plagiarism. But there is an important difference. In the second case, the use of another's work as the student's own was clearly intentional and deserves severe consequences. In the former case the intentionality may be harder to discern. I choose to treat these cases as poor writing skills, and an opportunity for me to provide students with skills to succeed in the future.

There are many causes of unintentional plagiarism.

• With digital tools it is dangerously easy to use copy-and-paste instead of taking notes in one’s own words. I have observed otherwise ethical professionals forget that their copy-and-pasted notes are actually in another's words and use them to produce a paper or report.
• Many students develop poor strategies in primary school and continue them to this day. Students will often tell me that they thought quotation was unnecessary as long as they only used an "insignificant" phrase or sentence (or three) from another source.  Alternatively students may believe that it is acceptable to use large portions of another's work as long as quotation marks or citation are added. 
• A poor paraphrasing strategy that writers may not have shed by college is taking another's sentence and replacing or reorganizing words. They see paraphrasing as a restructuring of another authors words, rather than a restating of the underlying meaning.
• Some students have genuinely not received the expected training on the distinction between original writing and plagiarism.

Just as digital media has made it easy for students to copy others' words, it has also made it easy for instructors to detect when a student presents others' words as their own. We have powerful tools at our disposal. These tools can be used to catch our students at plagiarism and they can be used to teach our students how to write effectively and honestly.

In part two (scheduled for publication on August 17) I explore strategies for detection of unoriginal writing and for developing student's original-writing skills.