Plagiarism

George Siemens

What is plagiarism?

• Is it the same as it used to be?

• The move from information scarcity to abundance creates a new climate

• Do we want students to collaborate and work together?

• What are new guidelines?

Definition

• “the act of passing off as one's own the ideas or writings of another." http://gervaseprograms.georgetown.edu/hc/plagiarism.html

Types and gradients

Types• Accidental• Semi-aware• IntentionalDegrees• Limited• Moderate• Significant

How has it changed?

• Prevalence

• Sophistication

Prevalence

• 80% of college students have cheated• 54% of college students admit to plagiarizing

from internet• 47% say instructors ignore known issues of

cheating• 55% of instructors say they wouldn’t be willing to

devote real time to document suspected plagiarism

• http://www.plagiarism.org/plagiarism_stats.html

The new plagiarism

• “The New Plagiarism requires little effort and is geometrically more powerful. While the pre-modem student might misappropriate a dozen ideas from a handful of thinkers, the post-modem student can download and save hundreds of pages per hour. We have moved from the horse and buggy days of plagiarism to the Space Age without stopping for the horse less carriage.”

• http://www.fno.org/may98/cov98may.html

Why the change?

• Ethics• Outdated definition of plagiarism (new tools for

collaboration, old views of “do it yourself”)• Internet• Mobile devices• “rip, mix, burn” culture• The stakes of academic success• Open, searchable, and findable information

(Google, Yahoo)• Paper-mills – professional plagiarism

Source: http://www.fno.org/may98/cov98may.html

Collaboration?

• Co-creation is a concern

• How do we define individual contributions when society increasingly values collaborative work efforts?

It’s not just students…

• Academics, research, authors

• Claiming work as own, or using without appropriate acknowledgement, are forms of plagiarism, academic dishonesty, or (at minimum) ethical lapses

NYTimes

• “With their arsenal of electronic gadgets, students these days find it easier to cheat. And so, faced with an array of inventive techniques in recent years, college officials find themselves in a new game of cat and mouse, trying to outwit would-be cheats this exam season with a range of strategies — cutting off Internet access from laptops, demanding the surrender of cellphones before tests or simply requiring that exams be taken the old-fashioned way, with pens and paper.”

Options as educators

1. Policing

2. Redesigning learning activities and assessment model

Policing

• Turnitin

• iThenticate

• Mydropbox.com

Current Views

“Digital plagiarizing calls for digital policing.

Such is the philosophy behind a wave of anti-plagiarism digital software that colleges are using to deal with the widespread use of essay-writing Web sites and online databases of pre-written papers, and to uncover writing copied from other students' work.”

USA Today, May 25, 2006

Policing drawbacks

• Expensive (software)

• Emotional costs (time invested research plagiarism, dealing with incidents)

• Additional work for instructors

• Culture of distrust

• Core problem not addressed: assessment at a higher level (authentic)

Solutions

• Clarify what plagiarism means

• Embed as strand through all courses/programs

• Redesign assessment models

• Start seeing assessment as a learning tool, not only evaluation of learning

Assisting students in avoiding plagiarism

• Detail appropriate collaboration

• Communicate paraphrasing, quotations, acknowledgement, common knowledge

• Sourcing ideas (note taking)

Specific changes

• Request reflective journals

• Ask for outline, draft, and final

• Mark for process, not only product

• Pursue authentic assessment techniques

• Peer assessment

• Move to advanced levels of evaluation

• Multi-pronged

What else?

Challenges

Changes in assessment require time to develop

• Alternative assessment takes extra time (interviewing 100 students vs. a computerized multiple choice test)

Plagiarism

• What we define as plagiarism says more about us as educators than it does about our students– New models of evaluation– New views of collaboration and co-creation

• Focus on what the individual learner learns through collaborative work

The issues

• Plagiarism is a teaching, learning, and assessment issue– Too often cast as only learning

• Teaching and assessment are in our hands

• Time required for authentic assessment

Levels of learning

• Bloom, Fink, and others – tiered levels of knowing (each impacted by emotions, motivation, context)

• Basic– Knowledge, facts, basic elements of a field,

awareness• Intermediate

– Application, analysis, involvement, human/social elements, pattern recognition

• Advanced– Synthesis, complex thinking, metacognition, multi-

perspective, evaluation, meaning recognition

Assessments

• T/F, multiple choice, short answer, etc. target basic learning levels

• Completion, essay, interviews, short answer, presentation, etc. target intermediate learning levels

• Interviews, essay, self-assessment, journal, performance, debate, portfolios etc. target advanced learning levels

Sources

• http://www.plagiarism.org/plagiarism.html

• http://www.web-miner.com/plagiarism

• http://www.virtualsalt.com/antiplag.htm

• http://www.ncusd203.org/central/html/where/plagiarism_stoppers.html

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism