Plagiarism is a plague on campuses across the United States, and that includes us here at Texas A&M University-Commerce. We employ several software solutions for detecting plagiarism once it’s happened, but there are ways to prevent students from plagiarizing before they even start. It’s all in assignment design.
1. Create a plagiarism contract for students to sign at the beginning of the semester. Outline the consequences of plagiarism in this contract and spend some class time talking about the different forms that plagiarism takes. This ensures students understand both accidental and intentional plagiarism, and the consequences for those actions.
2. Craft your assignments with specific, unique elements that will make it difficult for students to locate papers already produced online that fit the assignment criteria. Consider crafting three groups of assignments and rotating them every semester so that students can’t use the paper of someone who took your class previously.
3. Craft assignments that require drafts brought to class. Don’t accept a paper unless there’s a rough draft attached to it. Students who write drafts are less likely to suffer from the last minute time crunch that often leads to intentional plagiarism.
4. Have students turn in a short annotated bibliography with their assignments. Require annotations of fifty words or less for three different sources. This will require students do the research reading they need to do to write their essays.
These are just a few strategies you can employ to prevent student plagiarism before it starts. As always, though, to recognize plagiarism that’s already occurred, we use both TurnItIn and iThenticate here on campus.
Recent Comments