From Plagiarism - University of Michigan



The Center for Excellence in Writing

Tea Topic: Minimizing Academic Dishonesty

Friday, February 16, 2007

How prevalent is academic dishonesty? Here are some alarming findings:

▪ A study by The Center for Academic Integrity found that almost 80% of college students admit to cheating at least once.

▪ A poll conducted by US News and World Reports found that 90% of students believe that cheaters are either never caught or have never been appropriately disciplined.

▪ The State of Americans: This Generation and the Next (Free Press, July 1996) states that 58.3% of high school students let someone else copy their work in 1969, and 97.5% did so in 1989.

▪ A study conducted by Ronald M. Aaron and Robert T. Georgia: Administrator Perceptions of Student Academic Dishonesty in Collegiate Institutions found that 257 chief student affairs officers across the country believe that colleges and universities have not addressed the cheating problem adequately.

▪ A national survey published in Education Week found that 54% of students admitted to plagiarizing from the internet; 74% of students admitted that at least once during the past school year they had engaged in "serious" cheating; and 47% of students believe their teachers sometimes choose to ignore students who are cheating.

(above statistics compiled from )

▪ In a Dec., 2006 Penn State survey at all campuses, ~40% of students say that they know someone who's cheated on an exam.

(source: John T. Harwood, PSU Senate Committee on Computing and Information Systems)

Some faculty and administrator attitudes toward cheating:

▪ A study conducted by Donald L. McCabe titled “Faculty Responses to Academic Dishonesty: The Influence of Honor Codes” found that 55% of faculty "would not be willing to devote any real effort to documenting suspected incidents of student cheating".

▪ "With respect to cheating, I'm just in denial. I just don't want to deal with it because I know it is a huge problem." -- San Luis Obispo professor, as reported in Net Learning.

▪ "Who wants to sit around looking for websites trying to find out if a paper is plagiarized or not... pretty soon you're a private investigator." -- a Stanford University professor, from an article in TechWeb News.

▪ "[Plagiarism] is one of those areas in the academy that no one wants to talk about and is often rewarded for not addressing actively." -- an Associate VP of Student Life, as posted in The Chronicle of Higher Education's "Colloquy."

▪ "Too few universities are willing to back up their professors when they catch students cheating, according to academic observers. The schools are simply not willing to expend the effort required to get to the bottom of cheating cases" -- as stated by The National Center for Policy Analysis.

(above quotes and statistics from )

Handout from

Instructor Guidelines for Plagiarism Prevention

I. Explain what “plagiarism” means

Of course, most students will tell you they already know what plagiarism means. But do they really understand the difference between a legitimate paraphrase and a plagiarized one? Or between a proper citation and an improper one? Spending some time during the beginning of the course to explain plagiarism may go a long way toward preventing future problems.

You may also wish to distribute examples of plagiarism and legitimate citation, and then go over the differences together. This will clarify some of the common misconceptions about plagiarism and reduce the likelihood of “honest mistakes,” while at the same time showing how serious you are about the issue. Finally, you can direct your students to our website, where they can take a quiz on the difference between plagiarism and legitimate citation.

II. Explain what’s Wrong about Plagiarism

Without instruction, it may be hard for your students to understand the seriousness of plagiarism. Their response is often: “How can copying some words actually hurt anyone?” But the reality is that plagiarism is an act of fraud that involves both stealing (another’s intellectual property) and lying (implying that the work is one’s own). This undermines the principles of trust and respect that make education possible. But when they plagiarize, students hurt more than just their instructors and the person from whom they steal. They also hurt themselves, because they fail to acquire the research, analytic, and writing skills that they would have learned by doing the assignment honestly. Finally, plagiarism also victimizes those classmates who have legitimately earned their grades and degrees, and who will be competing with the plagiarizer for school admissions and jobs.

III.    Make the Consequences Clear

Students often do not know just what they risk when they plagiarize. Begin your course by establishing a clear policy on plagiarism. Give very specific information about the penalties involved. You may want to create a specific policy for your courses in addition to your institution’s general policy. Try telling your students, for example, that any case of plagiarism will result in immediate failure of the paper, and that a second instance will result in failure of the course and possibly expulsion, will doubtless make them think twice about it. Be sure to cite your policy on any research assignments as a reminder.

IV. Start off with Clear Expectations

First, let your students know you expect them to produce thoughtful, original work. Students are often under the illusion that the goal of their assignments is to collect the best information possible. Explain to them that while good research is critical, you are even more interested in their ability to transform the information they find into an original and persuasive argument than in their ability to come up with the most or best sources. The skills they learn in working to further the ideas and arguments of others are a valuable part of what they will take away from their assignments. Knowing this may help them understand the value of original work.

You may also want to establish some rules in advance: Should your students collaborate? Will you require separate “works cited” pages and bibliographies? How many sources will they be required to consult? How many sources will they have to include in their paper? Will online sources be sufficient, or would you like your students to find printed material as well? Starting off with clear guidelines will prevent most of the confusion that leads to unintentional plagiarism, and allow no excuses for the intentional kind.  

V. Assign Specific Questions or Topics

Provide a list of topics or questions that you would like your students to address in their papers. The more particular the questions, the less likely that your students will find papers already written on them. If you worry that lists like this restrict your students’ creative freedom, you might want to add an option that allows your students to develop their own topics in consultation with you or a teaching assistant.

VI. Require Students to Submit Thesis Statements, Introductions, Outlines, or Drafts

One of the best ways to ensure that your students’ work is original is to check it during the process of composition. Since rough drafts, etc., are not as readily available for copying as finished papers, the simple fact that they have to submit one will encourage most of your students to produce original work. It often takes more work to forge these materials than it does to produce them originally. Also, if you have time to comment on what they submit, you can monitor how they respond to your feedback and whether their papers show the flexibility of works-in-progress.

VII. Have your students Annotate their Bibliographies

Ask your students to summarize the content and usefulness of their sources in a few sentences. Be sure to tell them that copying library abstracts or blurbs from the backs of books is not permissible. Emphasize that the annotation has to be in their own voice and words, and should specifically discuss the relevance of the source to their research. This exercise should take no time at all for students who have done their work honestly. Plagiarizers, however, will find it considerably more difficult.

VIII. Assign Oral Presentations

Have your students answer questions about the process of researching and developing their ideas. This is also an excellent opportunity to ask them specific questions about their papers, and to bring up passages that seem suspicious. Questions like “This quotation here is a little unclear. Could you tell me a little more about the article from which you got it?” can be very effective in determining how much work the student did without offending or seeming suspicious.

IX. Require Recent and Printed Sources

Most papers from online paper mills and other cheating databases are already several years old at best. Having your students integrate at least one contemporary source in their paper will keep your students up to date on the issues and help ensure legitimate research and work.

X. Assign a Paragraph on the Composition Process

If you do not have your students give oral presentations or turn in drafts during the composition process, you may want to have them submit a paragraph explaining how they arrived at their topic, how they began researching it, what criteria they used for evaluating their sources, and what they learned from the research project. This will give you an idea of how well they have comprehended the material and the degree of fluency they have in speaking about it.

XI Encourage Concision

Students often try to “fill space” by “borrowing” material once they have finished with their own ideas. Tell your students that it is very obvious when they “pad” their papers to fill up page requirements. Encourage them to be as concise as possible, focusing on the substance of their claims rather than the length of their writing. Make sure they know the trick to writing a long research paper lies in coming up with a thesis or argument which requires the assigned number of pages to develop, and not in drawing out the points they make or citing multiple sources to prove a single idea.

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Jessica’s ideas for plagiarism prevention:

XII Hold mandatory conferences before the paper’s due date.

Talking with students about their paper prior to its due date can be incredibly useful in heading off plagiarism. First of all, students who intend to plagiarize may avoid these conferences. In some instances, their avoidance serves as a flag to their possible intentions. For students who do come to the conference with a suspected plagiarized draft, you can warn them off by asking pointed questions about source material or about the paper’s content in general. You will let them know that you’ve got your doubts about the paper’s originality and point them in the right direction in terms of proper citation practice. For those students who may plagiarize because they lack direction or ideas, conferences can provide that direction and encouragement these students might need to prevent their panicked last-minute cheating.

XIII Make lots of sample drafts available for students to review

Some students plagiarize because they don’t know what they are “supposed to do.” Offering samples of successful assignments helps them to see how they might pattern their own responses to the assignment. It also shows them how a generic “paper mill” essay, article from the Internet, or paper borrowed from a peer is patently inappropriate, given the sample drafts’ tailored, pointed responses to the assignment prompt.

XIV Be idiosyncratic

This is not usually something to be lauded in an assignment or as a good teaching practice. Sometimes, though, you can build in certain style or formatting requirements that make plagiarizing more trouble than it’s worth. Some examples: ask students to develop an extended metaphor (maybe giving even more specific parameters); require them to provide certain ranges of reference; ask them to use a semicolon three times, etc. You might change these requirements semester to semester so that a paper might not be recycled. Asking for these idiosyncratic requirements can be tricky; you don’t want to bog down the students with silly requirements, but rather challenge them to expand their writing capacities.

XV Consider using online an plagiarism prevention/detection service.

Penn State currently has a license with , online plagiarism prevention and detection software that is integrated with ANGEL. While the Penn State faculty who have used Turnitin view the program favorably and the University clearly endorses this online plagiarism detection service (see report below), there are still some lingering questions about fair use and intellectual property that the service raises. For instance, is it appropriate for students’ work, which they are compelled to submit to Turnitin, to become part of a private company’s “product” and profit stream, especially when the students are not compensated? Moreover, does the service disrupt the teacher-student relationship by overemphasizing detection and policing and focusing too much on the final product rather that the process of writing? The next few pages include additional information and resources on Turnitin.

SENATE COMMITTEE ON COMPUTING AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Turnitin: A Tool to Assess Student Plagiarism

(Informational Report)

Introduction

() is a web-based plagiarism detection and prevention system developed and owned by , Inc. Penn State licensed Turnitin () in June 2005. Turnitin is available to all Penn State faculty members. The service is administered by Information Technology Services (ITS). As of November 2006, PSU faculty members have submitted for processing by Turnitin about 30,000 student papers written by 6,230 students.

How Turnitin works

Upon submission of a paper to the service, Turnitin compares a student’s paper with four databases: Proquest (a database of books and journals), the World Wide Web, a database of the papers already submitted to Turnitin by students at other universities, and a database of papers previously submitted to Turnitin by PSU students and faculty members. Turnitin generates an “originality report” for the instructor or student when the analysis is complete. The report indicates the percentage of unoriginal content. This is the percent of the text that was found elsewhere and is, hence, unoriginal. That is, if the originality report scores the paper as 100%, then the paper is 100% copied and there is 0% original content. It is the faculty member’s discretion whether or not a student is allowed access to the originality report generated from analysis of their paper.

Turnitin stops searching for a match for a particular text segment when it finds the first match with content in one database. The match may or may not be that actual text source used by the student. In addition, Turnitin will identify segments as “unoriginal” when it matches a segment even though the source of the matched segment may be property cited in the paper. Thus, faculty members must take this into consideration in their determination of whether plagiarism has occurred.

Results from Turnitin

The following table illustrates the results of originality reports generated by submission of 29,878 papers by PSU faculty in the time period between the inception of the PSU system (June 2005) and November 2006.

| |No matches |0-24% |25-49% |50-74% |75-100% |

|Reports |8,988 |15,953 |3,033 |558 |1,346 |

|Percent |30% |53% |10% |2% |5% |

These data indicate that about 5% of the papers were markedly unoriginal, meaning that between 75% and 100% of the content was found elsewhere. About 2% of the papers were 50-74% unoriginal. In other words, about 7% of the papers had a significant portion of unoriginal content. About 30% of the papers were completely original, or at least no source was found for the student’s work.

Faculty Survey

In January 2006, ITS conducted a survey of faculty that had used Turnitin. There were 65 responses to the survey. The following table illustrates the results from this survey.

|Question |Response |Respondents |

|1. Will you use again in your |No will not use |13 |22.8% |

|courses? | | | |

| |Yes will use |44 |77.2% |

| |Total |57 |100.0% |

|2. Were you able to confirm any cases of |No plagiarism detected |21 |37.5% |

|plagiarism using ? | | | |

| |Some plagiarism detected |25 |44.6% |

| |Major plagiarism detected |10 |17.9% |

| |Total |56 |100.0% |

|3. Did you submit papers from all students or |Submitted All |40 |72.7% |

|only those papers you viewed as suspicious? | | | |

| |Submitted Suspicious |15 |27.3% |

| |Total |55 |100.0% |

|4. Did you submit drafts of papers or only final|Final only |34 |63.0% |

|versions? | | | |

| |Drafts and finals |19 |35.2% |

| |Drafts only |1 |1.9% |

| |Total |54 |100.0% |

|5. Did any of your students protest having their|No objections |46 |88.5% |

|papers submitted to ? | | | |

| |Yes few protested |3 |5.8% |

| |Yes most protested |3 |5.8% |

| |Total |52 |100.0% |

|6. Did you alert students of plagiarism problems|Alerted no corrections |21 |44.7% |

|found by and allow them to make | | | |

|corrections? | | | |

| |Alerted allowed corrections |19 |40.4% |

| |No alert no corrections |7 |14.9% |

| |Total |47 |100.0% |

|7. Did you allow students to access their |No, not see reports |29 |53.7% |

|originality reports? | | | |

| |Yes, see reports |25 |46.3% |

| |Total |54 |100.0% |

|8. Did you consider the results of the |Did not deduct points |23 |43.4% |

|originality report when calculating grades? | | | |

| |Deducted points |29 |54.7% |

| |N/A, Student self submitted |1 |1.9% |

| |Total |53 |100.0% |

|9. Did make it easier to verify the|Yes easier |42 |73.7% |

|originality of written works? | | | |

| |Not easier |15 |26.3% |

| |Total |57 |100.0% |

Interpretation of data and best practices for use of Turnitin

• Overall, the survey indicates that faculty members were pleased with Turnitin. They found it made the task of verifying originality easier and they will use Turnitin again. Respondent comments were positive and included suggestions for new features and/or improvements in the program. The comments also indicate that PSU faculty use the tool in different ways and have different attitudes toward the relative importance of detection vs. remediation. It should be noted that faculty members use the Turnitin information in different ways (note the responses to question #8).

• A system such as Turnitin is only as good as the databases it searches and the algorithms it uses. Furthermore, the data contained in the databases used by Turnitin will always, to some extent, lag behind (in time) the data available through the Internet even though Turnitin claims to add 30,000 “pages” of “web data” to its database each day. As a result, false negatives (i.e., a low “originality” score when a paper contains significant plagiarism) are to be expected to occur much more frequently than false positives.

• Because of the possibility for false negatives, faculty members should use their best judgment when evaluating papers for incidences of plagiarism. Other popular string match tools, such as common Internet search engines (Google, Ask, etc.) can also be a valuable aid to complement the capabilities of Turnitin.

• In searching for “unoriginal” content, Turnitin uses only data available in its databases and, hence, it cannot detect plagiarism of unpublished work or other work that is not available to Turnitin. This essentially contributes to the occurrences of false negatives.

• The algorithms used by Turnitin search for text string matches and not numerical matches. It should be recognized that Turnitin is designed to detect plagiarism of text and not fraud or data falsification. Also, it does not have any ability to detect plagiarism of other data assets, such as images or other objects of graphical design.

• The syllabi for courses should indicate how Turnitin will be used. Some faculty may choose to submit all papers or only the papers that do not seem to be original.

• Analysis of accumulated “originality” reports indicates that there is a small but significant incidence of plagiarism at Penn State. Faculty members should take active measures to reduce these occurrences and they should consider using Turnitin as a tool to detect plagiarism. ITS plans to monitor the status of the accumulated “originality” reports on an annual basis to determine longitudinal trends at Penn State.

• Turnitin can be used as a means to teach students how to work with information sources and to raise awareness of paraphrasing and quoting skills to avoid plagiarism.

• Faculty members need to be proactive to ensure that students know the proper way to use others’ work, both in print and digital forms. Toward this end, ITS has an effective collection of resources (), for instance, and faculty members should be sure that all students have a chance to practice responsible research skills.

• Additional information on obtaining a Turnitin account can be submitted to turnitin@psu.edu. Accounts are limited to staff and faculty who are actually teaching a course and only "...psu.edu" e-mail addresses are acknowledged at this address.

Respectfully submitted,

Russell C. Scaduto (Chair)

Jo Anne Carrick (Vice Chair)

Yaw Agawu-Kakraba

Thomas Benson

Thomas Bruening

Qiang Du

Stephen Garguilo (Student Represenative)

John T. Harwood

Jeff Kuhns

Willie Ofosu

Eric Paterson

Richard J. Simons

How to set up Turnitin for your class:

1. Go to:



This site has lots of useful information about how Turnitin works, what to put on your syllabus, how to set up your Turnitin account, and how to interpret Turnitin data reports.

2. Go to:



You have to go to this page in order to get the account/class ID and the join password for PSU. These codes are found at the middle of the first page. Once you go to turnitin.psu.edu and type in these codes, you’ll be prompted to create accounts for your class(es) and will be given a code for each class. You will then need to set up your own course password, which you will share with your students. Be sure to write down both your course code and your password.

3. If you have any problems, contact turnitin@psu.edu . You will usually get a quick response to your question.

Some additional resources on plagiarism and academic integrity:

An annotated bibliography on Plagiarism detection services compiled by the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s Intellectual Property caucus. The articles listed in this bibliography will help to acquaint you with the debate about the ethics and efficacy of plagiarism detection services.

Sponsored by , this site features lots of information and teaching materials to combat academic dishonesty. Many of the handouts are in downloadable Word format and can be easily printed for your students or placed on ANGEL.

Provides more information for users of . Explains the service’s features that go beyond plagiarism detection.

Penn State’s Academic Integrity Policy Resources

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