News Release
August 2004
(Bethlehem, Pa.)—The
new academic year is about to start at colleges across the
country. That means thousands of students writing thousands
of papers. With rising concerns about plagiarism, some teachers
are taking a novel, pro-active approach to the problem.
At Moravian College, Dr. Joel Wingard, professor
of English, distributed an “Anti-plagiarism guide for writing teachers” to
all professors who will be teaching Writing 100 classes. Wingard
authored the guide in 2002, which he now presents to colleagues
at the beginning of the fall semester each year. “I urge
my fellow professors to read it to get, perhaps, a more nuanced
understanding of plagiarism and to use the listed ‘best
practices’ in their classes,” Wingard said. “It
is important that professors concentrate on preventing plagiarism
through their teaching, instead of resorting to ‘gotcha!’ websites
to catch and punish student writers.”
Wingard believes a pro-active educational
approach is more effecting in preventing plagiarism. “The best practices
we employ are supported by the national Council of Writing Program
Administrators (WPA), a professional group comprising college
writing teachers and administrators.” Wingard says while
plagiarism prevention websites such as Turnitin.com have become
popular recently, they amount to teachers policing plagiarism.
Students at Moravian also play an active
role preventing plagiarism. As part of an undergraduate research
project, Alyssa DeSimone ’05,
Andrea Frankenfield ’04, and Brynn Saltzer ’04, tutors
with the Writing Center, designed and administered a survey to
determine the level of knowledge about plagiarism among first-year
students, upperclassmen, and faculty.
The group co-wrote a paper called “Navigating the Plagiarism
Minefield,” which they presented in October 2003 at the
International Writing Centers Association/National Council of
Peer Tutoring in Writing conference in Hershey, Pa.
The students devised a one-hour workshop
on plagiarism, which was offered to the student body during
the spring semester. The program covered the basics: what plagiarism
is and what it isn’t;
and how to indicate, formally and informally, that an idea or
wording has come from elsewhere. The workshop helped students
to avoid the common pitfalls that lead to plagiarizing.
Dr. Rebecca Moore Howard, associate professor
of writing and rhetoric at Syracuse University, says that by
concentrating on catching and punishing student plagiarists
teachers “risk
becoming the enemies rather than the mentors of our students … [and]
replacing the student-teacher relationship with the criminal-police
relationship.”
Prof. Howard suggests that writing teachers
can reduce the number of cases of plagiarism by taking a close
look at their own teaching practices. For instance, teachers
who give the same assignments year after year may unwittingly
invite students to plagiarize. Students may see such assignments
as “inauthentic,” Howard
says, and find the easiest or dishonest way of completing them.
Similarly, she says, “We beg our students to cheat if
we assign a major paper and then have no further involvement
with the project until the students turn in their work.” Instead,
if teachers require such work to be written in separate drafts
and take the time to respond to early drafts or confer with students
on their progress, students may see that teachers care about
students’ learning, not merely their compliance with a
final due date.”
Professor Stephen Wilhoit of the University
of Dayton says, “Requiring
multi-drafts of an essay helps dissuade students from buying
or borrowing papers … [making] plagiarism more trouble
than it is worth.” Indeed the WPA’s Statement on
Best Practices for defining and avoiding plagiarism, adopted
by the group in 2003, urges teachers to “support each step
of the research process.” Requiring and reviewing preliminary
drafts, for instance, “allows instructors to coach students
more effectively while monitoring their progress,” the
statement says.
Most American colleges and universities publicize
to students the definitions and consequences of submitting
plagiarized work. But that publicity is not enough to educate
students and deter plagiarism, Prof. Wilhoit says. “Without adequate repetition
and reinforcement, students frequently misunderstand our instructions
on plagiarism and source-based writing. … Some students
turn in plagiarized work because they have not yet fully learned
how to avoid it. …”
Prof. Howard finds problems with the “gotcha” websites.
Some of them “fail to distinguish between quoting and unattributed
copying” from sources, she says. “They blur the distinctions
between omitting quotation marks and downloading an entire paper.” When
the different forms and degrees of plagiarism are attended to,
and when the range of student motives for plagiarizing is taken
into account, Howard says, writing teachers can take a more proactive,
mentoring role with respect to their students’ learning.
“A downloaded paper is something that no professor should
tolerate,” Howard says. “We assign papers so that
our students will learn from the experience of writing them;
if they do not write them, they do not learn.” But less
blatant form of plagiarism such as unattributed quotations, direct
quotations treated as paraphrases, or paraphrases that are too
close to the language of a source can be prevented by careful
teaching.
Prof. Wilhoit says that “most cases of plagiarism result
from honest confusion over the standards of academic discourse
and proper citation.” So, he adds, teachers “might
more successfully combat the problem by spending more time in
class helping students learn how to avoid it.”
Compounding many students’ difficulty in understanding
some forms of plagiarism are the differences in citation practices
and conventions of different academic disciplines. Professor
R. Gerald Nelms of the English Department at Southern Illinois
University reminds teachers that “what might be plagiarism
in one discipline (for example, copying textual material without
citing the source in English) might simply be intertextuality
in another discipline (for example, copying textual material
without citing the source in Advertising).”
For that reason, Prof. Wilhoit says, it’s
important that teachers stress the citation conventions of
their own disciplines in the context of actual assignments.
Instruction in the discipline-specific ins and outs of acceptable
and unacceptable uses of source materials will mean more to
students who are working on actual projects in a discipline,
he says.
To help head off plagiarism before it becomes a campus discipline
problem, Profs. Wilhoit and Nelms offer a number of practical
suggestions for teachers to use in their classrooms:
- Thoroughly define and discuss plagiarism
in class; don’t have students rely merely on warnings
in college policy documents or on course syllabuses.
- Discuss hypothetical cases – in terms of discipline-specific
documentation conventions – and have students practice
revising plagiarized passages of writing.
- Teach note-taking so students can learn the differences among
summarizing, paraphrasing, and directly quoting source material.
- Require multiple drafts of all essays; for researched essays,
consider requiring students to submit photocopies of passages
they’ve used from sources.
Another suggestion is, for a writing course,
consider making plagiarism the topic of an assignment. Some
teachers have done this to try to put plagiarism and authority
in the contexts of rhetoric and ethics. For instance, at Southern
Connecticut State University, Professor Kelly Ritter has her
first-year composition students investigate the Internet paper
mills. Prof. Ritter says, “I
ask students to visit three of the many available mill sites
and analyze the rhetoric--words as well as images, and other
design factors--used on these to promote and sell the term papers.
I then ask the students to think about how this rhetoric relates
to their own concepts of ‘academic honesty’ and ethics.
This allows them to step back from the sites and see them as
students, and potentially consumers (they often mention cost-value
issues, without any prompting), but also researchers.”
And Professor Carmen Werder of Western Washington
University adds, “I try to teach citation as a writerly
move, a way of establishing one's authority by situating a
perspective in the context of others' views. So we gain authority
as writers by citing what others have said. Students seem to
appreciate the whole citation deal more when they understand
its rhetorical motive, rather than only its moralistic one.”
Many schools across the country offer students
online help in avoiding plagiarism. One example is the “OWL” (Online
Writing Lab) at Purdue University. Students from anywhere may
visit the site, where they are shown a brief discussion of the
rhetorical and ethical expectations of academic writing as well
as charts of what to avoid, when to credit sources, and “making
sure you are safe.” The site also has links to Purdue’s
academic honesty policy and to the WPA statement on plagiarism.
A number of major publishers of college writing textbooks also
provide Website information and exercises to help students understand
and avoid the pitfalls of plagiarism.
In addition to those sources of advice, parents
too have a role in helping the children learn ethical practices
with their work. Professor Darsie Bowden of DePaul University
says, “Parents
can help their kids with plagiarism issues by, for example, understanding
what plagiarism is--and isn't-- themselves, by encouraging kids
to get help from teachers, and by suggesting practical strategies
to their kids.”
The WPA plagiarism statement says it is “intended to provide
helpful suggestions and clarifications so that instructors, administrators,
and students can work together more effectively in support of
excellence in teaching and learning.” Many of the suggestions
it lists under “best practices” are consistent with
what professors like Stephen Wilhoit and Gerald Nelms do. As
Wilhoit says, “With time, and an informed strategy, we
can decrease the plagiarism in our classes. Most students are
well intentioned; they want to learn how to compose essays properly.
Too often, though … [teachers] do not adequately teach … students
how to identify and avoid plagiarism; we offer threats rather
than help. Changing … [teachers’] attitudes toward
plagiarism and the instruction … [they] offer is an important
first step in helping students avoid the problem.”
