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PLAGIARISM

Lake Park High School Plagiarism Policy

From the Lake Park High School 2000-2001 Attendance and Behavior Expectations:

"Cheating in any form or manner will cause the offending student to lose credit for the assignment. A second instance of cheating during a school year will cause the student to be removed from the course in which the second incident occurred and assigned to the Control Center. The offending student will receive no credit for the course for the applicable semester."

What can students do to avoid plagiarism?

The Writing Center, from Princeton University shows how students may unintentionally plagiarize and how to avoid those situations. This site also offers an example of how four students used the same source in their papers -two who plagiarized and two who correctly cite the source.

Plagiarism Site from Indiana University shows examples of plagiarism and gives definitions of citing terms. This site also shows students how to recognize acceptable and unacceptable citing and strategies for avoiding plagiarism.

What can teachers do to avoid plagiarism?

Cut-and-Paste Plagiarism: Preventing, Detecting, and Tracking Online Plagiarism

  • Emphasize the processes involved in doing research and writing papers. Ways to do so include requiring topic proposals, idea outlines, multiple drafts, interim working bibliographies and photocopies of sources.
  • Require students to engage and apply ideas, not just describe them.
  • Require students to reflect personally on the topic or the processes of research and writing, either in the paper or as an additional writing assignment.
  • Discuss plagiarism with students, both what it is and your policies about it.

Plagiarism and the Web

  • Be careful to give specific, non-generic instructions for papers. An assignment to "write about AIDS," for example, might tempt students to use one of the three AIDS papers at schoolsucks.com. A more specific assignment will make plagiarism much more difficult.
  • Also try to give writing assignments that will capture your students' attention. If they can develop some interest in the subject, they'll be less likely to cheat.
  • Let students know that you know about these web sites. Then do actually check some of them out. Students will be less likely to submit a paper that they know you may have seen on the web (or that a classmate might also submit).
  • Go a step further and take students to one of the sites. Have students look at a weak paper (there are plenty of these on the Web!) and analyze its failures. They will learn something about writing and also see that what's available for downloading may not impress their teacher.
  • Regarding advice on avoiding plagiarism: it's best to approach it as an issue of fair use and intellectual property. A discussion about the ways people use (and acknowledge) one another's ideas is better than an ex cathedra "Don't Plagiarize" rule. When presented as a "rule," it gets relegated to the list of other rules (use one inch margins, put commas between items in a list) and students are genuinely surprised when violation carries a stiffer penalty than the other rules!
  • Include specific instructions about bibliography, such as requiring all students to include material from required readings among their sources. Such readings might include web sites. (suggested by Fred Donnelly of the University of New Brunswick)
  • Watch your students write. Ask them to bring notes or drafts to class, have short conferences about the assignment, use peer groups to comment on drafts, ask for drafts to be submitted with the final paper.

How can teachers detect plagiarism?

Cut-and-Paste Plagiarism: Preventing, Detecting, and Tracking Online Plagiarism

  • Check for unusual formatting or formatting that does not match what you require. In particular, check for website printout page numbers or dates, grayed out letters and unusual use of upper/lower case and capitalization.
  • Notice any jargon or advanced vocabulary or sentence structure.
  • Read quotations carefully. Do they sound like a quote from an interview? Are there quotes without bibliographic entries?
  • Reference the original assignment. Are any portions of the assignment completely left out? Do any portions read like they were "added on" to the paper? Is it the correct type of paper, e.g. descriptive, position, first person, narrative?
  • Review the bibliography. Is the correct citation style used? Is the citation style used consistently? Does it match the sources referenced in the paper? Are there many items that the academic institution's library does not have?

How can teachers track down plagiarized papers?

  • Identify unusual keywords or unique phrases and search them in one of the large search engines such as Google or AltaVista. Remember to use quotation marks when searching for a phrase.
  • Look at original text of sources listed in the bibliography.
  • Be aware of unusual formatting and papers that don’t follow the requirements of your assignment.
  • Look for the paper at the Paper Mill Sites listed below.
  • Use one of the Plagiarism sites listed below to quickly identify plagiarism.

Paper Mill Sites

Costal Carolina University keeps a very complete list of paper mills. Check out this site to look for plagiarized papers, view what is available on the web and cringe at the awful papers available to students.

Plagiarism detection sites

EVE this shareware program searches the Internet for matches to your plagiarized papers.
Plagiarism.org- for a fee, teachers can submit papers that are checked for plagiarism problems against other papers in their database and on the Internet.