Paranoid About Plagiarism

There are cultural differences to be aware of too. In certain nationalities it is deemed polite to quote the whole of what a fellow academic has written. So a paper or an essay produced in these circumstances will contain little original thought by the student.  

Despite the paranoia, I’ve come across two really alarming cases recently. Alarming, because the perpetuators of the crimes thought they could get away with it. One student sort of plagiarised himself. He gave in two almost identical reflective essays for two different courses. If he hadn’t have been so lazy, he might have got away with it. There would have been some overlap anyway between the two. But it this case he neither added in nor changed enough of the first to make it suitable for the second – and that included not giving the right sort of bibliography. A second student had a remarkably different font for one section of their work. The opening two paragraphs were hardly the right sort of material for the task. The remaining paragraphs were spot on. In fact, the piece would have been complete without the two introductory paragraphs. Clearly, they had cut and pasted the material form a resource in order to prompt themselves about what they wanted to say. They had forgotten to remove it. Or to change the font back to a more normal one.   

More alarmingly I’ve heard recently of a very talented student being accused of plagiarism, being found as having no case to answer, but not before they were so totally put off their academic life that they’ve submitted subsequent assignments incomplete and late. They no longer wish to go on to Masters level and they are no longer enjoying their university life. I know of a Masters student where good old Turnitin in has found material from a paper that the student has never heard of. The percentage of matched material is actually reasonably low but still high enough for alarm bells to ring. Could this be just unfortunate coincidence or something wrong with the software?

Or it could be mixtures of styles. That’s another interesting one. Many of us use a collection of styles, though usually not in one document. My poor voice recognition software has a problem with me: I write for children, in different languages, academic papers, this type of article, short stories for adults, sarcastic letters to the bank and apparently, they tell me, very good emails to students. What chance does a machine have of recognising my style? If a piece is hurried, it may contain mixed styles and again plagiarism alarm bells ring.   

I recently attended an excellent course in how to prevent students from plagiarising. One important point is to make them aware of how acknowledging the research of others is a matter of courtesy. Another is to make assignments so varied that no one will have written on exactly that topic before and that it is unlikely even that two students will be writing exactly the same essay. This takes the student way beyond regurgitation and that has to be a good teaching and learning outcome anyway.

We worry. But if we use those two strategies for putting ourselves away from being tempted to plagiarise and if we check our work to make sure that we clearly show when we are referring to the work of others then we do not need to fear it so much.