I believe the plagiarism detectors act as deterrents for those who may consider plagiarizing someone else's work or a writing assistant for others. It never occurred to me that the students would simply copy information until it did occur.
Hi La Gayle,
It certainly has occurred to me that students may copy information and pass it off for their own work, either in good faith or with the definite intention of cheating. I maintain, however, that a good teacher who knows his subject, knows his students (their strengths and their limits) and has the right amound of flair and professional skills will detect most - if not all - of attempts at plagiarism in his students' submitted work.
ATB
Joseph
Excellent point. Knowing your students learning abilities and content does enable the skill of assessing student work. A good teacher should be able to recognize based upon previous student work if the work is authentic. When proofing my ten year old daughters' written work, I can immediately identify when she or my student (Biology,IPC,A&P) has directly copied information versus using their own words. \
In my daughters case, I require her to print out any information used from the site and attach documents to her submitted work. Although it is not required I feel she should be prepared to demonstrate where information was received including why she used certain data.
Unfortunately the ability versus time, number of students or other factors affect such skills for some educators including training,professionalism,ethics, caring,and burnout.
We have dedicated markers, who don't teach just mark.
Hi Claire,
Thanks for bringing to our attention the (not so new) Block: Crot: a new block for plagiarism detection. Why not discuss it in the already existing forum discussion here?
I might give that block a try. However, like our friend Don, I tend to be rather skeptical about plagiarism detectors in general. In my opinion, the best detector is the good teacher.
Joseph
How would that information not be useful to you?
I think what Joseph means is that if there is a big problem with plagiarism, then the teacher is setting inappropriate tasks and/or hasn't educated their students about the difference between quoting and plagiarising. See what he says near the end of this discussion : Re: Ability to disable Print Screen/ Copy/Paste and there have been many similar discussions on these forums.
Cheers,
Glenys
"the teacher is setting inappropriate tasks and/or hasn't educated their students about the difference between quoting and plagiarising"
OoooooooO - now there is a generalization.. Not at all - but someone has certainly dropped the ball.
Tasks are always easy for the student who knows what they want, what they are doing, but in any class there are students who do not. This means that those who do not know will always try it on. I would agree there is a strong element of laziness or ineptitude where this happens regularly, but if you talk to these students, they often believe vampires are real and Hogwarts exists somewhere, under another name.
The advent of the digital age has had a number of appalling outcomes as well, and plagiarism is just one of them. There are a number even more unsavoury. (Like the ready adoption of American spelling - for one......)
While the internet makes plagiarism easier, it also makes detection easier.
I have not seen any convincing research that analyses what, if anything has change. (I have not looked for such research, so it may well exist.)
But in my experience, whenever you dig into the history properly, there is really nothing now. For example, you may have seen this list of quotes: http://interacc.typepad.com/synthesis/2008/10/the-21st-century-imperative.html
And, that is very on-topic in a post about plagiarism. Does anyone know who first compiled that list? I have seen it used by several different speakers and writers on educational technology, and they have all used it without attribution
But...in the old days, one had to copy by hand. It still took some effort to research the source you plagiarized. You had to read what you copied. There was a chance that some little bit of the information would get stuck in your head while it was being manually transfered from your eyes to your hands.
Compare that to google ==>read first sentence of the first website that looks something like topic ==>cut/paste/hand in paper.
Once we start using the word 'Plagiarism', we are in High Stakes Assessment territory. Even if the work itself is trivial, an accusation of plagiarism can result in failure or expulsion.
Plagiarism is a contested, culturally specific concept, interpreted differently even by members of the same school. Since a student's career can be derailed by a single machine test, it is unfair to restrict her opportunity to test her work against machine repeatedly prior to assessment.
________
NSW schools use the term 'Appropriate Academic Scholarship' which embraces other issues of fairness as well. Unfortunately, the assessment processes seem to be archaic, and could benefit from two general lines of improvement.
1. Measure the process. If you really want to know that a student can personally write (or research or change brake pads) you have to observe that _process_, not just the outcome.
2. Set 21st Century tasks. Outside of the schooling/certification process, it seems that most knowledge-work is collaborative. 'Authentic assessment' would look for competence in utilisation of teams and 'found material'.
Both of these approaches require detailed observation and record keeping to replace simple collection of work. Fortunately, software features like 'track changes' and 'revision history' do help. There is still a long way to go, in developing expertise in rapid assessment utilising those records. The main difficulty seems to be that the markers don't yet know what characterises best practice in collaborative scholarship. I'm particularly interested in that question, and I am frustrated that discussions of Plagiarism often fail to acknowledge the social character of knowledge and its production.
Russell
Something I have been thinking about recently, which is somewhat related to this:
When you go to see a film, or a play, particularly if it is something trashy like a James Bond or Star Trek film, or a Gilbert and Sullivan musical, there is the concept of 'Suspending your disbelief'. That is, you will enjoy it a lot more if you go along with whatever ridiculous premise the film/play/musical is based on, rather than sitting there thinking "that's impossible", or "how ridiculous", the whole time.
I wonder if it is worth acknowledging a similar concept when it comes to course design. The student will get the most out of the course if they enter into the sprit of things, and agree to participate fully in whatever artificial and contrived activities the teacher has devised to help them learn.
Of course, really great art normally does not require much suspension of disbelief. Similarly, really great courses will uses practice-based and peer learning, realistic examples, and authentic assessment. But sometimes that is just not feasible or appropriate for what is being taught, just like sometimes you want to watch StarTrek, not Citizen Kane.
I've just rated Tim's latest post "Coolest thing ever" but that's not really what I wanted to express - sorry, I'm not the gushing sort. I would prefer just to be able to put "Useful" like on the Using Moodle forums (I'd also like to know how to have just a one item rating on my own forums).
But Tim, maybe you prefer to be rated "Coolest thing ever".
In which case, here are some smileys which express my opinion of your posts:
Cheers,
Glenys
In our school, which focuses writing a process writing approach with personal projects rather than general topics, it is hard for students to plagiarize their own reflections. Also we ask students to submit a folder for each essay with their notes, internet printouts, outlines, first, second and third drafts in a packet. That shows traceable path of how he or she built the essay.
Online plagiarism checkers would however be useful for checking within our site for past projects that students might be tempted to copy.
>>There are a number even more unsavoury. (Like the ready adoption of American spelling - for one......)
Hmm. One study revealed that by dropping the "u" in colour and the "me" in programme has saved saved thousands of tons of carbon in reduced paper waste and screen energy. Surely, mammoths would still be alive today had we adopted American spelling years ago. And just think of the global warming I am causing by adding on this last frivilous sentence.
Where I am seeing plagiarism (not in my own program) is in writing assignments that are hangovers from the pre-Internet days:
The trick to preventing plagiarism is to up the ante from regurgitation and simple interpretation to apply some facts to analyze this particular situation. In the analysis, the pertinent facts will spill out, along with the interpretive skills.
In my program, we had a question about linguistics where we wanted students to explain some verb tenses and when their use was appropriate. Obviously, a quick search leads to exactly those items. Why should a student make up something that might be wrong when they can copy what is already "published" and be certain to be correct?
We changed the question and added a comment that we wanted to see what the *student* thought about things, not what someone else thought.