It's 12 o'clock and you get to the last essay of the bunch. As soon as you begin to read it, your heart sinks. Suddenly the nearly failing student who didn't do any rough work all week has written a B essay. It would be so easy to just mark it and let it go. But we just can't. On goes Google. . .
We always hope that our lessons about identifying plagiarism, and our lessons about how to cite sources will avoid this sticky issue, but that's wishful thinking, I'm afraid. At one point or another during marking, we all come across a phrase or a sentence or a paragraph or even a whole paper that we suspect is not the student's own ideas or words. Click here to see some of the ways teachers in my department use to prove plagiarism.
Here are the links to the two plagiarism detection software programs that our department recommends:
Doc Cop and Turnitin.
We always try to err on the side of student. But once we've proved that a student has plagiarized, we deal with each student individually. She may not have intended to plagiarize or to have helped another student plagiarize. But in the cases where she has knowingly plagiarized, most often we assign a zero for the assignment and a vice-principal is notified.
No matter how thorougly we teach about the types of plagiarism, no matter how carefully we plan our assignments to lessen plagiarize, or no matter how diligently we handle suspected cases of plagiarism, it's hard to keep one step ahead of the technology. We certainly will not catch every instance of plagiarism, but at least we are making a fuss about it. After that, it's a student's own conscience that directs her.
About Me
- Ms Stronach
- I'm an English teacher at Elmira District Secondary School. I love to read and write and walk my dog.
3 comments:
Hello Mel! It's great to be writing to you - I think you've made an excellent post in creating (or showing how your Board created) multiple pathways for dealing with the single issue of plagiarism. With so many options, solutions can be tailored to fit differing situations, students, teachers, etc.
I have heard, but have never seen, the program that identifies when writing has been plagiarised. I think that is an amaong idea, and it's my loss that I've never gotten to use it. With this program specifically, how much "sameness" is identified as being plagiarised? Several words, several lines, long? THANK YOU!
Hello Mel - Great post, and thank you for the ideas you (or your Board) have for dealing with plagiarism. With multiple solutions for a single (but complicated issue) there should always be room to find a solution that matches the specific problem, classroom, kids, and teachers involved. Great ideas all around
Specifically, I am really interested to hear about the softward that identifies plagiarism. I have heard of it, but have never had the chnac to see or work with it. A quick question, how much "sameness" is needed for the softeware to identify plagiarism? A string of words? Full line? Paragraph?
THANK YOU MEL!
In my limited experience, Doc Cop needs a string of words, but not necessarily a full line. It of course will identify direct quotes, say, from a play, and so that's a little annoying, but I don't suppose there's a way around that.
Post a Comment