Tips to help learners avoid plagiarism and technology-enhanced cheating:
Using the internet for teaching and learning often brings up the question of cheating. A common concern voiced by faculty is “How do I know that my students are doing the work?” While this question frequently arises in completely online courses, the existence of a variety of “cheat sites” (sites where students can download term papers etc.) on the internet may cause concern in traditional and web enhanced courses as well. This information may be useful in the design of authentic online assessments that can promote academic honesty and deter “technology-enhanced academic dishonesty”
Design assessments that are unique in some way.
Use alternate means of assessment, portfolios, and/or multiple measures of mastery.
If appropriate, use frequent lower stakes assessments and self-tests.
If appropriate, avoid relying on a single high stakes assessments, e.g., tests or papers.
Get to know your students. Require a writing sample during the first week of class. Have learners do this in their “best written style” and make it personalized and customized to them individually. Keep this on record for comparison purposes.
Provide resources to ensure that all learners understand how to cite work in your course, and what would constitute plagiarism and cheating in their submitted work. The more learners know, the better prepared they will be to understand fully how to avoid plagiarism/cheating in their work.
Be clear and comprehensive regarding plagiarism policies.
Use online resources to help detect and minimize cheating (see links below).
Use MOSS (Measure of Software Similarity), which detects plagiarism in programming classes (link below).
If you suspect cheating/plagiarism don’t assume that it is. Discuss your concerns with the student to understand context and perspective.
When papers are required, focus on the process of writing. Require iteration on written assignments. Design the assessments in stages that require submissions and feedback as it is being written. For example, require a thesis statement, an initial bibliography, an outline, notes, a first draft, etc
Avoid “choose any topic” papers.
Require learners to use material from class lectures, presentations, discussions etc in their graded assignments. This makes finding “matching” papers more difficult.
Require learners to conduct an original survey, or interview as part of the assignment. The survey or transcripts of the interview would be included as an appendix to the paper/assignment.
Require an annotated bibliography as part of the process of writing the assignment. These are difficult to plagiarize.
Require an abstract of the paper where appropriate. Writing an accurate synopsis of a plagiarized paper is difficult.
Require a description of the research process with the final draft.
Require “raw materials” of the research process. For example, copies of the cited works.
Use a few papers on “cheat sites” as examples. Provide a grade for these and use as reference material. Learners will be hesitant to use a service that they know you know about.
If /when appropriate, use mastery and application – type questions and case studies in tests, papers and assignments, rather than “memorization” questions.
Use multiple-choice questions in more frequent lower stakes assessments as self-tests/quizzes, so learners can check their understanding of concepts, and course materials and readings.
If using online quizzes – provide different questions to different students – i.e., use a test bank.
If using online tests or quizzes, limit the amount of time the test is available.
CANEXUS.com Makers of EVE2 which “accepts essays in plain text, Microsoft Word, or Corel Word Perfect format and returns links to web pages from which a student may have plagiarized.”
Findsame – From Digital Integrity – “You submit an entire document, and we return a list of Web pages that contain any fragment of that document longer than about one line of text.”
