Why do students plagiarize?

•        Students may feel a required course not directly related to their major is something to be endured, and therefore not worthy of effort.
  

•        It may be accidental students may not understand that looking up synonyms and shuffling words around does not change the work enough to render it original.

•        Poor time management leads to a last-minute scramble to get things done.

•        The philosophy of the Internet has traditionally been one of giving away information for free.  The resulting perception is that this information is in the public domain, or common knowledge that can be manipulated at will.

•        Its gotten really easy. Before the advent of the Internet, students had to find library sources and retype them. Now they can copy and paste in a matter of seconds.

Where do they go to plagiarize (sources)?

• The Internet: including term paper mills, user reviews on Amazon.com, lecture notes, etc.
• Full-text article databases
• Traditional library sources such as books and journals.

How can faculty prevent plagiarism?

• Require parts of the assignment due in stages. Receiving copies of paper topics, abstracts, preliminary bibliographies, and rough drafts of the paper before the final is due will not only help the student avoid procrastination, but also makes it more difficult for a student to use a prepackaged work.
  
• Customize the research topic to data you provide, or ask the students to write with respect to a specific scenario. Most papers from paper mills are generic, so narrowing the scope of the topic will make it more difficult to use a run-of-the-mill essay.
  
• Talk about it. Let your students know you are just as Internet-savvy as they are; if they found it, you can find it too. Make sure your students really understand what plagiarism is; your understanding might be different from theirs. Let them know what the penalties are and what has happened to other students in the past.
  
• Get in-class student writing samples early in the semester. Compare these with students writing styles in the paper; have they dramatically improved?
  
• Change paper topics from year to year. Students may share files with others who have already taken the course.
  
• Require students to hand in notes, an annotated bibliography, or photocopies from sources. This shows the student that you are attentive to the sources used.
  
• Require a mix of sources: For example, require at least two books, two articles, one first-person interview, two web sites, etc. Also limit the use of articles older than five years, if possible; many of the papers available on the Internet make use of dated source material.                                           

What does the Daniel Webster College Student Handbook say on Plagiarism?

So that students understand the importance and expectation

 of academic honesty, instructors should define what constitutes

 plagiarism or cheating on each syllabus and describe the

 corresponding penalties (p. 19).

Increasing student awareness in such a manner is one preventative measure. The following lists other measures you might employ to prevent plagiarism, or failing that, to detect the source if a paper seems suspicious.

How is Plagiarism detected?

• Look for dramatic changes in writing style, or even fonts, throughout the paper. This could be evidence that the student has cut-and-pasted information from various Internet sources, or copied the body of the paper and added his own introduction and conclusion.
  
• Search for suspicious phrases or unusual words from the paper in search engines and in paid databases like EBSCO. For example, if the use of a phrase like lynchpin of the new youth culture strikes you as something the student would not have thought up on his own, enter it in the search engine Google within quotation marks to look for instances of that exact phrase on the web. Or do a keyword search with some of the words in the phrase in a database like EBSCO, along with a word describing the topic broadly. Then use your browsers find in page function to look for specific words or phrases within an article.
  
• Is the paper off-topic? If the paper fails to address some points in the assignment at all, or has only a tenuous connection to the assignment, it could be that this was the closest thing a student was able to find on the Internet.
  
• Randomly check the sources. If URLs are included, visit them. Do those sources actually exist? Does the library actually own any of the books?
  
• Require student presentations of material, or test their knowledge in some other way, such as via a written examination.  Often students view their workload in terms of a cost-benefit ratio. Knowing that they will have to get deeply acquainted with the topic anyway, they might decide its just as easy to actually write the paper from scratch.
  
• Use plagiarism detection software. Some are free, and involve your creating a database of locally stored student papers (e.g. the Plagiarism Resource Center at the University of Virginia: http://plagiarism.phys.virginia.edu/). Daniel Webster College has a subscription to Turnitin.com, a plagiarism detection service.  Click here to register to use this service.  
  
• Search for the paper topic on one of the term paper mill sites:

http://www.schoolsucks.com

http://allfreeessays.com/

http://www.sparknotes.com/

http://www.papershighway.com/

For further information or if you have any questions, please contact the Public Services Librarian, Baddour Library, Daniel Webster College, at 603-577-6541 or borbotsina_margo@dwc.edu.