Plagiarism Detection and Prevention

A quick search for “plagiarism detection software” in any search engine will return a plethora of options, but they all have one thing in common; there is a cost for the use of the software. While major corporations and schools may easily dismiss this cost, most students would find it hard to maintain the rate of expense that most software geared towards student use require. For example, WriteCheck (http://en.writecheck.com/) (a subsidiary of TurnItIn [http://turnitin.com/en_us/home] a detection software used by many schools) offers students a price of $7.95 per paper of $29.95 for five papers. It is important to note, however, that in their research on plagiarism by adult online learners, Jocoy & DiBiase (2006, p.9) did conclude that “automated plagiarism detection service noticeably [improves the ability] to find and document” plagiarism. Therefore, for schools, the cost of detecting plagiarism may be worth it since detections is over five times greater when compared to manual detection (2006, p. 9).

As I watched Palloff’s and Pratt’s (Laureate Education, Inc., 2012) dialog about plagiarism and cheating I was taken aback by how Dr. Pratt was surprised to have an incident of cheating for the first time in one of his courses. I was not so amazed of the fact that he was astounded that it had happen, but that this was the first time that it had ever happen to him. I have been a student for many, many years, and I assumed that every class had gangs of cheaters based on the lengths that my professors went to in their efforts to prevent cheating and plagiarism. I have been a part of a class in which the teacher used six different versions of a test within the classroom and never returned tests to the students, or the professor that cataloged a copy of every essay turned in to him and his department by topic, point of view, and course to prevent plagiarism. I assumed that there existed groups of organized crime that specialized on educational cheating and plagiarism. I often asked myself how well all these techniques work, and if there was a better way of preventing plagiarism.

Jocoy & DiBiase (2006, p.9) devised a three-prong strategy to prevent plagiarism. This strategy revolves around ensuring that the university’s policies on academic integrity are referred, customized guidelines are developed for the course, and each student passes a quiz on academic integrity to unlock the assignment’s instructions. In my view, this should be more than enough to prevent plagiarism. Yet, the results showed that not only did this strategy “only marginally reduced rates of plagiarism,” but the “improvement was not statistically significant” (2006, p. 10). These results only left me with a bigger void in my pursuit towards preventing and detecting plagiarism. This was so until Palloff and Pratt (Laureate Education, Inc., 2012) opened my eyes to a new way of viewing this problem.

Palloff’s and Pratt’s (Laureate Education, Inc., 2012) novel idea is to stop focusing our energy on catching and preventing plagiarism, and develop course, test, and assignments that emulate the way our learners problem solve in real life. They give the example that in real life when our bosses give us a problem that needs fixing they don’t lock us up in a room by ourselves and expect us to develop the answer in a vacuum. Instead, for many of us, the first thing we do is to do a quick search on Google, or any other search engine, to see if someone has posted any leads on possible answers to the problem. This practice has become so popular that society has coined the verve “googled,” as in “I just googled that, and….” This custom has become so imbedded in our culture that this month Senate Bill 2206 (2014), the Let Me Google That For You Act, was introduced to do away with the National Technology Information Service (NTIS), citing that Google is better at retrieving data than the NTIS without charging a fee like the NTIS does. Likewise, in real life people are allowed to collaborate with others in the process of solving the problem or task without running the risk of being branded a cheater. Therefore, Palloff and Pratt (Laureate Education, Inc., 2012) conclude that if the tests, assignments, and courses are designed to allow collaboration among the learners with the expectation that they will need to draw upon reference material, then students will not feel the need to cheat or plagiarize. They also recognize the important role that educators have to guide, teach, and correct our learners when they, unintentionally, plagiarize.

References

Jocoy, C., & DiBiase, D. (2006). Plagiarism by adult learners online: A case study in detection and remediation. International Review of Research in Open & Distance Learning, 7(1), 1–15.

Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2012). Plagiarism and cheating. Baltimore, MD: Author. (approximate length: 10 minutes)
Dr. Rena Palloff and Dr. Keith Pratt discuss effective methods for dealing with plagiarism in distance education.

Let Me Google That For You Act of 2014, S. 2206, 113^th Cong. (2014). Retrieved from http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-113s2206is/pdf/BILLS-113s2206is.pdf