Many college students plagiarize written material every year, but according to a new study, their motives aren’t always malicious.
The reason most students plagiarize is because they simply don’t know what plagiarism is, according to a study conducted by professors from Swarthmore College and the University of Michigan.
“The problem is that students do not really understand what plagiarism is and faculty members do not see this as something they need to be involved in,” said Thomas Dee, of Swarthmore College.
Dee and his partner Brian Jacob came to this conclusion through testing 573 students who were assigned to write various essays on the humanities and social sciences classes at a single, selective university. About half of those students received a tutorial through Blackboard that defined and explained different types of plagiarism.
The students who took the tutorial were less likely to plagiarize than their counterparts who did not. And in an interesting twist, Jacob and Dee concluded the tutorials prevented students from plagiarizing not because they were scared into submission, but because the students emerged with a better understanding of the concept of plagiarism and how to avoid it.
The moral of the story: If students everywhere were educated more about plagiarism, they wouldn’t do it.
And at a university where academic dishonesty automatically results in an XF grade for undergraduates and expulsion for graduate students, these results could have major implications for students and faculty.
In a working paper on their study, “Rational Ignorance In Education: A Field Experiment In Student Plagiarism,” Dee and Jacob lament that often students don’t have an incentive to learn about plagiarism and professors don’t have an incentive to teach about it.
“College instructors often view policing plagiarism and teaching students about it as outside their responsibilities,” the duo wrote.
Across this university, professors varied in their accounts of how they explain plagiarism to their classes.
Ray Hiebert, a journalism professor, said graduate students typically understand the concept, though undergraduates “don’t know what they are doing.” Still, he said he does not explain the issues much in his own classroom.
“You can’t teach them about plagiarism in every class,” Hiebert said. “It should be taught in the lower courses.”
Adam Binkley, a graduate assistant who teaches a section of ENGL101 discusses plagiarism with his students at the beginning of every semester and again before the first paper is due. He also provides his students with the link to the student honor council website which defines different types of plagiarism.
Ken Holum, a history professor, takes a different approach.
He talks to his students about plagiarism before they write their term paper. While he stresses students should “use their own words,” he does not explicitly define different types of plagiarism and does not supply students with the resources to do so.
But this sort of general overview of plagiarism does not always prevent it, especially because the most common type of plagiarism — mosaic plagiarism — is so subtle, Dee explained. This sort of idea theft occurs when a student keeps the basic sentence structure of their source in place and move some of the words around admist their own prose.
Because some of the words change, many students simply don’t realize this constitutes plagiarism, Dee said. He stressed the need for software to explain the act to make up for times when professors don’t.
“That is why the tutorial is useful,” he said. “The faculty doesn’t need to be involved.”
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