Topic: Plagiarism
Title: Student Plagiarism and the use of a Plagiarism Detection Tool by Community College Faculty
Rationale
This study sought to better inform community college administrators and faculty regarding possible factors that contribute to higher levels of student plagiarism and to suggest appropriate preventative or responsive interventions. The specific purpose of the study was to investigate a set of faculty related factors that may be associated with particular levels of suggestive plagiarism. Suggestive plagiarism is an intentionally chosen term to capture the fact that TII reports on submitted papers only and that may, but not necessarily, infer actual plagiarism. It does not assess a student’s intent or ignorance of the rules of source attribution. This reality of the tool is discussed at greater length later in this study. This study guide aims to help you to understand what plagiarism is in the context of academic work, and offers guidance on how to avoid it.
Introduction
Plagiarism, and the larger issue of ownership of the written word, is not as easy to define as it might first appear. Many writers on the topic of plagiarism and academic honesty have attempted to define the term. It comes as no surprise that the use of the Internet is on the rise and that the high school and college students of today see it as an integral and vital tool for their learning. The combination of the ubiquitous nature of computers, the internet and other information technologies with changing attitudes toward the ownership and control of information leads inevitably toward a world in which information is created, shared, modified and appropriated as never before seen. This combination of factors lies at the heart of the plagiarism threat in the academic world.
Background of the Study
In the last few years, a new tool has been developed for plagiarism detection that takes advantage of the very characteristics of the Internet that lead to a heightened potential for plagiarism. The tool is called TurnItIn™ (TII). Developed by a team of researchers at the University of California - Berkeley in 1996 for detecting the use of recycled research papers, today it has developed into the world’s premier tool for comparing student papers against the vast array of information available on the Internet or their own large database of material. To date, research using this new tool as a means of studying the plagiarism phenomena has just begun to emerge. Furthermore, its incorporation into research studies is valuable since it does not rely on student self-reports of their behaviors but rather measures their actual plagiarism activity via analyses of their submitted papers.
Because the tool has only recently come into widespread use and given the fact that the database of comparable information only very recently has become quite extensive, there remains a critical gap in knowledge about plagiarism as measured in this new way. This is especially true for community colleges where there appears to be little or no research on using TII, despite the fact that community colleges educate over a third of the national student body at any one time. Furthermore, little is known about particular course or instructor characteristics that may prove predictive of the extent of student plagiarism. Thus, efforts to combat the problem of plagiarism lack the ability to draw upon empirical data to inform classroom and institutional policy and practice reforms and instead must rely only on gut beliefs or hearsay.
While the focus of this research is not the identification and development of plagiarism prevention strategies, it is interesting to note that a great deal of the plagiarism literature focuses on various suggestions for preventing and identifying plagiarism. Ryan (1998) suggested that instructors can spot possible plagiarism by looking for changes in context or by spotting missing or false references or footnotes.
Martin (2005) and Braumoeller and Gaines (2001) found that when students are made aware of the fact that their writings are being scanned for possible plagiarism, the students are less likely to plagiarize.
Also, some authors suggested that students are often poorly trained and unaware of what behaviors constitute plagiarism. It follows then that programs designed to raise awareness of how to properly cite sources could be helpful.
For a full understanding of TII, it is important to have a basic understanding of how the TII service works from a user perspective. Essentially there are three phases or steps in the process of using TII to identify student plagiarism. Those steps are submission of the paper, the TII analysis of the submitted paper and the report from TII. The submission process for TII is fairly straightforward. The user (either a faculty member or a student) logs in to the TII website. The user is then able to upload a paper in the form of an electronic file to the TII website. Some faculty members may prefer to submit student papers themselves. Others may opt to create TII accounts for their students and then have the students themselves submit the papers. In both instances, the submission process is extremely simple.
Once submitted, the paper is compared to the TII database. This database consists of over 12 billion archived web pages, over 100 million student papers and over 80,000 newspapers, magazines and scholarly journals. In addition to being compared to this enormous database, the submitted paper is also added to the archive of student papers, allowing future comparisons to include previously submitted papers.
Finally, the TII service creates a unique originality report for the submitted paper. The submitter of the paper may view this originality report. The originality report includes a variety of information including the Overall Similarity Index. This is the percentage of the submitted paper that matches one or more other sources. In the report, the original submitted text is shown side-by-side with the matching text as identified by the TII comparison analysis. This allows the viewer to see exactly what portion of the submitted paper matches other texts, be that a journal article, a web page or another student paper. Furthermore, the viewer has the ability to select and turn off areas of matching text in the submitted paper that are properly cited and therefore not plagiarized. These reports are savable and printable as well.
Review of the Related Literature In some cases, the plagiarism committed may be due to a lack of understanding of the rules surrounding plagiarism and attribution of original sources. In other cases, the plagiarism is committed by the author with intent to deceive the reader. In both cases the end result is the same – the reader is led to believe the written text is the original expression of the writer – however the motivation of the writer differs greatly. In a practical sense, plagiarism can be defined in the following four ways:
1. Stealing material from another source and passing it off as their own.
2. Submitting a paper written by someone else and passing it off as their own.
3. Copying sections of material from one or more source texts, supplying proper documentation but leaving out quotation marks, thus giving the impression that the material has been paraphrased rather than directly quoted.
4. Paraphrasing material from one or more source texts without supplying appropriate documentation.
The literature review includes a variety of explanations for why students continue to plagiarize. For a student to avoid doing something wrong, he must first understand what behavior is considered wrong in the first place. A researcher believes that most students plagiarize without understanding that they are doing something wrong. This may be especially true of students at community colleges who are more likely to be first generation college students. As such, these students are less aware of the expectations for conduct in the academic community and may not be aware that plagiarism is prohibited.
Background of the Problem
Plagiarism is a growing problem, finding ways to identify plagiarism and developing methods to combat it are central to maintaining the intellectual integrity of the university. Plagiarism can and often does violate society’s sense of fair play and justice as well as the norms of academic scholarship. It undermines the integrity of our colleges and universities. Finally, investigating and addressing plagiarism unnecessarily diverts valuable faculty and staff time and resources investigating and prosecuting plagiarism. Arguably plagiarism is under investigated either out of naiveté as to what it is, how to differentiate the intentional from the inadvertent, or simply because of the perceived impact on the time needed to pursue other important institutional activities.
One particular phenomenon that has heightened plagiarism concerns has been the rise of the Internet. Pre-Internet plagiarism required the writer to retype text from printed books or articles, a sometimes labor intensive task. Today, text can easily be copied and pasted in a matter of seconds from the Internet. While access to information in new and greatly expanded ways via electronic media has certainly been a positive development, it nevertheless creates the impression that information is free and ideas without owners. The very idea of the Internet, a mechanism for free and easy access to information, creates the impression that one may lift others‟ ideas without attribution simply because it can be done with ease. It is this ease that is at the heart of many incidents of plagiarism.
Today’s traditional aged college students were born and raised with the internet and other electronic communication technologies. They have always used the internet as a primary means of communication and information gathering. As such, it has become quite easy to integrate internet-located information and material to incorporate into class papers and writing assignments. With the development of major efforts by Google and others to digitize leading academic libraries and to scan and make books available electronically and not just in printed form, it is likely that easy access to information will continue to rise and with it the opportunities for students to plagiarize.
There is also some evidence that public school systems are not effectively addressing the need to educate students in the proper manner of citing information. Plagiarism is becoming a very significant problem for high school writing teachers. Many graduates from our nation’s public school systems are often poorly equipped to navigate the expectations of academe when it comes to attributing others‟ ideas and expressions. These new college students are untrained in common practices and methods of citing sources in their written work or even worse, do not believe it to be necessary.
Sub problems
The specific research questions were as follows:
1. Are there particular instructor related factors that are associated with the level of suggestive plagiarism that occurs in the community college classroom?
2. Is there a difference in suggestive plagiarism based upon the campus on which the faculty member teaches?
3. How do faculties who use TII think about plagiarism and their role in educating BSE students on how to properly cite works and avoid it?
Importance of the Study
This study is significant for several reasons. First and foremost, it is important because of the way in which plagiarism is operationalized. Using the originality report from TII provides a new and different means of looking at the behavior of plagiarism. Past studies in this area have relied on student self-reports as a means of measuring plagiarism.
Second, as many authors have remarked, plagiarism is a current and growing problem. Finding ways to better understand plagiarism and the circumstances in which it thrives is vital to faculty and administrators seeking to maintain the highest levels of academic integrity by identifying and preventing plagiarism.
Third, most research in the area of plagiarism has centered on students enrolled at four year universities. Considering the large numbers of students who attend the nation’s community colleges, better understanding the plagiarism behaviors of these students could provide broad reaching implications for faculty and administrators across the higher education spectrum.
Finally, this study focuses on faculty related factors. Most existing research has focused on the impact of student related factors and plagiarism. Gaining a better understanding of faculty related factors and their relationship to plagiarism may assist college faculty and administrators in their efforts to better address the problem
References
http://scholars.indstate.edu/bitstream/10484/966/1/Thurmond,%20Bradley.pdf