Plagiarism and Cheating

What plagiarism detection software is available to online instructors?

 Plagiarism has been a touchy topic from years! I remember when I was college that was something that the instructor spoke about vaguely but really didn’t enforce any major policy because at that time technology was not as advanced as it is today. However, today with the technological advances such as Google. It very hard to plagiarize because everything is on the Internet even other students’ work! I remember there was a time where you could buy or purchase other student previous papers and pass them off as your own. But today, with the use of the plagiarism software such as “Turnitin and EVE” it helps instructor’s detect academic integrity among students.

 How can the design of assessments help prevent academic dishonesty?

  In my opinion,  to prevent academic dishonesty as an instructor would be to set cleat expectations, goals and outcomes.  According to DiBiase & Jocoy

( 2006)“Recent case study research provides support for the effectiveness of incorporating plagiarism instruction into individual courses.  For example, by addressing the university and course policy on plagiarism and incorporating the importance of academic integrity into the course will help prevent the dishonestly of students. Furthermore, Soto, Anand, and McGee (2004)  “found that students who received no explicit plagiarism instruction plagiarized twice as often as those who participated in active instructional activities such as class discussions of definitions of plagiarism, review of Turnitin.com plagiarism reports, and exercises requiring students to identify instances of plagiarism in example essays”.

What facilitation strategies do you propose to use as a current or future online instructor?

 The strategies that I would use would be congruent to the strategies that the Walden University Instructors use such as the Turnitin feature.    However I would change a couple of things such as allowing students the abilities to go back and make correction from there work that they submitted to Turnitin. In my opinion, I think to prevent academic dishonestly you have to teach the students about academic integrity because it’s all about interpretation. For example, I didn’t that the taking material from a previous paper written by you would be considered plagiarizing. And I am sure I am not the only one! Therefore, my strategies would be to encourage and to teach academic honesty through software features such as Turnitin and Grammerly. And encourage students to revise and edit their work and openly discuss the consequences of plagiarizing.

What additional considerations for online teaching should be made to help detect or prevent cheating and plagiarism?

 Honestly, I think providing clear expectations and guidelines of the university policy on plagiarism and academic dishonestly will help alleviate some of the programs with both. In addition “…providing explicit plagiarism instruction in the form of an expectation management strategy introduced prior to students’ preparation of assignments” DiBiase & Jocoy (2006). Furthermore, instructors should address the student that has been suspected cheating or plagiarism with direct information from that particular assignment by providing them an opportunity to redo the assignment or further disciplinary actions.  Students should know and understand that their will be consequences due to cheating or plagiarizing whether its grading deduction or disciplinary actions from the instructor or school.

Reference:

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