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In this article Melissa Burns, a informatics teacher,
discusses several ways to combat student plagiarism in the classroom. Her first suggestion when trying to determine
whether or not a student has turned in work that is not their own is to google
it. Knowing your students work is key
for this suggestion to work. If you come
across a suspicious sentence or phrase, simply type the phrase in the search
box with quotation marks on each end and view the results. If the text is taken directly from another
source, it should show up. Another
suggestion is to use a program called Plagtracker. Plagtracker generates a report from a large
database of sources. Ms. Burns even
suggests teachers use this program for themselves, as it is easy to forget
which ideas are uniquely your own after many hours of working on a project.
DocCop is a program that allows a teacher to compare two
documents for similarities. With this
program the teacher would still need to find the original source on their own
but it offers a quick analysis once the two documents are compared for
similiarities. WCopyfind works in a
similar way to DocCop, generating a report on the sameness of two
documents. Again, the teacher would have
to find the documents on his/her own however.
Finally, Ms. Burns suggests directing students and their
parents to Purdue University’s Online Writing Lab (OWL) for further information
on plagiarism and the consequences and effects it comes with. I think this is the most valuable tool in the
bunch because it will enable the students to actually learn how to avoid
plagiarism, rather than just punishing them once they have been caught.
Burns, M. (n.d.). 5 Online Tools to Help Combat Plagiarism.
Edutopia. Retrieved May 16, 2014, from http://www.edutopia.org/blog/online-tools-to-combat-plagiarism-melissa-burns
Throughout my time in school, I have used turnitin.com. I believe it works like plagtracker. The teacher has to create a class for the student to use. The site also allows for grading. The student uploads their document to the site and after a few minutes provides a report that contains how much of the document is similar to other documents in its database. The site claims that it can check students work against "the world's largest academic database" (turnitin.com, 2014).
ReplyDeleteI like Ms. Burns' take on what to do when students and parents complain about the student's grade. First, I think it is sad that parents would complain about grades instead of trying to find out what they can do to help their child do better. However, maybe by Ms. Burns giving the parents and students the information from OWL it will educate them not only about plagiarism, but other useful information that will help them through school.
Turnitin. (2014), Turnitin Originality Check. Retrieved May 17, 2014 from http://turnitin.com/en_us/features/originalitycheck
I had a big problem in my first two years of teaching at my current school with plagiarism. Students were turning in papers that were simply copied from elsewhere. After putting in a lot of great thought, I came to realize that there were two problems. The first is that these students had never been held accountable for their actions when they plagiarized someone else's work. Rather than give students 0s, which I thought was giving students an easy way out, I continued to make them rewrite things until they did it correctly. Eventually they got tired of redoing things and began turning things in that were not plagiarized. The other big issue was that these students had never really been taught how to avoid plagiarism. We do a good job at telling them that they're doing it wrong, but has anybody really shown them how to do it the right way? I know this hadn't happened at my school, so I took the time away from teaching science to show the students how to write original work and how to cite sources when they used someone else's ideas. The Purdue OWL is a wonderful resource to use. This year, I made my students write 10 current event summaries and cite sources to get them used to summarizing in their own words and writing a simple citation. I also assigned 2 persuasive essays and required various types of resources that needed to be used and cited. After all the hard work, things are starting to pay off.
ReplyDeleteI really like to use software from Grammarly.com. It is a lot like turnitin.com in that you copy and paste a student's work into the text box and it checks for spelling, grammatical errors, and plagiarism. If the program suspects that a student copied work illegally, it provides the name of the source where the student most likely took the information from. The software even provides a grade out of 100. Although I use a rubric of my own for assigning grades to assignments, it is good to have another resource to compare scores to.