Suggestions for developing assignments that minimize plagiarism possibilities:

Preface

For the sake of clarity and ease of reference, I’ve tried to categorize these suggestions. But, some suggestions fall into no clear category. Others fit into more than one. Please keep in mind that some of these strategies may interfere with what you’re trying to achieve with an assignment. All decisions about how to deter plagiarism should be made with you curricular objectives in mind. At Kirkwood, given our plagiarism policy, one of those objectives is now creating assignments which deter plagiarism

Sculpting the Learning Environment

First, assume nothing. At a February 2003 conference on plagiarism at the University of Iowa, with the exception of un-credited direct quotes, a room full of college faculty couldn’t agree on what did and did not constitute plagiarism – even with very specific examples presented for their discussion by keynote speaker Chris Anton. Don’t assume your students know what the word ‘plagiarism’ means. Don’t assume they understand the concept of intellectual property – especially if they are foreign students, or Americans who have largely been educated in other countries.

Define plagiarism in writing and orally for your students. Provide examples, or scenarios for discussion. Follow-up with assessments of their understanding – definitions quizzes, T/F responses to brief scenarios, etc. (When you’re sure, based on such assessment, that a student has integrated the concept, keep the quiz in a file in case you need evidence of comprehension later in the term.)

Like all humans, students are much more likely to cheat when they are anonymous units in large groups to which they have little or no personal connection. Internet courses exacerbate this problem. Invent ways to get to know your students. Give your students the opportunity to learn each other’s names and backgrounds. Decreasing the sense of anonymity and increasing the sense of community discourages cheating in general.

o During the first week of class, collect an in-class piece of writing from your students. This provides a base-line from which to judge subsequent submissions of the student’s work. The content is irrelevant except that you can make it double for other goals, like getting to know them, so, ask them to provide you with a little personal information, or to write about themselves in some why that connects with your course, like a history of her experience with the subject matter, or a written summary of his understanding of your syllabus.

Students are much less likely to cheat on assignments they see as worthwhile. Worth here equates to being able to see a clear relationship between the assigned work and the course objectives. Make such connections explicitly clear.

It is likely that students will feel less incentive to plagiarize if they’re confident that they can earn a good grade in a fair manner. To inspire such confidence one might do the following:

o Provide many assignments during the course so that one or two slip-ups will not destroy a student's ability to earn a good grade

o Indicate that you grade fairly by using clearly articulated assignments with pre-established grading criteria (both given to the student in writing)

o Offer written or oral responses to their work in-progress

o Provide ample time to complete multiple drafts of an assignment

At Kirkwood, the faculty agreed in the spring of 2000 that all syllabi will quote the college’s plagiarism policy. A master-syllabus resides on the internal-net at H:faculty/syllabus. You may use the whole syllabus (that’s why it’s called a "master" for those of you too young to remember ditto-masters) or cut the plagiarism section from it and copy into your own syllabus.

Given that the college’s policy specifically addresses the need of students to create a paper trail of their writing, help your students internalize this process. This can be quite simple – requiring 3 drafts with significant revision between each one, for example, and/or the submission of all drafts of a paper with the draft numbers labeled clearly. Or, how about requiring use of the Writing Center (which automatically sends you a receipt) followed by a revision of the assignment.

Let your students know that you will hold them responsible for authenticating their work, and make the ability to authenticate their work part of the language of your assignments.

Don’t harp at your students about plagiarism and cheating! Being treated as if one is dishonest, actually makes many people behave dishonestly. Find a balanced way to communicate with your students about plagiarism and other forms of cheating

Reproduce the college’s authentication policy on your individual writing assignments.

Finally, get creative with your assignments. It is possible to invent assignments which preclude plagiarism

 

Plagiarism-Proof Assignments

First, recognize that a required two-semester composition sequence does not mean your students will have had direct instruction about writing, research, or avoiding plagiarism. Many of the high schools which feed this institution no longer teach the research process (or teach it only in Advanced Placement courses) and no longer permit any out-of-class writing. This college, like most others, has no way of forcing students to take their writing courses before they take anything else. YOU have to discuss writing in your discipline with your students; you have to be able to articulate what plagiarism is and how to avoid it. You have to teach them how to wield your field’s documentation style.

Good writing results from a confluence of several processes, both physical (like simply locating sources) and cognitive. Running out of time and/or procrastinating impedes these processes, especially the cognitive ones, and motivates most of the plagiarism seen on college campuses. Thus, inventing ways to give students credit for pieces of the assignment-completion-process is not "giving them busy work," it is holding them accountable for participating in processes that years of composition theory affirm as significant to the quality of retention and writing products.

o Rather than simply a final due date, consider including due dates for: topic decision, research summaries, research syntheses, outlines, source notes, thesis statement, paper title (which gives the reader a hint of the paper’s thesis) properly formatted list of sources, etc.

§ Many such incrementals can be discussed in the Writing Center rather than with you; the WC will send you a receipt of the appt.

Avoid receiving papermill products by:

o Requiring several significantly altered drafts (you don’t have to read them)

o Assigning coupled and/or unusual primary texts. Examples:

§ For a rhetoric course, "Compare Orwell’s 1984 and the Bush White House’s website.

§ For a nursing course, "Use the text’s chapter on spores to explain what’s going on in the first half of  Hotspot."

§ In a literature class, "Apply Mazlow’s "Hierarchy of Needs," to the Jode family’s condition in the opening of Grapes of Wrath, at one of the camps in California, and at the end of the novel. Where on the scale would you say Tom Jode resides as the novel closes? Why?"

§ In a political science course, "Use Mazlow’s hierarchy to explain why the Afghani people couldn’t be expected to overthrow the Taliban without international help. In what ways is Mazlow’s theory insufficient to the task you’ve just been given?"

§ In a web-site design course, "Use Mazlow’s hierarchy to create a webpage for the new foreign students in a community college in the middle of Iowa."

Does your subject matter have application outside the college? Then, for heaven’s sake, make your students apply it! Invent assignment scenarios which define the audience and purpose of your assignment in ways that take it out of the academy. Examples:

§ For an environmental biology class, "Write an editorial for the local paper arguing that North Americans should stop eating bananas. Use at least two sources supporting your argument, and at least one which will aid in conceding one of the opposition’s points…"

§ Or how about this one for an ethics and media course, "Write a review of an episode of "Survivor" for your church/temple/mosque newsletter. Be certain to examine Aristotle’s ethos, pathos, logos triumvirate as it applies to the television program. Those of you are agnostic or atheist -- imagine that you’re writing an argument to your very conservative great grandfather who thinks the show should be taken off the air; your task is to convince him otherwise, and to use Aristotle to do it.

Ancillary assignments, or assignments related to the paper, can be effective plagiarism deterrents too. We’ve already discussed those which give students credit, or at least hold them responsible for meeting deadlines, associated with various steps/processes of research paper writing. Others can enrich the experience of the paper/project itself, encourage your students to rehearse knew knowledge before they try to write about it formally, and nudge them to think about the material or project in ways the assignment doesn’t make oblivious. So consider…

Require annotated bibliographies before they write the first drafts of their papers

Ask them to give oral source summaries to peers working on the same project/paper

When the whole project is completed to a depth and breadth that will enrich your classroom, have students present their written work in some oral fashion complete with Q & A

Part-way through the process, ask your students to create grading rubrics specific to their papers and to justify every step on the rubric

Have students keep a "paper/project log" in which they must:

o Describe the invention and writing process from brainstorming to final draft

o Explain what research they did, including summarizing what they found and explaining why they used or discarded their research results

o Explain the revisions made to their text including what prompted the revision (Peer guffaw? Writing Center response? Teacher questions? News item on MTV?)

o Require the photocopying or printing out of all source material used in the paper, and the highlighting of any portions used. This doesn’t prevent them from adding material they haven’t given you, but it does give the impression that you’re paying attention to sources, often enables you to catch unintentional abuses of documentation systems, makes shifts in diction or focus clearer, etc.

Make assignments which are very specific to your particular course:

o Provide a list of unusual topics for them to choose from

o Identify the sources student must use so that you know the sources well

o Identify categories of sources – one from this magazine, one from that journal, etc.

o Require that all the sources used in the paper be introduced and briefly summarized in the text of the paper

o Exclude any source material that has not already been used in the class

Grading

The ways you mark and grade papers and projects can greatly influence whether or not your students are tempted to cheat. We discussed earlier the importance of providing students ample opportunities to submit flawed work and still earn a decent grade in the course. In other words, a course with only two or three chances for a student to earn the grade, one of which is a paper and two of which are exams is a course begging for plagiarized work.

Some ways to create chances for students to submit drafts and for you not to have to read or mark them are:

Have one peer read another peer’s work aloud to the writer. The writer should listen for glitches created in writing and not proof reading. A third peer listens for moments in the paper when "the voice changes." They can hear where citations should go, by flagging the "voice changes," they make this apparent to the writer and each other.

Ask them to compare an early draft to the grading criteria, and to explain (1) if they’ve met the criteria, (2) where in the paper they believe they’ve met it and (3) how they did it. This can be done autonomously, by peer critique, in a Writing Center, or orally in your office…

Spend a class period having your students read each other’s papers, making just one decision for each one: is this paper done? (The answer is almost always no. It leaves the purchaser of a papermill paper forced to revise work they did not begin. It places most student writers in enough cognitive dissonance that they seek professional help with the paper.)

o Talk to your peers in Composition and English. They have hundreds of techniques for getting students to improve the quality of their work without adding to their own HUGE paper loads.

Grading rubrics which lay-out the paper/project criteria from the beginning are invaluable to students trying to conquer challenging cognitive tasks. Additionally, a couple of idiosyncratic items on the rubric will prevent students from being able to earn good grades with work they haven’t tailored for you course.

o Require specific content in specific paragraphs

o Require applications of course terminology

o Require, for example, that some place in the paper a student must compare and contrast two different authors' perspectives on the paper’s central issue, or must define at least four of the words used in the paper, or…

o Require that the author’s full name and the title of the source be mentioned in a signal phrase as each source is initially used

Refuse to grade or give credit to any paper for which the student can not produce multiple drafts (you set the number)

Refuse to grade or give credit to any paper in which the student has suddenly changed topics.

Finally, posting your writing assignments on Kirkwood’s Writing Across the Curriculum WAC site allows your colleagues across the college to check to see if it’s likely that work from other courses is showing up in theirs and vice versa. You might let us know there, when you post the assignment, whether you care or want to be notified if your students are writing papers for your course in other people’s courses, or are using parts of work from your course in other course work.

Hope Burwell and Allison York, who invented, monitor and update the WAC site, are also available for consultation on assignment building as well as rubric creating for your assignments.