Preventing Digital Plagarisim

Preventing Digital Plagarisim

In this article Caroline McCullen details that because of all the advances in technology, students have a much easier time of taking others work off the Internet and posting it as their own. Students can quickly locate data using search engines, and if they don't take the time to quote their sources properly the work that was copied could be mistaken for their own. Students that plagiarize on purpose can visit several sites that sell term papers. So how do teachers and administrators combat such acts of plagiarism? Caroline first recommends that you discuss with students the need to properly cite sources. There are several websites such as mybib where you can enter in the data and just copy and paste the cited info into your biblography. She also recommend that students practice paraphrasing material. A method such as reading a passage in a book, then shutting it and then using ones own words to describe what that paragraph was about can aid students in preventing plagiarism. Remind students that there are penalties associated with taking others work without properly citing it. Make sure that any policies in regards to the penalties are enforced. Lastly let the students know that there are tools to spot plagarisim. There are several services available to schools and administrators where teachers can have the students submit their homework to be "reviewed". In this reviewing process the paper is scored based upon what it sees as verbatim copying, and what is properly cited. When I was in Parkway we had one High School that used this procedure to grade student's work. Students need to know that as teachers and administrators we can use technology to our advantage and discover plagiarism.