B. Gilliard

A report released today by the plagiarism-detection tool TurnItIn confirms what a lot of teachers already know: that students are copying content from online sources. According to the report, for both high school and college students, Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers were the top two most popular sources of lifted copy.

But another interesting fact emerged from the report about the difference between high school and college students. While 31% of content matches for high school students came from social and “content-sharing” sites (like Facebook or Yahoo Answers), just 26% of the matches for college students originated there.

College students were more likely to use content from cheat sites and paper mills, the report finds: 19.6% of content matches in college students’ papers came from those sites, whereas just 14.1% of matches to high school students’ papers. College students were also more likely to turn to news sites — 16.6% versus 12.3% of college students. And even though Wikipedia was the most popular source for copied content, encyclopedias in general constituted roughly 11-12% of content for both populations.

The data from this report comes from TurnItIn’s own business: some 128 million content matches from 33 million student papers (24 million from higher education and nine million from high school) over a one-year period. That is, when students’ papers were submitted to TurnItIn, its system found passages from those papers matched content available on the open Web.

The report doesn’t indicate whether or not students cited these sources (it’s likely that many did). And TurnItIn doesn’t always catch plagiarized material from behind paywalls — sites that require subscriptions, for example, like many academic journals may not be included in what TurnItIn indexes.

TurnItIn’s report backs up a recent Pew Research Center survey, which showed that more than half of college presidents said that they believe plagiarism has increased among their students over the course of the last decade. None of this is surprising, of course. The “copy-and-paste” functionality  and the massive amount of online material available makes it a lot easier to take whole sections of a Web site and plop it into one’s assignment. As long as the source is cited, of course, it’s not necessarily considered plagiarism.

To help combat plagiarism, TurnItIn makes a number of suggestions for educators: make your assignments plagiarism-proof, the company suggests. Help students better understand citations. And — of course — the company recommends schools use a service like TurnItIn.

Recently we looked at some of the factors that may be behind our “culture of academic dishonesty.” Is it simply that students are taking advantage of easier copy-and-paste technology and online resources, or are there other issues at play? For example, what are the pressures on college students that make them far more likely to turn to cheating sites than high school students? What are the reasons why high schoolers turn more to social sites? How can we take advantage of their interest in working with their peers while helping them learn not to simply copy from them?

How can we address these factors, while creating better assignments — ones that reward creative thinking — and offering better instruction about citation?

Readers are parsing the difference between copying information verbatim without citing the source, and paraphrasing information gleaned from sources like Wikipedia.

One reader writes:

As a graduate student and researcher, 80% of what I do is not expressing original thoughts, but accurately understanding, coherently organizing, and properly attributing other people’s thoughts. I realize TurnItIn focuses on essays and term papers, not research, but perhaps what we really need is better education on how to attribute and use sources.

Another reader takes a step back and frames the conversation in terms of information ownership:

We are entering an age where ownership of information is becoming increasingly shared or indeterminate. Therefore, it’s time to re-think the concept of plagiarism.

This young generation of thinkers sees intellectual property very differently than my older generation does. I believe we are not far from an era where most information is considered public property and one’s intellectual value is measured by what one can do with information rather than by how much one knows. In this new world, plagiarism will become irrelevant. Of course, those who reject my hypothesis can always use technological solutions to address this fundamentally technological problem. Personally, I’d rather cultivate a paradigm shift in my own thinking about what I truly value in student writing. Changing my old attitudes is preferable to wrestling with out-dated notions of plagiarism that are doomed to become irrelevant by the middle of the 21st century. Like it or not, this new generation is going to re-define much of what us old timers take for granted.

A reference librarian says she believes Wikipedia is a legitimate resource to begin research, and paraphrasing is not plagiarism.

I explain that it is perfectly okay to use Wikipedia to start your research, because it can guide you to more specific sources. It is also okay to copy ideas from other sources, as long as you understand those ideas and can put them in your own words. After all, it is not reasonable to ask a sixteen year old to come up with an original insight into Shakespeare, the Civil Rights movement or the use of antibiotics. But we can certainly do a better job in helping those students understand what might constitute legitimate information sharing from legitimate sources as opposed to short-cuts that amount to cheating.

Another reader believes that using another source’s idea without reference is also plagiarism, whether or not the same words are used.

The whole point of plagiarism (which many confuse with copyright which punishes copying exact words) is that you’re copying someone else’s *idea* without attribution, not just their exact words.

This brings me back to the idea, written by Esther Wojcicki, about the importance of students learning the skills of a journalist: Collect and confirm information.

Brandi Jordan

Plagiarism is nothing new. Students have been plagiarizing far before the Internet was widely available — whether it was copying from the encyclopedia or hiring professionals. But the Internet and the explosion of online resources has made it easier for students to get to those resources. You’ll find a number of websites geared specifically to cheating — sites where you can buy papers, for example. But even if students opt not to pay-to-cheat, the Internet does seem to make it easier to lift content. It’s as easy as copy-and-paste.

But by those very same standards, it also means that plagiarism is much easier to identify. Even without purchasing expensive plagiarism-tracking software, instructors can Google suspicious-sounding sentences from students’ work and determine whether or not they’ve lifted content from online resources.

Even though plagiarism is often easily identifiable via a simple Web search, many schools have opted to purchase one of the many plagiarism-checking software programs currently on the market. One of the best known options is TurnItIn, which has just released an interesting white paper, based on the 40 million some-odd papers that have been submitted and analyzed by the site.

Some of the key finds from the paper include:

• Plagiarism is going social: One-third of all content matched in the study is from social networks, content sharing or question-and-answer sites where users contribute and share content.
• Legitimate educational sites are more popular than cheat sites: One-quarter of all matched material is from legitimate educational web sites, almost double the number that comes from paper mills or cheat sites.
• 15% of content matches come directly from sites that promote and benefit from academic dishonesty: Paper mills and cheat sites are the third most popular category for matched content.
• Wikipedia is the most popular site for matched content: It remains the single most used source for student-matched content on the Web, comprising 7% of matches in the months examined.

The TurnItIn research suggests that students really are trying to “do the right thing.” Noting the decrease in the number of students turning to sites that are clearly identified as “cheating,” the white paper asks if our new digital culture — one that promotes sharing, openness, and re-use — is running counter to some of the “fundamental tenets of education — the ability to develop, organize, and express original thoughts.” The paper suggests that many students really aren’t clear about what is legitimate re-use compared to plagiarism.

The white paper urges teachers to continue to teach proper citation methods and to discuss with students what constitutes fair use and what’s considered stealing. And no surprise, TurnItIn contends that adopting its tools means a reduction in students using “unoriginal content,” by as much as 30 – 35% in the first year.

Whether or not institutions opt to pay for plagiarism checking services like TurnItIn, the white paper does echo what many teachers already know from their day-to-day grading habits: Students turn to online sources to help them write their papers. But it’s important to note that these sources aren’t necessarily associated with cheating.

For educators and parents, the question is, how can we better equip students to take advantage of the vast resources online without succumbing to plagiarizing?