Guarding Against / Avoiding Plagiarism
Roger
Easson and Kate
Coffield in separate posts offered the following practical suggestions
for how to preempt acts of plagiarism in the writing classroom:
-
Devote a significant block of instruction to "information literacy" (Easson)
-
Design assignments that discourage it, and be open and direct with students
about it (Coffield)
-
Be aware of a student’s "overall pattern of writing" (Coffield)
-
Conduct "periodic conferences during the research process," which can "help
greatly in spotting plagiarizing ‘tendencies’ before they get too serious"
(Coffield)
-
Evaluate student work "at various stages (collecting sources, focusing
topic, formulating research questions)" (Coffield)
-
Spot-check sources (Coffield)
Nick
Carbone proffered the slightly more radical idea of paper-swapping,
i.e., allowing students "to take paragraphs from one another’s papers and
to use them without any citing." In this way, class members generate "pools
of knowledge (intellectual village commons), which [they] add to and draw
from without formally citing everyone." By establishing in this way a "community
intellectual property," plagiarism by definition becomes impossible, with
students freely sharing and accessing each other’s ideas. My
own suggestion for avoiding plagiarism, in keeping with both Nick Carbone’s
"paper-swapping" idea and Kate Coffield’s second suggestion above, was
to investigate "other viable models of research and critical thinking"
that allow us to sidestep the problem of plagiarism altogether. More specifically,
I recommended research assignments that "reward (among other things) instances
of appropriation and attribution in and of themselves," thinking that acts
of blatant or subtle misuse of outside material will be fewer if students
are taught to recognize skillful appropriation as a credit-earning
activity.