It seems to be the mind-set of many students in this generation that things should be easily accessible and can be obtained for self-use with the simple click of a button. Look at what they have grown up with music file sharing, copy and pasting, downloading YouTube videos, sending photos back and forth without ever acknowledging ownership. Maybe this is part of the perception of the Internet by the digital generation that information is authorless. A study of 20,000 first-year post-secondary students found that nearly three-quarters (73%) admitted to committing acts of academic dishonesty on written work while in high school (Source URL: http://www.ccl-cca.ca/ccl/Newsroom/Releases/20100706AcademicDishonesty.html) Addressing this disconnect that exist by the Internet age is an important battle for our schools in order to defend the concepts of intellectual property, copyright and originality.
One source of plagiarism that I have witnessed in my school doesn't come from the lazy kid who is looking for an easy solution to getting that large research paper completed. The students who seems to be getting caught more and more for plagiarizing in their senior years of high school are the academically conscious, high-achieving ones. The school that I work at is regarded as one of the more academically oriented schools in the area. The pursuit for high marks is quite competitive. Many students have personal tutors, not because they are struggling to met a 70% entrance requirement, but rather to maintain their averages in the 90's and earn academic scholarships. The kind of student that I find is plagiarizing more and more are the ones who put an enormous amount of pressure on themselves to earn high marks, and are overloaded with work, completely stressed about timelines and are struggling to keep their straight A average. They know what plagiarism is and understand the consequences, but when they weight that against their perception of not getting accepted into the University program of their choice, the moral argument for not plagiarizing doesn't stand a chance.
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Preventing plagiarism has been quite successful in my department for the past several years. Being a math teacher, I must admit I encounter cheating on tests and quizzes, more often than plagiarism on essays and reports. However, one course that I teach called Grade 12 Data Management has a big report component attached to it, worth 25% of the year. The report requires the student to perform at statistical study on a topic of their choice that is of a statistical nature. For example students have done studies on "The Correlation of Holding a Part Time Job and Academic Performance" or "How Does Caffeine Consumption by Students Affect Grades?". The students then have to gather data from fellow students in the school using surveys, then organize the data, display the data, analyze the data and then draw conclusions from the data and report their findings. It does require a large investment time and hard work on the part of the students and sometimes students seek to find short-cuts.
The most common source of plagiarism for this course occurs when students try to acquire a previous years report from a friend who took the course in the past. Plagiarism was a very big problem for the teachers of this course until a web site called Turn-it-in.com came on the scene around 2005. Turn-it-in.com provides software to discourage plagiarism. Students are required to submit their reports to the website by uploading them under the schools account. The website then creates a database of all submitted reports. The teacher can then view what percentage of each report is considered "plagiarized". Ever report no matter how original will receive a "plagiarized" score of about 8% to 14%, due to the unavoidable duplications of such things as stating the mean, median and mode of a set of data, or giving the rules to a game such as badminton, which will be found on the Internet hundreds of times. Teacher are able to chick on a report and the software displays the student's report and highlights and sections of the text that are plagiarized and provides the name of the sources. Sometimes the source is a article or study on the Internet, or sometimes it is a report submitted to our ever accumulating database on Turn-it-in.com several years earlier. From my experience, just the threat of having to submit the report to a anti-plagiarism website is enough to convince many students that plagiarism isn't worth it. However, every year students think they can "beat the system" or they leave the assignment to the last minute and opt to plagiarize. We sometimes encounter plagiarism scores of 40% or more, up to the all-time record at or school of 89% plagiarized. Once the teacher has established that the student has plagiarized, they are called in to view what the software has highlighted and after a conversation about their actions and a admission of guilt, they are told they will receive a mark of zero for the report. It took about 4 years for our database to build up enough past reports so that the majority of the reports that potential cheaters were acquiring were already in the database. In the end this particular anti-plagiarism software really prevents plagiarism and has served our purpose well.
I strongly believe that it is often the mere threat of repercussions towards plagiarism that will deter students. Thus it is important for schools and classroom teachers to make it very clear to the students that an Academic Dishonesty policy is in place and outline exactly what form of punishment will be handed out for any offenders of this policy. A school that is united and who take a very serious position towards preventing plagiarism will be successful. Students tend to cheat only when they think they can get away with it.
The most common source of plagiarism for this course occurs when students try to acquire a previous years report from a friend who took the course in the past. Plagiarism was a very big problem for the teachers of this course until a web site called Turn-it-in.com came on the scene around 2005. Turn-it-in.com provides software to discourage plagiarism. Students are required to submit their reports to the website by uploading them under the schools account. The website then creates a database of all submitted reports. The teacher can then view what percentage of each report is considered "plagiarized". Ever report no matter how original will receive a "plagiarized" score of about 8% to 14%, due to the unavoidable duplications of such things as stating the mean, median and mode of a set of data, or giving the rules to a game such as badminton, which will be found on the Internet hundreds of times. Teacher are able to chick on a report and the software displays the student's report and highlights and sections of the text that are plagiarized and provides the name of the sources. Sometimes the source is a article or study on the Internet, or sometimes it is a report submitted to our ever accumulating database on Turn-it-in.com several years earlier. From my experience, just the threat of having to submit the report to a anti-plagiarism website is enough to convince many students that plagiarism isn't worth it. However, every year students think they can "beat the system" or they leave the assignment to the last minute and opt to plagiarize. We sometimes encounter plagiarism scores of 40% or more, up to the all-time record at or school of 89% plagiarized. Once the teacher has established that the student has plagiarized, they are called in to view what the software has highlighted and after a conversation about their actions and a admission of guilt, they are told they will receive a mark of zero for the report. It took about 4 years for our database to build up enough past reports so that the majority of the reports that potential cheaters were acquiring were already in the database. In the end this particular anti-plagiarism software really prevents plagiarism and has served our purpose well.
I strongly believe that it is often the mere threat of repercussions towards plagiarism that will deter students. Thus it is important for schools and classroom teachers to make it very clear to the students that an Academic Dishonesty policy is in place and outline exactly what form of punishment will be handed out for any offenders of this policy. A school that is united and who take a very serious position towards preventing plagiarism will be successful. Students tend to cheat only when they think they can get away with it.
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