Probing for Plagiarism in the Virtual Classroom

Summary:
With more and more students opting to take courses online, detecting plagiarism can be quite a challenge. With more resources available via technology and the Internet for students to have papers written or to cheat in general, teachers must be knowledgeable about the resources potential cheats have available to them and also the countermeasures available to educators attempting to preserve intellectual integrity. One interesting point made by the authors is that with much discussion in online courses happening through written discussion, instructors have many examples of a student’s writing style to compare written assignments with which can be useful in determining if a student has plagiarized. Term-paper mills are websites that allow students to purchase or take parts of whole papers and copy and paste directly into their own assignment (some paper mill websites include Schoolsucks.com and cheater.com). There are over 250 known term-paper/essay websites. There are, however, plagiarism-detecting websites available to educators. By obtaining papers from these paper-mill websites the plagiarism-detecting sites create “fingerprints” for each paper. When an instructor uploads a paper to this website, it cross-references the uploaded paper with the “fingerprints” of the archived papers while Web crawlers search the internet for possible matches. This tool must be used with caution though as many of these websites are run by the very same companies who sell the term papers to students. Plagiarism-detecting software is another example of a resource for educators. This software can, for example, delete every 5th word of a paper suspected of being plagiarized and the instructor may ask the writer to insert the missing words. Overall, the suggestion of the author includes making students aware of the use of these tools, collecting writing samples through required discussion board sessions and using occasional pop-quizzes should deter many potential cheaters.

Response:
I found this article to be my favorite in this text so far. It was written in very teacher-friendly language and the suggestions were short and useful. I had no idea that all of this plagiarizing and anti-plagiarizing technology was available. I feel like I’ve really learned something after reading this article. Though I will likely not need to use plagiarism-detecting software in the elementary setting, I’m glad that I’m aware of some of the issues and concerns of my fellow educators.

Hamlin, L.S. & Ryan, W.T. (2003). Probing for plagiarism in the virtual classroom. In J. Hirschbuhl & J. Kelley (Eds.), Computers in education (163-165). Dubuque, IA: McGraw Hill.