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Fostering academic integrity has always been a goal of educators. The web provides incredible educational resources, while it increase to the challenge of discouraging plagiarism. What can faculty members do to encourage academic integrity in the "wild west" of the 21st-century Internet era?

how to encourage academic integrity

Online Plagiarism: How to Prevent It, How to Detect It - from the Citadel's Daniel Library a while ago, suggests the following:

    • Define and explain plagiarism to your students, including your policies about it.
    • Don't assume that they understand the concept of intellectual property and documentation of material.
    • Explain exactly how much group work and student collaboration is permissible.
    • Discuss how to document sources, both traditional and electronic.
    • Provide an opportunity for your students to learn to do research. Schedule research instruction classes with the Library.
    • Establish a process for researching and writing the paper by devising a timeline for turning in elements of the paper. Establish deadlines throughout the semester for submitting topics, working bibliographies, outlines, and rough drafts.
    • Require that students include copies of all sources with the final draft.
    • Devise an exercise whereby the students must reflect on some aspect of their papers. This could be an in-class essay on what they learned or an exam question relating the paper to some aspect of the course.
  • How can I prevent plagiarism? from Carnegie-Mellon Universit's Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence & Educational Innovation
  • 10 Tips for Avoiding Plagiarism by Katharine Hansen
  • Anti-Plagiarism Strategies for Research Papers by Robert Harris (revised October 2020)

plagiarism - understanding the problem

In addition to basic searching on the Internet and in library databases, what online resources facilitate plagiarism?

  • School Sucks - download your workload - Their old motto: "The site they warned you about." Then came this motto: "Don't Waste Your Time!!! Seach 101,000 Essays Now" - Now the site has subject links to Khan Academy, "a nonprofit wit the mission to provide a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere." (history from the Internet Archives Wayback Machine; this website is no longer online, at least under this URL, since March 2022)
  • Academic writing services: PaperFellows, Wise Essays, My Assignment Help, and many more.

programs, services, and approaches to detecting plagiarism

  • If you suspect plagiarism while grading a paper, use popular search engines like Google or DuckDuckGo to test a section of text or the paper title, up to 20 words or so, enclosed in quotation marks. This will reveal if that section of text is taken from another web site or free paper mill. You can use the same approach with a small section of text (eight words) to search library databases with full-text articles, for example MasterFile, Academic Search Elite, InfoTrac OneFile,  Lexis-Nexis, ScienceDirect, etc.
  • Plagiarism.org - (one of several) commercial detection service with the motto "leveling the playing field in the digital age" Their turnitin.com services are licensed on individual campuses and university systems.
  • In 2019, Google started offering "Assignments" software aims to help teachers check for plagiarism. Seems fitting....

BEWARE - Some "free" anti-plagiarism services have been alleged to be connected to paper mills which turn around and sell submitted papers back to students.

online resources to help students avoid plagiarism

another resource for encouraging academic integrity

  • Center for Academic Integrity - From Duke University, a consortium of 200 institutions working to promote academic integrity. Web site includes a searchable bibliographic database and other resources. Faculty can use many of the resources with a guest account.