What’s Happening on College Campuses Today?

April 24, 2009 | 11:45 AM Eastern Standard Time | Webinar 1

Question and Answer Summary


Q. Institutions have a way to identify students as having had issues with plagiarism (regardless of the course)? In other words, is there a way to track such issues through a student's transcripts or otherwise?

A. Many institutions have this capability, especially those that assign stiffer penalties for 2nd and subsequent offenses. The ones that I know of, however, track plagiarism and academic dishonesty cases internally and don’t note them on students’ transcripts. The point of keeping track is more to make sure that a student can’t continue to break the rules in class after class than to have the record follow them after they leave school. It is, though, up to each institution to make that call.

- Teddi Fishman


Q. A suggestion was made that students would be less likely to have pressure to cheat if they think they will have multiple opportunities to be assessed. I have observed that students will study less for an exam thinking that they will have another chance to be evaluated. How do you work with this?

A. You’re quite right—some students will reduce the amount of effort they put into an activity based on the amount of credit that it is worth. The trick, in my experience, is to find the correct balance. For instance, it definitely seems to be the case that some students will put less effort into a draft of a paper when they know they get to revise, but often if the draft itself is worth a significant amount, many students will find it worth their while to try to do a good job. If, for instance, you make the initial draft 15%, the first revision 25% and the final revision 60% (of the paper grade) and use a rubric (to make it clear what you expect for each), you’re communicating to the student that each one is important in and of itself—not something they can “blow off” just because they have another shot at it later. (If they bomb even the first draft, their total possible for the assignment drops to 85%.)

Another approach is to make a series of smaller assignments (instead of, for instance, a mid-term and final that each count 50%.) You might have a project proposal, 3 weblog, journal, or wiki entries, 3 progress reports, 2 oral presentations and a poster, each of which has specific, related objectives. Especially if these assignments build upon each other, you make the same kind of statement—that the work itself is important—not just the assessment at the end.

I like 10% as a minimum value for each assignment, because it represents one letter grade. That’s usually enough to motivate grade-centered students.

- Teddi Fishman


Q. I've been an HR professional for about 20 years and can't recall asking for a GPA record. I can verify college degree but not GPA...I don't connect with the idea that there is some employment pressure to get a high GPA. There are so many other things to consider when hiring. Can you say more on this?

A. Good point. In fact, I wish I had had this perspective back when I was a student. J It is also true, however, that many of our undergraduates are planning on graduate school, and to get there, the grades often matter quite a bit. Not only that, but their GPA matters in terms of financial aid while they are still in school. This means that students really do have reasons to worry about them, but often not as much as they think they do. Sometimes I try to talk with them about it when they are particularly upset about a grade, or failing an exam. I ask them, “In 10 years, will this grade matter? In 5 years? Next year? This(college) is the only chance you get in life to just work on becoming who you want to be. You should make it count.” (Note: this doesn’t always work, but I tell them anyway, and hope that it sticks.)

- Teddi Fishman


Q. Are there many students falsely accused of plagiarism? Does anyone have any research about this?

A. That’s a very difficult (but very good) question. It’s difficult to determine what is a false accusation and what is an inadequately supported (but not false) one. I don’t recall ever seeing any research specifically about this, although I did just do a small survey that asked students about their experiences with academic dishonesty. It will be interesting to see what that yields.) I can say this: A significant number of plagiarism charges do not result in disciplinary action against the student. This happens for a number of reasons—sometimes the charges are dropped, sometimes there isn’t enough evidence to tell--but sometimes it just becomes apparent that the student didn’t intentionally plagiarize, and when that happens, we have an opportunity to educate instead of punish. Based on the cases I’ve seen, the judicial boards, which are, ideally, made up of both faculty and students, do a great job sorting them out.

- Teddi Fishman


Q. Many students feel that paraphrasing is not plagiarism -- they’ve read the stuff & processed it - how best to explain to them that this new information is not their work yet?

A. This is a tough thing to do for many reasons, not the least of which is because there are no hard-and-fast rules about when knowledge becomes “yours.” What I recommend, though, is to give them a little lesson on quoting, plagiarizing and summarizing. (The Purdue O.W.L. has a great handout on this.) When I do this, I preface the “nuts and bolts” part of the lesson by explaining a little about how the construction of knowledge works. I tell them things they usually haven’t considered yet: that they are novices in their field, that in order to enhance their own credibility, they have to demonstrate that they know what is going on, and that one of the ways they do that is by “standing on the shoulders” of those who have come before them. Often they have not considered that by referencing the experts, they take on some of the credibility of those experts. I also ask them why anyone should believe what they say about, for instance, global warming and tell them that if they want people to take their opinion seriously, they have to demonstrate how they came to their conclusions and make those sources available to their readers, in case the readers want more information. That means using good references. They often start out with the idea that looking like they know everything makes them look smarter. What they need to come to understand is that they’ll actually look smarter if they show not just what they know but also how they come to know it. Once they start to understand how credibility is established, you can move on to showing them quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing. (I also sometimes have them practice it, to make sure they understand.)

- Teddi Fishman


Q. Is pressure ever an excuse for cheating? I mean, if you cheat in school because of pressure, what do you expect later in the outside world when you're under MORE pressure to achieve?

A. No, pressure is never an excuse to cheat. However, that does not mean that it isn’t a primary reason why students choose to do so. College students feel an immense amount of pressure at every level, from social to parental to personal. The solution is to have more communication between students and professors. If a student feels a ton of pressure and stress because of an upcoming project, they must feel comfortable talking to their professors about the situation ahead of time. I’ve seen many cases where extensions are given or advice from a faculty member is given that has allowed a student to complete the project honestly and on time. Your point about the professional world is completely accurate. If students develop the idea that cheating is alright in school, they will continue it into their career.

- Bill Connolly


Q. With 80% of courses being taught by overworked adjunct instructors, do you or your colleagues have recommendations for how to proceed (with more assignments or exams so the stakes are not so high) without burning out the instructors?

A. I believe that schools have to utilize all of the resources that are available to them in order to make this a successful process. Having more discussion-based assignments allows students to form their own opinions about certain topics. Also, having more informal types of projects other than research papers, like debates or creating websites, promotes an element of creativity in the student and makes them more likely to take pride in the project and do it honestly. Finally, realizing that professors are overworked, it is still very important to have smaller assignments so that the pressure of one poor performance doesn’t build on a student. Even having reflection papers that make up a small portion of a student’s grade, or participation, alleviates the effect of a poor midterm or final. Although it is difficult, it is a necessary thing to do in order to change the culture of the college campus.

- Bill Connolly


Q. I tell my students that their own or their colleagues' cheating diminishes the value of their grade. It doesn't seem to matter. Your thoughts?

A. As a Professor and educator, you are doing the right thing by telling your students that cheating diminishes the value of their grade.However, without a reference point, that may not make much of a difference. Students need to realize that they are not only diminishing the value of their own grade but of the grades that their peers get as well. If they have a personal connection with the consequences of cheating, then they will be much less likely to do it.

- Bill Connolly


Q. So students from the academic integrity council at Bentley University talk to high school students about cheating and academic integrity? Could you tell me a bit more?

A. Yes, we as a group contact and visit local high schools in the Greater Boston area to discuss with them the value of integrity at the college level. We usually talk with seniors as they are closest to the college process. Our presentation consists of several skits demonstrating various potential cheating scenarios, a game that illustrates real world examples of integrity (or a lack of it), and real stories of students caught cheating and their punishment. We then open our program up for open-ended questions and allow the students to ask us anything that they want. We have found that when teachers leave the room, the students are extremely willing to engage in the discussion and ask about plagiarism, and college life in general. It has been a very successful aspect of our group over the past few years, and we looking forward to continuing this activity in the next school year. If there are any students reading this who wish to create a similar program at their schools, feel free to contact me at connol1_will@bentley.edu.

- Bill Connolly


Q. Second year students are not experts in APA formatting. If they make mistakes such as missed quotation marks, do you believe that they should be cited for plagarism and threatened with failure or expulsion?

A. Certainly not! There should always be a first assignment that allows students to learn the appropriate standards/conventions, even to the extent that they submit the assignment to Turnitin and both read and analyze the report produced. The second and subsequent assignments should build on this learned knowledge, and expect good formatting. However, I am still of the mind that errors or omissions can be innocently made, and in order to show that they were not deliberate, proof of the development of one's assignment should be available (as I mentioned, on the school's email server.)

- Jon Radue


Q. In this world of massive amounts of information being easily accessed, I want my graduate students to gather, compare, contrast, validate, and digest that information and then report and react. What do you think of the idea of having a button on each web site that allows us to copy an paste a proper citation for the source?

A. If you use Firefox and have the Zotero plugin, then you have a button on your browser that can be used for precisely this purpose. But Zotero gives you a lot more than this--indexing, notes, copy of the web page or library resource, searching, and more! So there is no need for each web site to adhere to a standard of adding a specific button to give the correct way to cite the resource.

- Jon Radue


Q. I am worried about students who have used Turnitin which showed no plagiarism and then these students subsequently received discipline for unintentional plagiarism. Your thoughts?

A. Rebecca Moore Howard in her book Standing on the Shoulder of Giants terms unintentional plagiarism as "patchwriting" which exhibits weak scholarship and poor paraphrasing skills. Howard suggests that this is not plagiarism and should not be criminalized. Rather, patchwriting is the author's attempt to imitate the original author and create new meaning from the original passage as it is placed within the new context of the novice writer's work. Unintentional plagiarism, she posits, is what the apprentice writer does as he or she enters into a new discourse community or conversation.

I find that unintentional plagiarism is prevalent in my students' academic writing, and I agree with Howard that students should not be punished for it. I, however, set out to take my apprentice writers and move them to full-fledged writers. I argue that we need to move students beyond patchwriting, so they can communicate with ease in their new-found conversations. Integrating WriteCycle into my composition courses and using the Turnitin Originality Report enables me to do just this. My students carefully analyze their Originality Reports for instances of patchwriting, what Rebecca Moore Howard describes as "coping from a source text and then deleting some words, altering grammatical structures, or plugging in one synonym for another" (xvii). My students can then begin to reevaluate their paraphrases and learn from the visual feedback the Originality Report offers. Even if the Originality Report reveals no similarity to sources, I inform my students that this does not mean they have mastered paraphrasing. I ask them to annotate their Originality Report to identify source material that may not have been flagged by Turnitin and closely assess their ability to integrate the source into their own argument. My students run their work through Turnitin to do a self-check of their writing, and they are able to make any changes they wish prior to submitting a final draft. This skill is not something I expect my students to master in one essay but over the course of the semester; thus, my students submit writing in a final portfolio at the end of the semester. I have found that using Turnitin as an instructional tool and not a punitive device has helped my students to better master their contributions to academic conversations.