Plagiarism Confession

Guest Blogger: Bill Donohue

I have a confession to make. I have plagiarized. On Friday, January 20, 2017, at approximately 11:23 a.m., I committed an act of plagiarism—right in front of my composition students. I am a plagiarist. Turnitin told me that my writing submission was 80% similar, to use Turnitin’s term, to resources that that Turnitin used to check against my writing. As a matter of fact, all my students plagiarized that day.

Before you go snitching on us to the plagiarism police, the act of plagiarism was a demonstration. For the first time in my teaching career, I am using the Turnitin software as a component of the teaching of writing. And thanks to the Turnitin workshop sponsored by CETL and ATS (Thanks Anna and Nancy ;-), I have a solid understanding of how the program works, and I how I can avoid the pitfalls that kept me from using Turnitin in the past.

 This post is going to get long; so if you have had enough reading for a Saturday morning, here are a few discussion questions:

 What is your experience with plagiarism in your courses?

How have you handled plagiarism?

How do you teach students to engage with sources?

What advice do you have for a teacher who has not used Turnitin?

 To be clear, my aim has always been to teach students how to write; how to gather, understand, and use information; and how to use information responsibly. My courses have defined plagiarism, discussed plagiarism, reviewed examples of plagiarism, focused on citation conventions, and generally expanded the student’s knowledge about plagiarism. (Students are always surprised by the issues of minimal citations for paraphrases and self-plagiarism). I create assignments that limit the opportunities to plagiarize. I try to reason with the students by telling them that to become better writers, they need to do the work and receive feedback on that work. If I am giving feedback to work that someone else did or that was copied and pasted from an internet source, then the students are not becoming better writers. I also develop grading systems so that students are not focused on the grade but the writing itself. Finally, I do give the penalty lecture. I talk about how a professor’s job isn’t just to teach, but to create new knowledge. If someone steals those ideas as their own, they are stealing from me. And I review the sanctions for someone caught plagiarizing that can lead to expulsion!

 The notion of plagiarism as theft, and using detection software to police that crime, has never sat well with me as it puts the teacher and student in an adversarial position that does not aid in the teaching of writing. When I have caught someone plagiarizing, the most egregious examples are intentional plagiarism, which is not difficult for me to detect. A google search provides the evidence for me to confront the student. This is never a pleasant experience for both the student and myself. It can provide a teachable moment, and I do my best to work with the student.

Unintentional plagiarism, if it is considered plagiarism at all or rather the misuse of sources, is easier to contend with, although more difficult to detect and labor intensive in some cases. Most often, the citation convention is not employed correctly and the feedback mechanism can indicate to the student the issue without having to be adversarial. The adversarial positioning is one reason why The Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) passed a resolution denouncing the use of plagiarism detection software (http://www.ncte.org/cccc/resolutions/2013). Other issues with the use of the software are undermining student agency, threating privacy and intellectual property, ineffectiveness of detection, and distraction from teaching students how to write from sources.

Research, such as the Citation Project (http://site.citationproject.net/), has shown that instances of intentional plagiarism are quite low and that the larger issue is how students are engaging with the source material they are trying to use. Students need to be taught how to use source material. A focus on reading skills, especially when the subject is unfamiliar or complex as in upper division major courses, can aid students in synthesizing sourced ideas into their own arguments in deep and meaningful ways. Better understanding of the topic being written about and what the research says about those topics leads to better integration of ideas and less patch-writing. This approach is more labor intensive as class time, written feedback, and individual conferences may be needed to provide the proper amount of instruction. (Writing Centers are also useful for this instruction.)

 So why am I using Turnitin this semester? Partly, I am doing so because other professors are using the software. As a composition teacher teaching a subject that has a heavy burden of service, I want to make sure students have an awareness and an understanding of the tool so they can use it effectively to aid in their writing. Similar to my warning that plagiarism can have consequences, the use of Turnitin may dissuade a student from intentional plagiarism and compel them to give a more honest, if flawed, attempt at the writing assignment that creates a space for learning.

I use many of the best practices for teaching writing in regards to source work as outlined by CCCC and the Writing Program Administrators (http://wpacouncil.org/positions/WPAplagiarism.pdf). One of those is the creation of assignments that resist plagiarism. An example is from the Integrated Writing and Reading course. Students read A Lesson Before Dying, and an assignment is to write a characterization of five main characters. The intention is for students to use their reading skills to gain an understanding of who those characters are in the narrative. The characterization assignment has students use writing-to-learn in order to examine the characters and use the information for the essay they will write about the transformation of a dynamic character in the novel. In the past, students have copied and pasted from internet resources such as SparkNotes to complete the characterization. While some students realize this is intentional plagiarism, others think that the information is so basic and common that it is fine to copy it.

A way to change the assignment to resist plagiarism is to change the nature of the assignment. Instead of a straightforward assignment that calls for summary of a character’s position, the assignment could engage in higher level thinking such as asking students to write from the perspective of each character. They may write a brief letter from one character to another about an issue in narrative. A reflection assignment would focus on why the writer made the choices that they did in the letter. The problem with this assignment maybe that students struggle to complete it and miss the opportunity to gain a base understanding of one or multiple characters in narrative that are important for the essay they will write. Using Turnitin with the straightforward characterization version of the assignment may help students engage in the true intention of the assignment, which is the application of their ability to read and understand the narrative.

We shall see. And I will write a blog post later in the semester to update you on what happened.