Plagiarism Software: Use with Caution

The 8th grade New York State ELA examination requires students to write an essay comparing and contrasting two texts. Throughout the course of their arguments, students are supposed to support their assertions with facts presented in the provided texts. Early in the year, I gave my students a practice essay. Together we went through each text and made posters that listed the facts we might use to support arguments about similarities and differences. I left the posters up in the room as the students wrote, hoping the visuals would provide a scaffold to them citing parts of texts without copying language directly from the texts.

Reading my students’ essays showed me that a lesson in plagiarism would require more than one such scaffold. Students lifted entire sentences, sometimes paragraphs, from the original texts. When I spoke with them individually about their writing, they genuinely did not know how to paraphrase, and they did not understand where they had made mistakes.

In this instance, and a few others throughout the course of last year, I did not need plagiarism software to show me that my students had plagiarized. Granted, I teach middle school and I had read the texts from which the students were working, so the complexity of the assignment did not lend itself to needing technological assistance for detective work. But, I would argue that schools, especially secondary schools, should not use plagiarism software to “bust” students unless the schools are absolutely positive that students understand what it means to plagiarize. I assumed that by 8th grade, students knew not to copy from other texts. While some of my students may have had a sense that this was wrong, I do not think any of them thought it was criminal. I would have done them a disservice if all I did was run their work through a computer program and reject it after it failed to pass. I would have punished them, but not taught them.

On the secondary school level, I think it would be much more effective for teachers to spend the necessary time teaching students about plagiarism. Tell students what it is, and how to avoid it. Avoiding plagiarism requires lessons on citation, lifting quotations, paraphrasing, and building on others’ work without copying it. To illustrate the idea of building on others’ work, I found myself inadvertently explaining this concept to a student who I thought had plagiarized. My students wrote stories about superheroes they created this year, and one student turned in a paper that exactly followed the plot of a video game he plays. I could tell the ideas were not the student’s own because his writing in the story sounded unlike anything else he had previously turned in. I Googled the plot line, and sure enough, the name of the video game came right up. When I confronted the student he said that he knew he probably should not have written the story the way he did, but he struggled to think of a plotline for his character. I explained to him that it is alright not to have entirely original ideas all the time (Williams, 2007). He could have taken one event from the video game, then brainstormed how events could have unfolded differently after that one event and thereby resulted in a different story. The student rewrote his story using an idea from the video game, but turned in a final product that reflected his own creative thinking.

I can see that the use of plagiarism software could help schools establish consistent protocols on handling the issue. If schools have a policy of running every piece of student work through the software, regardless of who wrote the work, and schools make students aware of this policy, it could be fair (and hopefully efficient). I also think that if the program is used as a teaching tool—a resource through which students can run their papers before they turn them in—then it is especially positive (LaRussa, 2008). I still think, however, that students should be required to complete a course in the techniques described above so that they are armed with the tools they need to avoid plagiarism before their work is subject to computerized review by a teacher. Even universities should have students fill out diagnostics or questionnaires to determine their understanding of what plagiarism is and how to avoid it. I say this because I know people who teach 12th grade and have the same issues with plagiarism in their classrooms that I do: their students do not know the intricacies of the crime.

Subjecting students to plagiarism software before ensuring their understanding of the policy and the issue comes across as distrustful and can encourage negative relationships between students and teachers (Williams, 2007). Conversely, properly educating students, and maintaining an open and understanding environment in which students can ask questions about plagiarism and their work, would ensure positive and productive teacher/student relationships. If a school or university cultivates this latter type of atmosphere, only then do I think that the use of plagiarism software as a well-advertised formality is a fair way for a school to protect its integrity.

References:
LaRussa, T. (2008, May 31). Teachers engage anti-plagiarism software to discourage cheating. Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Retrieved July 29, 2008, from http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/cityregion/s_570291.html

Williams, B. 2007. Trust, betrayal, and authorship: Plagiarism and how we perceive students. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 51(4), 350-54.