OrangePhilosophy

Thanks for this, Mark. I think that much of this is sound advice. I'm a little concerned, though, with the emphasis that you're suggesting putting on 'knowing the student' (tracking paper styles throughout the semester, being suspicious of good papers from dumb students, etc.). Do you think that puts too much of a subjective emphasis in? The idea of a student having a better chance of being caught if, for instance, the instructor doesn't like the guy is unsettling.

Now I know that none of these are supposed to be definitive signs, but won't a consequence of this advice be that a cheating student who does a good job getting the instructor to like him is more likely to get away with it than a cheating student who doesn't?

In the one course that I've graded for so far (I'm just finishing my first year of grad school now), I graded blind -- I didn't see names of students until after I'd recorded grades. This struck me as a good policy, but it obviously would make some of your advice impractical.

It's not about whether you like the person but whether the paper they give you fits with what you know about the person. I've had students that I've liked still plagiarize, and I've been able to notice it simply because it didn't look like the kind of work I'd seen from them before. Mark's point is about remembering things about students, not about being buddies with them.

Another thing I don't like about blind grading is that sometimes students it's good to give students who work extra hard to overcome difficulties some extra grace. One way to do that is just to bump up their grade once you grade the papers blindly, but I do think it can sometimes be good for it to affect the paper grade itself. But the really important downside of grading blindly is that sometimes it takes a fine sense of how a student will read your comments to know what to say. Some students need a lighter touch, and some really need to hear the criticism harshly, or they won't pay attention to what you're saying. If you know the student, you can better fit the comments to the student.

This is a good discussion. Mark has a lot of insights. Thanks. The recent comments are valuable. When I suspect plagiarism, I google the first line (unless it's flabby..."since the dawn of time, philosophers have..." you know the drill). I consider minor cutting and pasting from the internet (which is the form of plagiarism I've encountered most) to be a problem that's easy to correct--it's almost unintentional, with emphasis on "almost". To push Jeremy's point, imagine a student (shouldn't be hard) that rarely participates in class, never sees you in your office, and rarely comes to the lectures. You suspect some kind of plagiarism. I think you are more likely to think that the act was academically malicious, rather than just careless. And this is an important, sometimes subtle, distinction to make. I'll grade blind, but only on multiple choice tests (HA)and never on papers. Our students have trouble sometimes setting the scene for their papers, embedding their paper often in some strange narrative about their lives that almost never helps their arguments. It's important that we understand that narrative to give helpful feedback, as Jeremy pointed out. Jonathan has some good advice, if we are talking about say short weeklies or essay tests. I think that grading essay tests, especially in-class ones, blind could minimize bias we have toward stidents at least a little bit. But it is creepy that our bias and plagiarism come up in the same conversation--and, well with that said, I should say that tomorrow I'll give a multiple choice test for a final. Not the best method for evaluating students, but certainly one that minimizes the potential for "grading hypnosis"--where good students' contradictions and senseless banter magically transforms into wff's.

Great post, Mark. I have a couple of follow-up questions:

1. What is your evidential threshold for taking action? Do you confront only those students whom you can catch red handed?

2. How do confront students whom you suspect of plagiarism? Most importantly, what do you do if they stonewall? I've had this happen before. The paper was obviously not the work of the student, but I couldn't find the source. It might have been from the frat house file, or maybe he commissioned specially. Do you have any tips for coaxing students into owning up?

Wow, good feedback. I'm just popping by through the office so I'll start with Lindsay's comment and work my way back. As far as evidential threshold for action, and, by action I believe you mean reporting to the Dean/giving them an 'F', and so on, it's got to be very, very clear. Pretty much it has to be obvious that the student cut-and-pasted significant portions with an attempt to make it appear as their own.
As far as those cases where you are certain or near certain that a student plagiarized, but you can't find the source, I've heard of the following methods. You take the student aside and compliment them on their excellent paper. Then, when they're just about to walk away, ask them in particular about a portion of the paper that you think it unlikely they knew of. Look for the reaction. If it's casual and it appears they know their stuff, that's the end of it. If they huff and puff, prevaricate and dissemble, then you can insist on a meeting or a phone conversation. You then ask them questions about their paper. If they can't at all answer any questions satisfactorily about what they supposedly wrote a week or so ago, then of course they plagiarized. Yet you have no evidence. Tamar Gendler told me once that in such situations you can tell the student that you'd like to arrange for them to be interviewed by a panel convened by the philosophy department, or, that they can merely give you their source, and in this case that you'll allow for a re-write, while also reporting them to the Dean [you should never allow a rewrite in almost any other case]. I did have one particularly ugly encounter that was kind of like this. It is very difficult to know what to do when you have no proof. Often you just have to let it slide.
As far as Jonathan's concerns, it could appear like I'm bent over all my students papers, rubbing my hands together, and drooling over the next big catch. Not so. It's not like I actively work on these principles so much as I've extrapolated the principles from what I intuitively and casually observed.
As far as this:
"The idea of a student having a better chance of being caught if, for instance, the instructor doesn't like the guy is unsettling."
What is unsettling is not that anyone's chances of getting caught are improved, but that the students I like have a LOWER chance of getting caught, which they don't. And the reason for this is that my liking or not of any of my students has nothing to do with their intelligence, or their intelligence alone. Some of my best friends are idiots.
Anyways, I didn't mean to give the impression that we should be maliciously remembering everything the students do, and have some keyed off in your mind as 'likely suspects'. Just be a careful observer, and remember how your students perform in the past. This is not merely important for catching plagiarism, but, like Jeremy says, to help you get a balanced picture of the student when grading.
Alright, that's enough...

Oh, I forgot to mention in regard to another thing you said Jonathan that, in fact, more often than not the plagiarizers I catch I not only like, but are often pretty smart. The dumb student plagiarizers you catch in part by the methods I had for them, the smart student plagiarizers by others. The key of course, is to catch ALL of them if you can. I've been severely let down many times by bright students that I did like which plagiarized, even when I was giving them a break, letting them turn in things late, etc etc..

A few comments from an average student:

"1. Bad Writing/Good Writing"

A good sign; I'm sure you have something more qualified in mind to avoid false positives, such as:

(i) writing the night before, spent many hours on the introduction and a few subsequent paragraphs, (or a few key paragraphs) ran out of time, smoothed over the rest substituting thought to paper for normal prose. this is a good motivation for plagiarism, not always, however

(ii) a terrible writer (me) who hasn't found his or her voice is likely to borrow stylistic snippets, sentence structure, literary devices in addition to overzealous use of a thesaurus; or misuse, really - that week I read too much Jerry Fodor comes to mind

(iii) I have written papers on occasion that weren't exactly on topic simply because I found the question boring, let wishful thinking set in, and wrote about something similar but more interesting. If I'm not interested I won't be motivated. Asking the prof for permission first is a lesson I had to learn the hard way.

about testing the knowledge of the student:

I hear a student will usually admit guilt if they are accused, indirectly as that may be, however the "know their stuff" test might be a little faulty when a student does "know their stuff" or came to know enough to fool you in the course of planning to write, while simultaneously avoiding it.

Now I'm home, and looking over the comments I hurriedly typed up, there are a few problems. One is that, the method I mentioned about as suggested by Tamar is one you can never employ without talking to your supervisor.
And, I never answered Lindsay's second question. As far as confronting students whom no doubt plagiarized, and I have full evidence for, my confrontation is merely my handing them or emailing them a letter reporting that I caught them plagiarizing which I cc to the Dean. If you have good evidence, it doesn't really matter if they stonewall. Your only worry after reporting them is what to do if they appeal the charge. Out of the 45 or so cases, I've only had one appeal, which panned out pretty easily in my favor, although it was an ugly experience, with the student falsely charging me with all kinds of character fraud and teacherly misconduct in order to bolster claims of plausible deniability. Anyways, we should never not report plagiarism just because of the trouble/bother it can be for us. Just watch your back when you report a prominent athlete.
You know, recently, my wife Irem who teaches here was threatened with being sued for reporting someone. Once I get a letter from the parent of a student vaguely threatening legal action. One good thing to remember is, that, once you report it, it's out of your hands. The only thing the student can do is appeal to the Dean, so, if a student is persistently bothering you with emails, etc. after the reporting, you should say that all further correspondence should be between them and the Dean. You just have nothing to say to each other. If they keep sending you nasty emails, forward them all to the Dean or adminstrator in question and let the student know that you are doing so. This usually stops harrassment.

As far as your comment, Shai, there's not too much a worry about false positives, since these tests/indicators I gave are just for searching the 'net, not for reporting for plagiarism.
The only worry about false positives is separating sloppy citation skills from genuine plagiarism. This is a tricky issue, and would demand a long detailed post on its own. Let's just say that, when in doubt, you're charitable to the student, and always go with incompetence over deceit as the likely culprit.

I swear I've read this somewhere before...

One subtle indicator of plagiarism that a professor of mine related noticing: the small dark line in the top left corner. Source? The photocopied staple from the original paper.

I have a question about self-plagiarism. I took a class last year that I failed, and now I'm re-taking it. The class consisted of a take-home midterm, a take-home final, and a paper. When I took the class last year, I didn't turn in a midterm or a final, but I did turn in a paper. Would it be plagiarism to resubmit the paper this year? I don't think I would get caught; last year the paper was graded by a TA, but this year, the professor is grading them.

Greg, I'd say what you're talking about depends on the situation. If you're retaking the class, and you didn't get credit for it the first time, then the work you submitted didn't contribute to your degree. So reusing it isn't doubling up on anything that had already counted toward your work. In principle, then, it might not be a problem. I have two caveats. First, your school might have a rule against this. One of the places I teach does, but I don't know how ambiguously it's worded. It may say you can't submit the same work for different courses. Is it a different course if it's the same course but a different section? In cases like this, it's always worth asking.

What you'll probably get is something along the lines of my second caveat, which is that it's always good to revise it even if you're going to do something like this. It allows you to reuse some of your earlier work, but it also gives you a chance to make it much better by taking into account what you've improved on in your understanding of the issues the second time around. If you got an A on the original, and you didn't get credit for it because you failed the class, the professor might let you use it as is, but if any of those conditions isn't there I'd do a serious revision to try to improve what you can and avoid the charge of flatly reusing work.

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A high school English teacher once told me that when he suspects students of plagiarizing, he assigns them a very low grade; if a student complains, she is confused about the low grade and doesn't know why she deserves it; therefore, she didn't plagiarize. If she doesn't complain, it's because she knows she was caught plagiarizing.

This tactic might work in some cases, but I can imagine a brazen student trying to press her luck and talk her way out of the low grade, though she had plagiarized; this will not avoid a direct confrontation. I can also imagine a particularly shy student not understanding what she did to incur the wrath of her instructor, or otherwise believing that she deserved the low grade, and not wanting to stir up more trouble for herself, though she did not plagiarize (for I was once like this).

But then, it seems that plagiarism in a university setting is treated much more seriously than it is within a high school setting, and a passive-aggressive tactic won't work when your responsibility is to report plagiarism to the University.

Regarding Greg's post, I've been in the same position: same class, same professor. Fortunately for me, the professor expected that I would hand in the selfsame papers as I did the previous year (which had been of good quality).

From my experience as a student, I found that most plagarism issues were founded in the following:

1) Assigning essays/research papers about over-beaten-dead-horse topics. This is more prevalent in high school, or freshman classes, because they necessarily re-hash tired, yet fundamental, topics. It's hard to say something on these topics that hasn't been said before. Use of the same teaching materials year after year compounds the issue. Solving this would require more originality on the part of the professors of these courses, or as I like to term it, less Educator (self-)Plagarism.

2) Students are rarely taught, from an early age, how to research a topic not just to support a thesis, but in order to identify candidate theses that haven't been written on, or that can be taken from an opposing view point. The synthesis of ideas taken from many sources on a particular broad topic, for it's own sake, is all most students can succeed at (and usually results in plagiarism). The easiest way to generate novel approaches to a general topic is to merge the topic with other related, but incongruent, topics. Finding these relations is generally a product of research. However, identifying totally original relations is the ideal goal, which leads to:

3) Some students lack creative insight, which is nothing more complicated (or less difficult) than combining one's personal experience of a topic with everyone else's. Seeing something in a topic that no one else has seen before, or seeing it from a different perspective, leads to well-writen, original work. Creative insight is something a lot of people have "built-in," and it's not hard to learn. It just takes years of practice, which is best started early.

How many people have pondered the homoeroticism of "The Ren & Stimpy Show"? I came up with that idea while writing this, by watching an episode of the show on TV and remembering the term "homoeroticism" with regards to recent news. I googled "homoeroticism stimpy" and got 17 hits. It seems to me that there should have been a lot more hits. When the idea crossed my mind, I marveled at how apparent the relation is, at least to me, but that I never put the two topics together directly before now. Certainly, I thought, many other people have already written about this. Certainly, at least according to google, I was wrong. That was creative insight at work. It was easy, especially as I applied it to random topics. Applied to more interesting topics, it is a powerful tool.

Perhaps less emphasis on policing for plagiarism, and more emphasis on the skills needed to avoid it in the first place (which, to me, are the same skills needed to understand why it's bad in the first place) would lead to a better solution to the problem.

KoalaBear
Vuja De

Some good comments, KB. One thing to remember, though, was that the post is ON catching plagiarism, and only minimally about avoiding it in the first place, which I said outright, and how that would demand a different post. (so, it seems a weird criticism to say that I focused too much on catching plagiarism since that was what the post is on) A couple things, however. There's nothing wrong with assigning putative dead-horse topics like free-will vs. determinism if these issues are being thought of in a systematic way by the freshmen for the first time, which they usually admit they are. I'd rather have them thinking about free will vs, say, homoeroticism of the Ren and Stimpy show just in order to avoid plagiarism (which, if any of those 17 sources is plagiarizable, wouldn't avoid this anyway). Use of the same teaching material year after year could only bring up this problem if the same students are taking the same classes year after year, so I don't see what your point is. You are right in that you can avoid plagiarism by asking questions that are more creative, and are such that a student couldn't plagiarize. Sometimes, however, too much leeway in the way of creativity gets too far from realizing the purpose of having the student learn the material.
This point I'm ambivalent about:
"Students are rarely taught, from an early age, how to research a topic not just to support a thesis, but in order to identify candidate theses that haven't been written on, or that can be taken from an opposing view point"
It's true that students need more help in learning how to research a topic, which is why I have them meet with me. Also, I wish there were introductory classes for writing that are NOT just composition/english classes, but required the student to write a history paper, and english lit paper, and a (low-level) science report, all in one class, while focusing on citation skills, research skills, how to use the library and the web appropriately, and so on.
But, the second part of the sentence seems too much to focus on originality for orignality's sake. Probably almost everything that can be said about free will has been said, but I'd rather have a student write, and come up with herself, a good point of view that's been around, rather than defend a novel but awful thesis, poorly defended. Just because a topic's been exhausted is no reason for the student to not cover the same ground. It's been exhausted for a reason-it's important. If students had to write about/come up with only novel theses, maybe we should just throw out topics like free will or dualism (or whatever's been talked about quite a bit) and focus on the phallic nature of ballistic missiles or the propensity of dictators to have mustachios or whatnot, but I think that would be far worse for the students. Anyways, to sum up, it is true that teachers have to look for what it is that they might do that contributes to plagiarism, and seek to avoid it, but to blame plagiarism on professors, or to seek to avoid it by focusing on trivial topics, seem both wrong to me.

Two comments:

First- Well, the reference/quotation indicators you mention do not work very well. There are personal criteria disagreement on how to quote some authors.

For instance, I cannot quote Leibniz or Hume using years like (1968) or 1997, just because I took the reference from an anthology. It sounds completely unrealistic and ignorant. I'd rather prefer to use the date on which the work has been made.

Second-I often know that what I have is case of plagiarism because:

(i.)I know the literature and I can see when an entire paper has been simply copied, specially if I have already read that paper;

(ii.) Students iniatially cannot reason according to the necessary formalisms in the field, and when they finally can they will not express views that conform with the current standard doctrines on the issue.

In the one of the examples you mentioned, the confusion between assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia is more likely to be an indicator of originality than of plagiarism. Why? Because only intellectuals and long time scholars think that this distinction makes sense. People usually tend to think that it voluntary euthanasia and assisted suicide are indeed the same thing. The same applies to capital punishment and abortion: only politicians and again intellectuals defend one of them and attack the other. Common people who spouse one idea often defend both of them.

Of course, the most ordinary case of plagiarism happens every day: it is when students repeat what one teaches them to pass, and discuss issues only within the frame we have set. This often pleases teachers, but it is also often a sign that they are not forming ideas of their own, but are rather playing the parrots.

Hi Tony,
Well, I disagree with just about everything you wrote. There are standards on citation, and one is not allowed to cite, for example, the original date of the writings of Hume or Leibniz, when in fact your source is a later edition, and edited or translated. Also, the page numbers won't add up, and, what student is going to read Leibniz in the original form? Why should we require students to cite the original Hume pages when they have an excerpt on Hume on causation/induction? And, how could they cite the original pages of Leibniz? These works often aren't available.
The reason I said the citation irregularities could be an indicator is because, especially when dealing with class materials, the instructor often explicitly tells the student how to cite. If they cite otherwise, or from other anthologies/editions, then this would be suspect.
As far as the cases of plagiarism you mentioned, I thought I covered those, but just went beyond those cases.
I don't understand why you think using terms like 'assisted suicide' when in the class we used voluntary euthanasia would be a sign of originality, nor do I see only intellectuals as thinking that this makes sense. Most intellectuals think it is a distinction without a difference at best, misleading at worst.
Also, it's ridiculous to think that parroting is plagiarism, when, for instance, the instructor in particular instructs them to sum up or criticize a position. Parroting is a necessary, and indeed often for undergrads, a difficult skill--the kind that if they cannot master they cannot hope to get ahead in academia. Saying what a position is back to the instructor, in their own words, is an invaluable skill. Before you can think for yourself about a position you must be able to know what it is...and this often requires parroting.
But, parroting is never supposed to be all there is to a critical paper. This is used as a jumping off point for the students' own ideas and criticisms.
I don't understand how you could expect an undergrad student to have good original ideas about a topic in a paper w/o requiring them to understand it first. And, parroting is a good means to this end. Also, I take it that papers are not only about having the student develop original ideas, but assessing their understanding about the issues. And, how can we do this if they don't 'parrot' at all?
It sounds like you think the best paper would be one that is COMPLETELY original, with ideas formed by and only by the student herself. If this is so, how would it dovetail with the topic and the essay question? Well, it couldn't. So, parroting [a pejorative term], is necessary. Most of us call it a part of learning. But, you're right that it shouldn't be all there is to it. And I've never held that.

Yeas, to date ancient works is not always possible...
But, in many cases, it is possible to write, for instance, Hamilton 1779 and then add apud X(1985) or In ... Anthology...1954 or any form like this. What I do not like is when I find Copernicus (1988) or Peter of Spain (2003).

I mean, if you give your student an anthology and he has the trouble to find the year the originals date from, he has had the trouble to research a little bit beyond what you gave him and that is a good sign. I do not think you would punish someone for working harder. Quod abundat non nocet.

There are rules of citation, but not everyone agrees with them. But maybe I am talking too much.