There are a number of different issues here, at least from
a UK point-of-view. Firstly, because of an increasing
course-work ‘bent’ in the UK schooling system plus the
obvious massive increase in the use of online stuff
generally, new undergrad entrants come into the university
system in the UK being quite accustomed to a fair amount
of ‘cut-and-paste’ in coursework, almost as a natural
thing. It is not their fault that a) the school system
puts pressure on them to complete work in this way, and b)
there is a tempting, easy availability of relevant
information to complete assignments which they get used to
using. They come to us ‘tainted’ (as it were) by the
culture of their own school system.

Secondly (and consequentially) the tendency towards
criminalization. Having come across a fair amount of
plagiarism (deliberate and otherwise), my feeling is that
in the UK anyway probably 95% of it is crude and
relatively easy to detect, particularly if you know the
student and the writing style. We’re talking about chunks
of sophisticated text plonked down in the middle of a
narrative that is grammatically- and
syntactically-challenged, which I don’t see as too much of
a problem. I did come across a case at one university
(which shall remain nameless) where second/third level
students were offering assignment-writing services to
first years and I understand that this and accessing
online assignment-completing services may be more
prevalent in the USA, but this is of a different order of
‘criminality’ to the crude bulk of plagiarism I’ve come
across.

Thirdly (leading on from one and two above) my feeling
would be saturating the level one tutorial process with
anti-plagiarism teaching (such as the Indiana University
plagiarism test at
https://www.indiana.edu/~tedfrick/plagiarism/index2.html)
combined with giving level one students what amounts to a
free pass, is probably the best way to combat the majority
of plagiarism. The point after all is that we want them to
use as many different appropriate sources in their work as
possible but that they must attribute them. A logical
carrot-and-stick approach would therefore be to actively
reward in the marking system a rich use of appropriate
sources whilst making sure that students understand that
unattributed usage will be punished – at least from level
2 onwards. And I say this, please believe me, as someone
who has been all too keen in his time to jump on
plagiarism… but one has to adjust to changed realities,
no?

If I’m right and the vast mass of plagiarism is crude and
amateur, then that would seem to imply that services like
Turnitin would be best employed in tackling the ‘truly
criminal’ forms of plagiarism, professionally-written
essays etc, which would be at once a far stickier problem
but probably more rewarding. Would students make the
choice to buy an essay online (for instance) if the
University/Turnitin had already accessed such databases
itself (or as many services as possible) and added them to
its own database, and publicly warned that this was the
case? If universities/Turnitins sent round regular e-mails
to students with lists of online services that they had
(or at least claimed to have) added to a plagiarism
service, what would student response be?

So I guess I’m saying a multi-level approach is needed
here:

1)    Reward good behaviour rather than just punish bad
behaviour.
2)    Give first level students leeway and make detected
plagiarism part of the learning exercise rather than just
an excuse to bash them over the head.
3)    Special cases for foreign students – no foreign
student should be allowed anywhere near a home university
without taking an language test which establishes a level
of linguistic competence allowing them to qualify, and
part of that test should comprise taking a short course on
plagiarism, taking a plagiarism test and signing a
statement of affirmation before commencing a course.
4)    Concentrate the major plagiarism engineering on the
professional services to try and make them economically
unviable and at the same time career-damagingly risky for
students. 

Some thoughts,



--
Dr Jon Cloke
Lecturer
Geography Department
Loughborough University
Loughborough LE11 3TU

E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Tel: 00 44 07984 813681