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SafeAssign: Policing v Prevention

 

The meteoric rise of electronic environments has brought the more or less timeless issue of plagiarism to the fore of the academic community. While there is no way to really know whether plagiarism today is any worse than it has been in the past, in recent years educators have expressed increasing concern about issues of academic integrity in student populations. Research into the plagiarism issue bears out our general concerns. In 2005, Donald McCabe published the results of a study about the academic integrity of college students. In this study, he found that “one quarter to one half of undergraduates and as many as one quarter of graduate students” reported having engaged in “unauthorized collaboration, paraphrasing or copying a few phrases or sentences from either a written or web source (‘cut and paste’ plagiarism) and fabricating or falsifying a bibliography” (5). McCabe further notes that “16% of all undergraduate respondents and 8% of responding graduate students” reported “turning in work copied from another, copying large sections of text from written sources, turning in work done by another and downloading or otherwise obtaining a paper from a term paper mill or website” (5). Thanks to this and similar studies, educators have given renewed attention to issues of academic honesty, intellectual property, and plagiarism.

 

In some ways, this heightened awareness of plagiarism has been beneficial. It has encouraged many of us to focus more of our attention on teaching students to use research wisely and well, to incorporate these discussions into our classes at all levels and in all disciplines, and to consider more deeply why students plagiarize and how we might prevent that. At the same time, however, the increased focus on plagiarism has developed into an unfortunate trend: as educators and evaluators of student writing, we are cast as the policers of plagiarism rather than the preventers. This construction is unfortunate, as it pits educators against students, fosters an “us versus them” mentality, and places us in a “policing” role that is not commensurate with effective teaching.

 

As faculty more interested in teaching our students to avoid plagiarism than in catching them in the act, we must be careful not take a reactive approach. However, plagiarism detection tools like SafeAssign can be used reactively. In SafeAssign, for example, instructors can submit student papers privately in order to “catch” plagiarized papers. In fact, the “personality” of SafeAssign, both in its language and its reporting process, constructs student writers as assumptive perpetrators and instructors as the plagiarism police.

 

Though the personality of the tool is unfortunate, SafeAssign can nevertheless be used in positive ways that give students agency and ownership over their writing and their SafeAssign reports. For example, in addition to the feature that allows instructors to generate reports privately, SafeAssign also has a more open and dialogic function that allows students to submit papers in draft form and view their own reports before turning in final products, allowing them to screen their work as they draft. Using the Safe Assign tool in this way allows us to act before students get into trouble with their work, not after.

 

As we all know, some students do intentionally plagiarize, but most students are not out to cheat. Students plagiarize for all kinds of different reasons, many of which are rooted more in emotional distress or lack of knowledge than in trickery or subterfuge. Of course, some students who plagiarize are flat-out cheaters, but many more are decent students who may legitimately not understand how to work with sources or have, for one reason or another, simply become overwhelmed by the writing task and have therefore made poor decisions. Thus, rather than making it our goal to ferret out and punish plagiarizers after the fact, we should instead work toward understanding why plagiarism happens in the first place, taking steps toward creating lessons and writing assignments that address issues of academic integrity head on and positively.

 

For example, instructors might help prevent plagiarism by discussing citation in the context of its goal as scholarly conversation and academic genealogy rather than as simply a tedious exercise for avoiding plagiarism. Most students do not understand the real, scholarly purpose of citation; instead of seeing it as a tool for fellow researchers, they see it only as a way to avoid plagiarism. By elevating the discussion about citation beyond the mere mechanical level, we provide opportunities for students to better understand why they should be so concerned about properly documenting their work in the first place.

 

References:

 

McCabe, Donald L. “Cheating among college and university students: A North American perspective.” International Journal for Educational Integrity 1.1 (2005).

 

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Also in this section:

• Policing v Prevention
• Intentional v Unintentional Plagiarism
• Culture: a Complicating Factor