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1. Add a note
on plagiarism to your course syllabus and discuss it during the first
days of class. Many students do not know exactly what constitutes
plagiarism, and your guidance and clarification will be very important at
this point. Talk to your students about the
AUB Student
Code of Conduct and the consequences of using plagiarized work at AUB.
2.
Use some class time to talk about copyright. It is common among
students to believe wrongly that whatever is on the Internet is public
property. Inform your students that the opposite is true, that is, unless
otherwise noted, everything one finds on the Internet is copyrighted, even
material with no copyright note. Emphasize that
plagiarism is unethical because it infringes upon other's intellectual
property rights, and teach the students how to protect their own
intellectual property. Make clear the difference between copyright violation
and plagiarism. It is necessary to recognize the source of copyright free
material too. For more information on copyright see
Copyright on the Internet on
the ACC web site.
3.
It is very important
to teach students which research sources require citation and how
to properly cite them. Surveys have shown that in many cases students
commit plagiarism because they do not know the correct way of citing sources
and acknowledging authorship. Give students some tips on proper note-taking
during the research process to avoid unintentional plagiarism during the
writing stage of the paper. For information
on how to cite electronic sources properly go to
Citing Internet Resources on the ACC web
site and to the page
Resources
for Students, in this web site.
4.
During the first week of class, ask your students to write an in-class
short essay on a topic familiar to them, and keep these texts as a
reference of the students' writing skills to compare with their future
writing.
5.
Warn your students that you are aware of the Internet resources
available in your field of study and of the sites that offer cheating
papers, and tell them that you will compare suspected papers with these
materials. Using plagiarism detector tools and informing the students about
them seems to reduce plagiarism cases. A survey conducted at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign among 180 students in a course,
Introduction to Political Sciences revealed that "Warning students not to
plagiarize, even in the strongest terms, appears not to have had any effect
whatsoever. Revealing the use of plagiarism-detection software to the
students prior to completion of an assignment, on the other hand, proved to
be a remarkably strong (though still not absolutely perfect) deterrent."
(Braumoeller, Harvard University and Brian J. Gaines, University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign, 2001).
6. Although the
above measures (talking, teaching, alerting) can help prevent cheating, the
most efficient strategy lies in the kind of assignment
and its requirements.
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