As the grader, I plan to be tough on plagiarism because A) I think the students should actually try to learn something by writing their own essays, dammit and B) it annoys me that this particular prof is giving our department and our discipline a reputation for being "easy" with his super-lax, anything-goes reputation.
Unfortunately, our university has an "honor code," and therefore officially believes that students will never cheat. Hence, there is no institutional funding for a subscription to Turnitin.com or similar plagiarism-catching websites.(Apparently nobody's heard of "Trust, but Verify" around here.)
So, the thirsty:
Q: How do you vet students' essays for plagiarism? What are the "clues" that I should be looking for? Are there websites where I can do plagiarism checks for free?
I do spot check five essays from each set. I tell my students I am going to do it. I even tell them how I do it, so really, if they want to cheat, they should be able to not get caught. Still, I catch too many, and it is not pleasant and it gets me bad ratings sometimes (although sometimes students cheer me on in my evals). I do it because I really believe that to be college educated is to possess the skill of being able to write up your thoughts in an organized, coherent manner all on your own. I want my students to push themselves to do it.
ReplyDeleteI do not do anything fancy. I don't have turn-it-in anymore (although I did-----but if your school does not have it it was too expensive and too much trouble). All I do is put a sentence or two into google. You'll know when you want to check-----mostly you'll notice style changes. It will seem too sophisticated for the person. Your plagiarism radar just goes off. I think it is worth the time to do it.
Actually, if they are copying off each other, this may not work as the language may not be online. You could foil them by making a wiki and having them post the essays online. I am not sure if this would fly as I have not tried anything like it. If I were you, though, if I could not search the essays online, I'd make them hand them in as word documents electronically, store them on my computer, and search them with Word's search function. At least you'll catch them going forward.
DeleteI probably won't grade for this prof/course again, but I could pass them forward to the next grad student who will. I definitely plan to have them submit the essays as word documents. Thanks for the tip about googling incongruous sentences.
DeleteLet's be honest though: the language is online.
DeleteStart by googling the essay question verbatim. Read the top 3 cheating essays that appear. Then when your students submit them, you'll recognize them immediately.
Beyond that, spot-check by googling any oddly-shaped, particularly beautiful, or really specific sentences that do not seem to come from your students. This process seems better to me than using Turnitin.
This is really a great idea! I know that most of the language is online. I have had to listen to obnoxious colleagues, though, insist that their essay ideas are soooooooo original that their students could never plagiarize! Never! THAT's the answer to the plagiarism problem, they say! Simply give original assignments that no one has ever thought of before!
DeleteRemember, we are a junior college teaching mostly intro courses.
You have no backing from you boss or from your university. You do not have the authority to identify and accuse plagiarists. Do the job you were hired to do.
ReplyDeleteDude, do you KNOW how big a deal calling yourself "Duck" is?
DeleteI'm sorry, marginala, but Duck is right...
DeleteYou have not been hired to check for plagiarism. Either quit the job or do the job you were hired to do.... give easy As. It sucks, but all you're going to do is get yourself in a shitload of trouble when the little cherubs complain and the prof has to "grade" the crap himself.
Your school's rep is shit because they want it to be. Don't care more about your students' work than you are paid to care. (An adaptation of the CM rule of not caring more about your students' work than the students do.)
Thirding this. If the guy you're TAing for doesn't give a flying fuck about plagiarism, he probably won't give a flying fuck if you catch a few plagiarists either. He probably won't back you.
DeleteMy advice would be to concentrate on your own grad work and let the undergrads fend for themselves. This situation isn't your fault--and as a TA, you're not really being paid to make it better.
One way to ward off plagiarism -- or at least to make plagiarism a time-suck for potential cheaters -- is to require outlines and drafts of the essay turned in at various points before the final copy. If the final bears no resemblance to previous drafts, or if there are no previous drafts, that's a 0.
ReplyDeleteOf course, you'd have to have some authority over assignment structure and submission guidelines to make this happen, and I'm not sure you have that as a grading assistant.
I'm not sure how much authority I'll have over this, either. Thanks for the suggestion, though!
DeleteThis idea generally works well, but crafty students can foil it too. In my first full-time gig, one of my colleagues was going on about a student essay that showed such great promise. It was about comics and popular culture. She showed me the final product when it came in: a writing process portfolio with an invention exercise, outline, rough draft, peer review, instructor conference, and final draft. The student had plagiarized the essay from Stephen King word for word but faked the whole process!
DeleteHa! The student sounds clever. If only s/he would apply that same level of effort toward actually doing the assignment...
DeleteTurnitin could be a bear, but it worked significantly better than Safe Assign, which is the module included with Blackboard that our university now uses. I could do a better job using Bella's method above, and I often have to.
ReplyDeleteOne more tip: do not put quotes around your sentence. That way, google will still catch it if they have changed a word or two.
ReplyDeleteYou *do* develop pretty good radar over time; as others have said, it's usually the shifts in voice (which tend to be pretty obvious to someone with any expertise in textual analysis/close reading/careful reading of any kind) that given them away. Shifts in font or line spacing (remember, recent editions of Word have different defaults for paragraph style than older ones do; this can be handy if you suspect students may try to update something originally written in Word 97-2003) are even more blatant clues.
ReplyDeleteAlso, if you have any kind of a plagiarism checker available, even as part of your LMS, requiring students to check their own drafts can go a long way toward deterring cheating. As Liz says, SafeAsssign is not very good, but it works pretty well as a deterrent (and as a detector of truly egregious borrowing from the web). If students are expected to cite sources at all in the relevant assignments, this can be touted as "checking their paraphrasing process" (which purpose it does, in fact, serve).
Really, as Bella points out, just saying that you're going to check in some way can do some good. As far as I can tell, the great majority of students (including some of the computer science students) have no idea how plagiarism checkers work, or just how primitive they are (even after I've repeatedly explained ours to them, and warned them that it is a very rough, very dumb tool, and that they'll have to check their own citation format, etc.). And the relatively poor students -- the same ones who are so befuddled by the idea of a paper that they think one can be created by stringing random paragraphs together -- are even less likely to understand what's going on behind the scenes/software. You could probably scare those students just by saying "I google any phrases that sound suspicious to me."
To the above, I'd add allusions to works not covered by the essay or the course.
ReplyDeleteAh, but your tone of mistrust destroys rapport with student... ;)
ReplyDeleteAs a grading assistant, I won't be on the receiving end of student evaluations. They can moan and cry all they like- it won't go into my record. *evil chuckle*
DeleteLittle things give it away, too. Look for strange formatting in one part of a document that don't exist in others. I caught a student because she had a few sentences here or there that were in dark gray text, not black. A quick Google search found that she had cut-and-pasted those from a website.
ReplyDeleteI caught another when a certain word appeared with a strange definition and always in ALL CAPS. Turns out it was an acronym, and the student had plagiarized something irrelevant that happened to use that word as an acronym.
And another's paper included "See figure 2," though there were no figures. Again, none of these pointed definitively to plagiarism, but each red-flagged something to Google.
When you Google, Google a bunch of different permutations. Pick the most specific word in the suspicious passage and Google it along with a few words on either side, then try a few more combinations. If you find nothing, you find nothing, and it just takes a minute.
My favorite trick is the "smart quotes" technique. When you type a quotation mark or apostrophe in MS Word, it auto-converts it from a straight-up-and-down mark into curly quotes or a curly apostrophe. (Try it.) But when you copy and paste from elsewhere, rather than typing into Word afresh, it doesn't auto-convert. Now, there's nothing wrong with cutting and pasting per se. Maybe the student wrote parts of his/her draft in an e-mail and then cut and pasted. Maybe they wrote it in Notepad. Maybe the thing they pasted is an actual quote, cited properly. But often it's a good red flag to Google anything with straight quotes or apostrophe.
I disagree with those who say it's just your job to do as the prof says and ignore plagiarism. Unfortunately, you may not be able to do much beyond reporting the plagiarism to the do-nothing prof. But you should at least be able to report it, and then if the system fails at that point, it fails. At least you've scared a few students into potentially writing their own papers.
Or, if the cases you report go unpunished and you feel like being a whistle-blower, you could blow the whistle. Go to the relevant dean and bring the evidence and see what happens.
Good luck!
"At least you've scared a few students into potentially writing their own papers."
DeleteReally, that's my goal here. I don't intend to get too carried away with this- after all, I have my own coursework/grant-writing/dissertation-proposal to worry about. But I do want to make it clear to the students that I *will* be thinking about the possibility of plagiarism as I read their papers. If I do find any plagiarized ones, the only thing I have the institutional authority to do is to pass that ball into the professor's court. Maybe if I've already done some leg-work to document the plagiarism, he'll rouse himself to do something about it. Or maybe not. Either way, my goal is to "scare a few students into writing their own papers."
In my experience, most plagiarized papers are so unbelievably egregious that they can be detected with the most cursory of glances. Of course, I guess you have to establish a baseline for normal student work first.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking as someone who has been in this exact situation, I would heed the advice given here to choose your battles wisely. I once busted a flagrant plagiarist whose paper was a surrealist pastiche of unattributed web sources, but received absolutely no backing from my prof, who, though she clearly agreed that the work was plagiarized, nevertheless let the student get away with the old "I forgot to include a 'works cited' [for an essay assignment where outside research was expressly forbidden]" excuse. I guess she just didn't want to rock the boat.
Anyway, don't be a hero. Your job as a grad student is to cover your own ass.
"Your job as a grad student is to cover your own ass."
ReplyDeleteABDbag nails it. If I might add:
Your job as a grad student is to finish your dissertation in a timely fashion and cover your own ass while you do it.
It sounds like it's not part of your job description to nail the undergrads for plagiarism. In fact, you should probably spend as little time as possible grading and more time doing things that will get your dissertation done.
Do you know what a time-suck it is to pursue plagiarists? I'd suggest checking the faculty handbook if you want to know. Honor council proceedings can take weeks, and if the students want to fight things it might take longer. You'd also be wise to check the syllabus, that's the legal contract for students.
I'm not saying you need to ignore plagiarism, but be thoughtful about the times you feel the need to push against faculty.
Thanks for this. I do intend to choose my battles carefully. And if the prof won't back me up, then I know that there's not a lot that I can do. I'm hoping that if I show a little proactivity and present him with hard evidence, he'll be roused to do something. But if not, I can know that at least I tried.
DeleteSafeAssign and Turnitin are the way to go if your uni has 'em. I've also learned this cool trick: if you have an iPhone or newer iPad (not first generation), download the Google app. It has a feature called Google goggles, where you can take a picture of something and Google will search for it. So, if you take a picture of words on a page, Google will recognize that it's words on a page and go searching for those words. I can't say how accurate it is, but it's another tool for the toolbox.
ReplyDeleteIf you can find the relevant handbook and the correct forms, you could try handing the completed documents to the prof and maybe, just maybe, he'll sign'em if the work is already done.
ReplyDeleteTercel sends this in:
ReplyDeleteShe would probably be in violation of FERPA if she passes this semester’s essays to the next TA.
This is fun but not helpful (sorry). Years ago (before internet), I had a student in my biomed course hand in a technical paper. He was furious when he saw his F, and proclaimed up one side and down the other that he had NOT plagiarized anything! I asked him about his sources, and whether he happened to notice that the author he had lifted virtually the entire paper from was.......wait for it........ME.
ReplyDelete