On 11/20/2013 06:04 PM, LiAnna Davis wrote:
I'm curious to see if this seems to hold true with
your programs as
well -- and does anyone have a great solution they've implemented
that's cut down on student plagiarism?
In my experience in the university context, the best prevention is to
simply require the students to submit the assignments via Turn It In.
That pretty much removes the temptation. That said, when I look at the
TII reports they often show the best papers as being the most
plagiaristic because the students made extensive use of quotes and
bibliography. The algorithms aren't very good. Hence, I'm curious about
the details of Sage's figures.
And the practice and its reception certainly is cultural. As Loveland
and I write in [1]:
More generally, although the notions of authorship,
ownership, and
other elements of print culture are taken for granted today, Adrian
Johns (2001) argues that they ‘are in fact rather more contingent
than generally acknowledged’. In particular, the process of stigmergy
is at odds with increasingly strict laws regarding copyright. In this
vein, Peter Jaszi argues that ‘copyright law, with its emphasis on
rewarding and safeguarding “originality”, has lost sight of the
cultural value of what might be called “serial collaborations” –
works resulting from successive elaborations of an idea or text’
(1994: 40). Furthermore, deference to copyright has become so
exaggerated that, in Rebecca Moore Howard’s view, it prompts a form
of hypocrisy around what she calls ‘patchwriting’, ‘a form of
imitatio, of mimesis’ that is inherent to professional writing and
students’ learning (1999: xviii). A similar concern leads Richard
Posner (2007) to conclude that plagiarism is a complex and
constructed notion, overreaching and inappropriate in many of its
contemporary applications; according to Posner, what we should focus
on and condemn is intellectual fraud.
[1]:
http://nms.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/01/13/1461444812470428.full