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