Nancy (post 31) mentioned that the best way to stop plagiarism is to assign projects that can’t be plagiarized. I think that’s easier to do in the middle school where our assignments don’t have to be strictly analytical, hard-core research projects. So, for example, instead of asking my students to write “reports” on various figures from the Tudor period in Britain, each student must research their topic, and then create some historical fiction artifacts: a personal journal, a newspaper article, a poem, and a top-ten list.

It’s subjective, to an extent, but there are ways to make it clear and to mitigate against its appearance. For example, I often duplicate difficult problem set items on the midterm or final exam for my courses, so if students really worked on and understood the problem then it’s only a matter of reconstructing the solution. (And any good solution to a problem is memorable to the problem-solver.) On the other hand, the plagiarizers end up losing significantly more credit than they “earned” through copying work.

You asked for funny or memorable stories. Unfortunately I have very, very many stories and none of them are what I would call “funny”. Academic dishonesty saddens and angers me.

As an educator that works with teachers each day, too many of them come to me complaining about the perceived “plagiarism problem” in our schools. They ask me how to teach kids about plagiarism.

One thing I think works against students is a school culture steeped in reciting the “correct answer” and that alone, is good enough. I could point to standardized testing, NCLB, etc., as root issues behind this.

Our students will Google search (it’s easier than other database searches), find something that looks credible, print it, and hand it in. They may not even read it. “Found it,” let’s move on.

I wonder if the written assignments are simply too boring in 2007.

Those of us from academic backgrounds know that the reason that plagiarism in colleges/universities is taken so seriously is that they are looking for evidence of original thought. But in a remix culture that many teens today participate in, I am not sure we are culturally putting a lot of value on original thought.

To combat the problem, I think students need concrete examples, I think assignments should change with the times to challenge students to find their voice, and I think at some point we could begin to value artifacts of remix culture when/where the authors of source material are agreeing to share their work for re-use.

The issues I deal with (and there have been more and more recently) are with those students who are trying to do the least amount of work possible. I understand that often the idea is “just get it done and deal with the consequences later”.

The question I have begun asking is: “Do you really trust someone else’s work? Are you willing to take whatever credit the teacher gives for another person’s work?”

Simon– Personally, my problem is with unknowingly using someone else’s idea; I’ll read something, forget about it, and then present it as my own idea a few months later . That’s my same problem. *sheepish* I’m always afraid that I might present an idea that’s actually somebody else’s. ]]>