The Sniff Test

So it’s plagiarism prevention time again. Seems like just yesterday when I wrote the entry about ethics and the students’ responsibility to cite borrowed information. This is obviously a constant struggle.

This time, the lesson comes not from a Senior Project class, but from a Sports Marketing class in which the teacher had assigned a short (2-3 page) research paper on an athlete or sports agent. Through the faculty grapevine, I have become known as the “Plagiarism Buster” because I am the facilitator of our Turnitin.com account and I am really good at Google searches for plagiarized information. Anyhoo, Ms. G brought me several papers that, in her words were, “Too good to be true.” (That’s a pretty good indicator, huh? When struggling writers become brilliant writers overnight . . .) One of the papers she brought me was printed in color and still had the hotlinks in blue. What a hoot! It took me about five minutes to find their sources, print them out, and return them to Ms. G. Didn’t even have to bother with Turnitin; all I had to do was pick out a particularly sophisticated phrase and put the whole thing in the Google search bar with quotes at the beginning and end. Immediate results. Ms. G was amazed at how easy it was to bust them. I taught her my very intricate (ha ha) technique and she was off and running. She took her set of papers back to class, laid them all out on the table, and gave her kids the opportunity to pick them up and try again with no penalty, as long as they did their own work. About HALF the class picked up their papers to try again. She put the remainder of the papers through the “sniff test” and still found about twelve instances of pure cut and paste. After awarding the thieves with a zero and assigning an additional paper on ethics and plagiarism, I think her kids are finally getting the point. And here’s the point. . . we are not stupid.

I don’t know if busy schedules and lack of time to investigate has led to students being able to get away with plagiarism, or if it is just that teachers don’t know how easy it is to find the sources. Some people say that the Internet has corrupted our kids, making it easy for them to cheat. I think it’s our fault. We have not taught them how to integrate information and have not held the line enough to make the consequences for plagiarism meaningful.

My school is on the road to changing that mindset. We are serious about teaching our kids that plagiarism is stealing, just as if you put a CD in your pocket. Stealing is stealing. No question. Information literacy and writing instruction will go a long way toward plagiarism prevention, but, let’s face it, it all comes down to the grade. If we all stick together and take the time to perform the “sniff test,” the word will get around and the ever-so-easy right click won’t be worth it anymore.

Here are some great resources. I have written for permission to use them. One is a great interactive tutorial about citing information and one is a well-formatted brochure you could hand out to your kids about plagiarism prevention.

http://library.acadiau.ca/tutorials/plagiarism/

http://alameda.peralta.edu/projects/20013/plagiarismbrochure12pt.pdf#search=%22%22plagiarism%20handout%22%22