World-Shaker

10 Ways to Cheat-Proof Your Classroom →

A fascinating article. Here are three of the ten:

1. Critical Thinking: The best assignments cannot be copied. This might include asking students to develop an argument and defend it individually or having students develop their own math problems or their own processes for solving shared math problems. 
2. Move Toward Mastery: Help students see that the goal is not completion, but mastery. Get rid of averages and zeroes. Students need to understand that cheating prevents teachers from providing necessary intervention and plan for future learning. 
3. Monitor Frequently Engage with Students Often: If a student turns in a plagiarized essay, chances are the teacher wasn’t part of the pre-planning, writing and editing process. Teachers need to monitor students often and provide instant feedback so that incompletion doesn’t snowball into an opportunity to cheat.

Survey Finds Cheating Among Students at All GPA Levels →

infoneer-pulse:

Over a third of undergraduate students admitted to some form of cheating at one of America’s top research universities, according to a survey published November in the journal Science and Engineering Ethics.

Students surveyed at the University of California San Diego shared a common perception that “everyone is doing it”, a notion that contributed to the cheating prevalence, said Tricia Bertram Gallant, an academic integrity coordinator at the public university and lead author of the survey.

Psychologists call this phenomenon normative thinking. About 91 percent of students surveyed reported that “students will do what it takes to get the assignments done and get the grade.”

» via International Business Times

I’m a little too tired to speculate on this at the moment, but it’s pretty significant.

"Among papers submitted by students in higher education, Wikipedia was by far the most plagiarized individual site, at 10.74 percent. Yahoo Answers was a distant second at 3.9 percent. Slideshare came in a close third at 3.87 percent, Answers.com at 3.57 percent, and Appapers.com at 3.11 percent."

— Wikipedia Tops List of Plagiarized Sources

Did you know?

lhuddles:

The latest version of Microsoft Word has a built-in citation maker. You can keep a running list of your sources, and then double-click on the appropriate source in the sidebar in order to insert it as a citation in the paper. You can also pick if you want APA or MLA or another citation format. 

Also, once you’re done with the paper, MS Word can create a bibliography page for you. Super easy and nice. 

I’m playing my hipster card and saying I knew, but we’re totally in agreement that most people don’t and more people should!

Here’s a quick tutorial if you’re on the Mac.

And one if you’re on the PC.

UPDATE: GirlWithALessonPlan has a great reblog on why this function still falls short in some pretty significant areas. Please check it out!

"A student writing an essay for their teacher may be tempted to plagiarize or leave facts unchecked. A new study shows that if you ask that same student to write something that will be posted on Wikipedia, he or she suddenly becomes determined to make the work as accurate as possible, and may actually do better research."

—

Probably more basic logic and psychology than technology influence here, but interesting nonetheless.

Wikipedia improves students’ work: Students become much more concerned with accuracy when their research is posted online, study finds

Today, my principal gave me a card telling me I did a good job handling a cheating incident, and it came with a bag of Skittles.

girlwithalessonplan:

Proving once again:  You’re never too old to hear and “Atta girl!” and get candy.  

Stop the cheating, taste the rainbow.

Incredible essay written by a professional essay writer. →

forradicalteachers:

You’ve never heard of me, but there’s a good chance that you’ve read some of my work. I’m a hired gun, a doctor of everything, an academic mercenary. My customers are your students. I promise you that. Somebody in your classroom uses a service that you can’t detect, that you can’t defend against, that you may not even know exists.

I work at an online company that generates tens of thousands of dollars a month by creating original essays based on specific instructions provided by cheating students. I’ve worked there full time since 2004. On any day of the academic year, I am working on upward of 20 assignments.

He spends some time talking about why students cheat and which students cheat. I especially like how he points out that a lot of the students who come to him to write their essays for him aren’t necessarily inept; they just can’t write. All the more reason why we should encourage writing in every course. Even you, math teachers, should find a way to get your students to write in class. Want proof that writing is vital in every subject matter? Every subject matter has a textbook.

Even more interesting, he says at one point that the subject most infested with cheaters is education. Isn’t that amazing to think about?

I’ve written papers for students in elementary-education programs, special-education majors, and ESL-training courses. I’ve written lesson plans for aspiring high-school teachers, and I’ve synthesized reports from notes that customers have taken during classroom observations. I’ve written essays for those studying to become school administrators, and I’ve completed theses for those on course to become principals. In the enormous conspiracy that is student cheating, the frontline intelligence community is infiltrated by double agents. (Future educators of America, I know who you are.)

I’m not sure how one can sleep at night knowing they’re cheating their way into a profession in which children and young adults will rely on them not just as educators, but as role models.

Here’s another section that really struck me hard.

After I’ve gathered my sources, I pull out usable quotes, cite them, and distribute them among the sections of the assignment. Over the years, I’ve refined ways of stretching papers. I can write a four-word sentence in 40 words. Just give me one phrase of quotable text, and I’ll produce two pages of ponderous explanation. I can say in 10 pages what most normal people could say in a paragraph.

I’ve also got a mental library of stock academic phrases: “A close consideration of the events which occurred in ____ during the ____ demonstrate that ____ had entered into a phase of widespread cultural, social, and economic change that would define ____ for decades to come.” Fill in the blanks using words provided by the professor in the assignment’s instructions.

Has academic writing really become this formulaic? Is it our fault as educators? Who’s to blame for this?

This article raised some great questions I’ll be thinking about in the coming weeks. What’s even better, however, is that it’s excellently written, so I recommend it to anyone and everyone.

Seconded. A fascinating article on plagiarism and academic integrity.

Plagiarisma - A Plagiarism Checker →

Plagiarism: as teachers we see it a lot. Sometimes it’s done intentionally, sometimes it’s done accidentally. Either way we can’t allow our students to plagiarize other people’s works. Plagiarisma is a free tool that teachers and students can use to detect possible cases of plagiarism.

"Examining this situation crystallized two issues in my mind — one immediate and the other more general. For the immediate issue, I explored some sources in the social science literature that identified the problem as possible “self-plagiarism,” which on first impression sounds like an oxymoron. As a matter of intellectual ownership, how could one plagiarize one’s own ideas?"

— Views: A Study of Self-Plagiarism

Plagiarism a persistent problem on campuses →

As an increasing amount of material can be found online, plagiarism has become a growing problem on college campuses. More than 60percent of undergraduate students nationwide admitted to cheating on assignments and exams, according to one study. And 40percent of all U.S. college students said they had woven unattributed material from the Internet into their own work.

You see these situations and can’t help but wonder what the solution is.

It reminds me of something Barry Schwartz said in one of his Ted Talks:

“The single most important thing kids need to learn is character.”

7 Resources for Detecting and Preventing Plagiarism →

My favorite on the list:

Paper Rater is a free service designed to help high school and college students improve their writing. Paper Rater does basic spelling and grammar checks, but the real value of Paper Rater is that it tells students if their papers have elements of plagiarism. Paper Rater scans students’ papers then gives students an estimate of the likelihood that someone might think that their papers were plagiarized.

How cool is that?

Should Colleges Do More to Teach Students About Plagiarism? →

A series of articles in The New York Times this month highlights the prevalence of student plagiarism on campuses and the cluelessness of some of today’s college students when it comes to academic-citation practices.

“At the University of Maryland, a student reprimanded for copying from Wikipedia in a paper on the Great Depression said he thought its entries—unsigned and collectively written—did not need to be credited since they counted, essentially, as common knowledge,” said one of the articles.

Note that you are under no obligation to go to the NYT website given their habit of requiring an account to view content.

"If we look closely at plagiarism as practiced by youngsters, we can see that they have a different relationship to the printed word than did the generations before them. When many young people think of writing, they don’t think of fashioning original sentences into a sustained thought. They think of making something like a collage of found passages and ideas from the Internet."

— Cutting and Pasting: A Senior Thesis by (Insert Name) (via rachelbdoyle) (via infoneer-pulse)

Plagiarism Inc. →

givemesomethingtoread:

Jordan Kavoosi built an empire of fake term papers. Now the writers want their cut.

Preventing Plagiarism →

Zotero is also a marvelous information-management system, and is therefore well-suited to avoiding the accidental plagiarism that results from not keeping good track of one’s sources. If students get into the habit of keeping both their sources and their notes in Zotero, they’re much less likely to inadvertently neglect to cite a source, or to accidentally cite something as a paraphrase or summary when it’s really a direct quote.