Collaboration & Plagiarism

The Issues

7 Tips for Successful Cooperative Learning Online and at a Distance, Teaching, Learning and Technology @ SUNY.

Assigning Collaborative Writing—Tips for Teachers from "Collaborative Pedagogy" by Rebecca Moore Howard, Composition Pedagogies: A Bibliographic Guide. Ed. Gary Tate, Amy Rupiper, and Kurt Schick. New York: Oxford UP, 2000.

Cheating Themselves by Miriam Schulman, Issues in Ethics V. 9, N. 1 Winter 2003, Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. "Universities must create communities where academic dishonesty is explained but not explained away."

Cite-Check: On Collaboration, Plagiarism, and Everything in Between, The New Humanities Reader, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002. "Our goal, rather, is to help students navigate the gray areas that emerge whenever one engages in serious intellectual inquiry. In such an environment, where class discussions are exciting, peer review of student work is helpful, and collaboration continues on long after class is over, it can be difficult to tell exactly who came up with the idea or insight that eventually makes its way into the paper. The challenge, in other words, for students and for their teachers alike, is to develop ways to work together productively in the ambiguous world of lived experience."

Collaboration or Plagiarism? Explaining Collaborative-Based Assignments Clearly, Tuesday L. Cooper, Associate Dean, School of Education/Professional Studies and Graduate Division, Eastern Connecticut State University.

Collaborative Learning and Academic Integrity from York University: "Group study has been shown by research to accelerate learning but only if each student is a full and active participant in that learning process. Collaboration also brings fears of "over collaboration" and a fear that students will cheat in a collaborative environment. Some methods and techniques to avoid such "over collaboration" are presented below."

Collaborative Learning: Group Work and Study Teams from the hard copy book Tools for Teaching by Barbara Gross Davis; Jossey-Bass Publishers: San Francisco, 1993.

Fifteen Common Mistakes In Using Cooperative Learning — And What To Do About Them, Teaching, Learning and Technology @ SUNY.

Unauthorized Collaboration, Solitary and Cooperative Learning, and Appropriate Practices in Cooperative Learning from Bucknell University.

Unauthorized Collaboration: What Students Need To Know An excellent summation of the various complications inherent in collaboration from the Old Dominion University.

When Is Collaboration OK? from Student Cheating and Plagiarism in the Internet Era: A Wake-Up Call by Ann Lathrop and Kathleen Foss. Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited, 2000.

The Student Perspective

Cheating: new face, old number by Yana Litovsky, The Justice, the Student Weekly of Brandeis University.

Collaboration and the Peer Tutor: Characteristics, Constraints, and Ethical Considerations in the Writing Center by Nancy Annett.

Collaborative Learning: Definitions, Benefits, Applications, and Dangers in the Writing Center by Nancy Annett.

Sample Policies: Find or adapt one you like and put it in your Syllabi!

16.070 Collaboration Policy "This document describes the collaboration policies for 16.070. Two classes of inter-student work are covered: plagiarism and collaboration." A very specific guideline for students.

Appropriate collaboration from New Century College.

Policy on Collaboration
Instructor: Josh Tenenberg
"Collaborative work with other students is often a helpful way in which to learn material. However, each student is also individually accountable for the work that he or she hands in. This document clarifies the policy that I uphold in my courses on what is legitimate collaboration and what is not."

Referencing, Collaboration and Plagiarism "Collaboration between students in this course on weekly assignments is acceptable, and ‘jam-sessions’ on the problems involving a small group of students can be beneficial. In these sessions you will be able to practise articulating and evaluating competing analyses of the data, a valuable linguistic skill. While this kind of collaborative discussion is permitted, even encouraged, you are required to write up the answers to the assignments individually, and not to copy one another’s wording. That is, feel free to work together on solutions, but then go away and write up the solutions on your own, and in your own words. Failure to do so will constitute plagiarism. You should always indicate on your assignment if your solution is based on collaborative work, and who your collaborators were."