Resources for Faculty

Help students avoid plagiarism by alerting them to Resources for Students.

ECSU's Office of Judicial Affairs:

Resources from Kimberly Armstrong Silcox, J.D. 

University Judicial Officer 

Wood Support Services Center, Room 246                                      

Phone: (860) 465-4426

E-mail: silcoxk@easternct.edu

• Academic Integrity Quiz
• Academic Integrity Workshop PowerPoint
• Academic Misconduct Report Form

Rita Malenczyk's handout: If You Suspect a Student of Plagiarism

Barbara Little Liu's Sample Academic Honesty Policy Statement For Syllabus

Faculty Resources

Academic Honesty and Intellectual Ownership
This document was originally prepared in May 1996 by Inger Brody, Ann Ekes, and Jeanette DiScala as part of the University of Puget Sound's Academic Standards Committee, Subcommittee on Academic Honesty. Intended as a teaching guide, it introduces students to the issues of intellectual ownership and accepted forms of citation. Included are sample published pages, along with a range of ways in which students might use such passages in their papers.

Actions Do Speak Louder than Words: Deterring Plagiarism with the Use of Plagiarism-Detection Software
Bear F. Braumoeller, Harvard University and Brian J. Gaines, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign "Warning students not to plagiarize, even in the strongest terms, appears not to have had any effect whatsoever. Revealing the use of plagiarism-detection software to the students prior to completion of an assignment, on the other hand, proved to be a remarkably strong (though still not absolutely perfect) deterrent."

Anti-Plagiarism Strategies for Research Papers
Robert Harris, Vanguard University of Southern California.

Can We Control Cheating in The Classroom?
Joe Kerkvliet, Oregon State University, and Charles L. Sigmund, Office for Oregon Health Plan Policy and Research, Journal of Economic Education, Fall 1999. "A new study on cheating by college students has found that diligent professors can virtually eliminate cheating on exams through a combination of efforts, including using multiple versions of the same test, hiring additional proctors and giving verbal warnings about cheating." Study On Student Cheating Finds Profs Make A Difference

The Cat-and-Mouse Game of Plagiarism Detection
Jeffrey R. Young. Colleges provide professors with new online tools to give them the upper hand. The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 6, 2001.

Cheating 101: Paper Mills and You
Aimed at providing faculty with an overview of the current state of Internet Paper Mills, how to locate Paper Mills, how to detect plagiarized papers, how to track down suspicious papers, and how to combat plagiarism by Margaret Fain, Assistant Head of Public Services, and Peggy Bates, Reference Librarian, at Coastal Carolina University.

Cut-and-Paste Plagiarism: Preventing, Detecting and Tracking Online Plagiarism
Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe of Illinois State University. Includes links to free and for-a-fee student paper web sites.

Defining and Avoiding Plagiarism: The WPA Statement on Best Practices
"Plagiarism has always concerned teachers and administrators, who want students’ work to represent their own efforts and to reflect the outcomes of their learning. However, with the advent of the Internet and easy access to almost limitless written material on every conceivable topic, suspicion of student plagiarism has begun to affect teachers at all levels, at times diverting them from the work of developing students’ writing, reading, and critical thinking abilities.

This statement responds to the growing educational concerns about plagiarism in four ways:

1. by defining plagiarism

2. by suggesting some of the causes of plagiarism.

3. by proposing a set of responsibilities (for students, teachers, and administrators) to address the problem of plagiarism.

4. by recommending a set of practices for teaching and learning that can significantly reduce the likelihood of plagiarism.

Detecting Plagiarized Papers
Margaret Fain, Assistant Head of Public Services, Coastal Carolina University.

Deterring Plagiarism: Some Strategies
Dr. Margaret Procter, Coordinator, Writing Support, University of Toronto.

Downloadable Term Papers: What's a Prof. to Do?
Tom Rocklin, Director, Center for Teaching, The University of Iowa:

Electronic Plagiarism Seminar
Gretchen Pearson, Public Services Librarian, Noreen Reale Falcone Library, Le Moyne College. Up-to-date, thorough website including the following sections:

Fostering Academic Integrity
Includes Strategies for Preventing Cheating on Term Papers, Take-Home Written Assignments and Exams.

How Cheating Helps Drive Better Instruction
Greg Van Belle, Department of English, Edmonds Community College. Proactive strategies for faculty.

Internet Plagiarism: Strategies to Deter Academic Misconduct
Mary Hricko, Library Director, Kent State University.

Plagiarized.com: The Instructor's Guide to Internet Plagiarism
Authored by a student: The purpose of this site is to help teachers or professors (or even parents) determine if a given piece of academic work has been obtained from the Internet. Check out Dead Giveaways: What to watch for when you suspect an essay isn't from the student's own head.

Plagiarism
Sharon Stoerger's excellent mega-site including:

• Copyright & Intellectual Freedom
• For Instructors
• For Students
• Plagiarism Case Studies Plagiarism
• Detection Tools
• Term Paper Sites--Examples

Plagiarism and Anti-Plagiarism
Heyward Ehrlich, Department of English, Rutgers University.

Plagiarism and the Web
A very helpful site by Bruce Leland, Professor of English, Western Illinois University.

Plagiarism in Colleges in USA
Attorney Ronald B. Standler. Plagiarism by students is a serious problem in colleges in the USA. This essay discusses plagiarism from a legal perspective.

Preventing Academic Dishonesty
From Tools for Teaching, by Barbara Gross Davis, Assistant Vice Chancellor, Student Life-Educational Development, University of California, Berkeley. Includes specific strategies for Papers and Exams.

Student Plagiarism in an Online World
Julie J.C.H. Ryan, a graduate teaching assistant at George Washington University and Information Security Consultant in ASEE Prism Online.

The plagiarism handbook: Strategies for Preventing, Detecting, and Dealing with Plagiarism
Robert A. Harris; cartoons by Vic Lockman. Los Angeles, CA: Pyrczak Publishing, 2001. We have two copies that circulate and one copy in Reference. PN167.H37 2001

Using Sources Effectively
Robert A. Harris, targets unintentional plagiarism and the ineffective use of research source material. Free examination copies are available to faculty via Pyrczak Publishing. Use Browse Titles: Writing: Using Sources Effectively and click on the Exam Copy tab.

The Web's plagiarism police
An excellent article by by Andy Dehnart for Salon, June 14, 1999. Issues a caveat regarding various anti-plagiarism tools; reviews Plagiarism.org and EVE.

Writing Resources for Faculty and TAs
Writing Support, University of Toronto.

Back to Top

Examples of Paper Mills on the Web

For the most up-to-date list, please see Internet Paper Mills from Peggy Bates & Margaret Fain, Kimbel Library, Coastal Carolina University: "Our list of Internet Term Paper Sites includes over 250 sites that were active as of December 2004. The list of Subject Specific Term Paper Sites contains an additional 71 sites."

Back to Top

Faculty Tools for Plagiarism Detection

Try this 1st! Select one or more suspicious phrases and plug them into Google's Advanced Search (see screen shot below):

Detection Tools and Methods from the
Virtual Academic Integrity Laboratory (VAIL), Center for Intellectual Property, University of Maryland University College

Plagiarism Detection Software, Its Use by Universities, and Student Attitudes to Cheating: A Report for the University of Sydney Teaching and Learning Committee Tested Turnitin, EduTie, PlagiServe, Glatt Plagiarism Self-Detection program, CopyCatch Gold, EVE2 and WordCheck Keyword DP. Conclusions:

"There are a wide range of plagiarism detection tools and software available to universities and other academic institutions. Of these Turnitin.com appears to be the most widely used, and has been chosen by JISC in the UK for its centrally provided plagiarism detection service, and by CAVAL Collaborative Solutions as the program to market to all Australian universities.

Although plagiarism detection tools provide an excellent service in detecting matching text between documents, care needs to be taken in their use. A noted fault of the online services, such as Turnitin.com, is the inability to distinguish correctly cited text from plagiarised text, necessitating human intervention before a paper is declared plagiarised. This may pose a problem, or a barrier, to implementing such a service university-wide, especially in faculties where large class sizes are seen as a reason for not checking students’ work carefully for plagiarism.

The very fact that students are notified of the intent to use plagiarism detection tools to check assignments acts as a deterrent. However, information on the definition of plagiarism and how to avoid it should be made available to all students."

Use of Electronic detection tools: 1. Choosing the right tool for the task
Recommendations taken from Good Practice Guide, Commissioned by JISC and written by Jude Carroll and Jon Appleton from Oxford Brookes. "If the lecturer is worried about students copying from each other, they need a tool that checks for collusion. CopyCatch, devised by a forensic linguist and available for purchase (see resources in Appendix 1 (42kb)), requires a relatively short time to match each script with all the others in the cohort. Matches over 60% or 70% (depending on the task) are clear indications of the need for specific checking of those papers more closely. CopyCatch can only be used if students submit work electronically."

EVE, the Essay Verification Engine
EVE is a powerful tool designed to combat the growing problem of internet plagiarism. EVE accepts essays in plain text format and returns links to web pages from which a student may have plagiarized. EVE has been developed to be powerful enough to find plagiarized material while not overwhelming the professor with false links. Try EVE by giving it an essay in plain text (.txt) format. Next, find some similar material on the web, copy a couple of paragraphs into the essay, and give the new essay to EVE. In our testing, EVE found approximately 80-90% of plagiarized material.

Glatt Plagiarism Services, Inc. produces three different software Programs to help deter and detect plagiarism:

1. Glatt Plagiarism Teaching Program (GPTeach):
   A Tutorial Program to provide computer assisted instruction on what constitutes plagiarism and how to avoid it. Includes definitions of direct and indirect plagiarism, when and how to provide attribution, and mastery test of concepts.
2. Glatt Plagiarism Screening Program (GPSP) A highly sophisticated Screening Program to detect plagiarism. Typically used in academic institutions or in the legal profession for cases of copyright infringement.
3. Glatt Plagiarism Self-Detection Program (GPSD) A Screening Program to help detect inadvertent instances of plagiarism.
4. For additional information, see endorsements and a partial list of academic institutions that have helped fight plagiarismwith Glatt Plagiarism Services.

Moss (for a Measure Of Software Similarity) is an automatic system for determining the similarity of C, C++, Java, Pascal, Ada, ML, Lisp, or Scheme programs. To date, the main application of Moss has been in detecting plagiarism in programming classes. Since its development in 1994, Moss has been very effective in this role. The algorithm behind moss is a significant improvement over other cheating detection algorithms (at least, over those known to us).

Moss is being provided in the hope that it will benefit the educational community. Moss is fast, easy to use, and free. Access to Moss is restricted to instructors and staff of programming courses. To obtain a Moss account, send a request to moss-request@cs.berkeley.edu. Processing requests for accounts may take up to a day; once you have an account queries are processed as soon as they are received.

Plagiarism.org:

Welcome to Plagiarism.org, the online resource for educators concerned with the growing problem of Internet plagiarism. This site is designed to provide the latest information on online plagiarism and explain how our user portal, Turnitin.com, is now being used by educators all over the world to fight plagiarism and help bring academic integrity back into our schools.

Is it possible to prevent plagiarism by determining if a term paper has been copied from the Internet or from another class? It is now.

The Plagiarism Resource Center at The University of Virginia
The goal of this web site is to help reduce the impact of plagiarism on education and educational institutions. At present, it distributes free software to detect plagiarism and is gathering information on peoples’ experiences with plagiarism. The site’s author is Lou Bloomfield, Professor of Physics, University of Virginia, Box 400714, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4714, bloomfield@virginia.edu.

Last Update: April 17, 2007.

	ECSU Home Page	Library Webmaster	Library Home Page
	© 2007 ECSU	University Disclaimer	All Rights Reserved
	Site Text Menu	Last Updated 04/18/07	ECSU Site Search