Suggestions for Department Policies to Combat Plagiarism

During the last five years at the School of Public Policy, I have encountered about a dozen plagiarism cases.  These cases arose despite special efforts to inform students about School and University policies  about plagiarism, to provide them with resources to check their work and take appropriate steps to correct any problems, and with repeated notification that students' work would be subjected to plagiarism checking services to which the School of Public Policy now subscribes.

General steps to combat plagiarism will also contribute to raising the quality and integrity of all student work, including the final project.  I propose that the faculty consider adopting the following policies:

1)  provide excellent training of students about acceptable and unacceptable research and writing practices.

Notices to statements on the subject or the Honor Code appear not to be sufficient to eliminate the problem.

2)  encourage the use of assignments or tasks that do not lend themselves to plagiarism, such as use of original data, interviews, etc. in more research and writing,

The nature of student research and writing has shifted due to the use of electronic resources, making it easy to cut and paste.

3)  require students to make oral presentations of their projects to a panel of faculty members as part of their overall evaluation.

This will reduce the incidence of some types of plagiarism by requiring students to know their material well enough to withstand close and interactive scrutiny.

4)  require students to have an external, non-GMU advisor from a professional organization in their field.

I have encouraged students to do this for the last two semesters, and those that have done so profited greatly.  In addition, it discourages plagiarism by forging stronger ties between our students and our employer constituencies, and exposes our students to valuable outside scrutiny.

5)  facilitate conversion of student papers to PDF files for posting on the final project website.

Putting student papers on the Web, at least for a short time, has given the more successful students a greater sense of connectedness with their projected or current work worlds.

6)  counsel students not to take on more than they can handle academically.

The pressures facing students to juggle more (jobs, school, in some cases families) lead them to expedient but illegal solutions when they see them as viable options.

7)  alert the faculty and administrators to  marginal candidates who might feel more pressure to cheat (though plagiarists are by no means limited to poor-performing students).

The faculty might wish to evaluate the criteria by which students are accepted from abroad, with an eye to assessing integrity (if that can be measured) as well as ability (the measurement of which may already be compromised).  Foreign students make up the majority of plagiarism cases; some infractions are driven by genuinely different understanding of what constitutes proper research and writing practice, even at the end of the masters degree sequence, but others reflect poor preparation or continuing difficulty with English language understanding and use.

8)  provide better incentives to the faculty to make detection efforts worthwhile:
a) preserve courses that have a high rigor quotient, regardless of popularity,
b) make vigorous enforcement the social norm,
c) take enforcement vigor into consideration in performance evaluations,
d) emphasize for non-tenured or adjunct faculty the value to the overall program of their contribution on this point, and reward them for it.
9)  require consistent enforcement measures by all faculty members.

It may be useful, even necessary, for a set period to require that ALL student work, regardless of course or assignment, be submitted for plagiarism evaluation.  This would have the value of putting everyone on notice that the faculty is serious, and that no one is immune from checking.

10)  provide for plagiarism data collection and use, either in students personal files, or in a special plagiarism file.

Plagiarism is relatively opaque to faculty and to students;  we derive little deterrent value from any one prosecuted case, since they are not formally made public.  Lack of information about plagiarism, both generally (number of cases per semester, where it has occurred, etc.) and by specific students makes it possible for a student to serially plagiarize, and plead for mercy from faculty uninformed about prior infractions and sanctions. Some way to work this out to respect student privacy would be necessary.

Long term success will likely require changes in student and faculty work practices and even in the local academic culture.

Todd M. La Porte
School of Public Policy
tlaporte *at* gmu.edu
(703) 993-3351
http://mason.gmu.edu/~tlaporte/plagiarism_suggestions.html

November 13, 2002