Many online teacher worry about the possibility of plagiarism in student assignments. Many teachers have taken steps in the fight against student plagiarism. The internet has made it easy for students to just google the answers to writing assignments or even find entire quiz answers to online quizzes.
One teacher researched a student and found that a student had uploaded all his assignments to a cheat website. Then, that teacher ordered that student to take down his assignments from the cheat website. My colleague told me it took him 4 hours to track down this cheating student. Most teachers, however, are not as diligent and many cheaters upload answers to online quizzes to cheat websites all the time. Some even upload their A + papers to the cheat website. Yet others upload their forum question answers to the cheat website.
Yes, I repeat again, some even upload their forum question answers to the cheat website so the student conversations you are having in your discussion forums could have been cut and paste from a cheat website. There are many cheat websites in existence on the web and I will not name them. If you pay $60, you have access to papers, test answers from past students who had gotten A's on those tests and essays. How can you tell if your forum answers are coming genuinely from the student? How can you tell what you are grading is plagiarism? What can you do as a teacher to fight against plagiarism?
How have online institutions fought against plagiarism?
1. Use of a plagiarism checker
At AMU, when students upload an essay, the essay is automatically uploaded to Turnitin. Turnitin is a software program that determines if an essay is plagiarized by checking how the essay matches up to previous essays. If the essay matches a previous essay or even matches just bits and pieces of previous essay, then Turnitin returns to the teacher a plagiarism score. Now, Turnitin is not perfect so I would take each plagiarism on a case by case basis. I will talk about the weaknesses of Turnitin in another post.
2. Change the quiz questions or rotate quiz questions from a question database
Teachers need to rotate quiz questions from a question database to prevent students from learning the correct answers and posting those correct answers to the cheat website. When each student takes the quiz, the LMS automatically rotates or changes the quiz questions for each student, so each student gets a different set of quiz questions.
3. Have a proctor
Students can take a proctored test just like in the face to face testing world where the test proctor walks around the room to make sure students are not cheating on a test. Military students go to their base test center to take university proctored tests.
4. Authentic assessments
Teachers can give assignments that require the students to give their own answers to the open ended questions. 1) Role play assignments--each student would answer a hypothetical role play assignment--What if you were president for 100 days, what would you do? 2) Case Study--If you were head of a country, would you lockdown the country like England did, or would you let the country run as usual with some precautions like washing hands and social distancing like Sweden did? 3) Problem Solving--How would you solve the Coronavirus crisis? What suggestions do you have for Dr. Fauci or President Trump? Get unique answers from each student.
5. Multiple Drafts of an essay
When students turn in multiple drafts of an essay, then you know for sure that the student is working on the essay in real time as opposed to turning in an essay as a finished product. After all, some cheat essay sites offer customized essays that can avoid detection by Turnitin. So seeing the student work on the paper from the pre-write stage to the revision stage allows the teacher to verify that the student is actually doing the work during class time.
6. Upload your entire Discussion Forum to Turnitin
You can upload your entire Discussion Forum to Turnitin and see which student has cheated. Turnitin will highlight any forum entries that have been plagiarized and tell where the original forum post came from. When I did this for the first time, I was surprised at how many students had plagiarized their online posts. Note: Not many teachers are willing to take the extra time to do this due to time constraints and heavy student workload.
7. Make students aware of the Plagiarism Policy of the University and have them take a plagiarism pledge
Have students take a plagiarism pledge that they will not plagiarize. Some online classes have an online forum dedicated to that pledge where students pledge they will not plagiarize. Note: I have seen a few students who had pledged they will not plagiarize, yet they still plagiarized. Luckily, very very very few students do that. Most students honor their plagiarism pledge.
Do you have any other suggestions on how online teachers can spot plagiarism and avoid plagiarism in their online classes?
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