C3 Conference

Plagiarism - Academic integrity

in the internet age

Don McCabe – Rutgers University

Presentation Agenda

Overview of research

Identifying some technology issues

Institutional and classroom strategies

Overview of Research

High School Students

Self-reported cheating* Public Parochial Private

Test/exam 76% 71% 49%

Plagiarism 61% 64% 47%

*Data from over 18,000 students at 61 schools across the United States.

Motivations to cheat in high schoolBecause why do the work when you don’t have to?

There is no need to work so hard, if everyone else is cheating.

Courses weren’t interesting enough…

Time, or lack thereof.

Pressure to get good grades.

Desire not to disappoint my teachers/parents.

Student Comments - TechnologyOne kid stole the disk the final exam was on…

Students finding copies of tests on the Internet. (Often from text book publishers.)

Kids from our school have a website where you can find any answer for any book used [here].

Emailing a paper to a teacher which is filled with “jibberish” and blaming it on the transfer process” [to get more time on the assignment].

College Students

Research Chronology – 1990 to 2006

College

Have surveyed 135,00+ students at >140 schools Have surveyed 14,000+ faculty at >90 schools ~2,000 TAs at 17 schools have been surveyed Honor codes were an early focus; now modified codes 10 - 20 schools will be surveyed in 2006-2007

High School

Over 30M students at >65 schools Have also surveyed a small number of faculty

Undergraduate Students

2002-2006 Surveys

Canada

• Students, faculty, TAs, first year students• 16 participating schools

United States

• Students, faculty, TAs, first year students• 84 participating schools

Methodological issues

Self-report data

Anonymity concerns with web-based surveys

Low response rates

Changing definition of cheating???

Large sample size

Respondents

U.S Canada

Undergraduate 61,700 22,128

Graduate 9,270 2,151

Unknown 1,730 599

Institutional factors associated with greater cheating

Cheating is campus norm (cheating culture)

School has no honor code

When students feel faculty don’t support integrity policies, there is little chance of getting caught and, even if you are, penalties are not seen as significant

Students reporting greater cheating

Business majors (Communications)

Males (esp. test cheating)

Students with low or high GPA’s

Fraternity/sorority members; athletes

Self-reported cheating

U.S. Canada

UG Grad UG Grad Test Cheating 22% 9% 19% 9%

Written Cheating 46% 31% 45% 30% (50%) (32%) (52%) (35%)

N 61,700 9,270 19,378 2,151

* For undergrads - >90% via Internet = 20%; <10% via paper = 29%

Plagiarism - Undergraduates

1999 U.S. Canada

Written ‘cut & paste’ 40% 38% 36% Written plagiarism 16% 6% 5%

Internet ‘cut & paste’ 10% 37% 35%

Internet plagiarism 5% 3% 2% (e.g., paper mills)

Motivations for cheating

[T]here are students who attend [college] just to receive a diploma at what ever cost.

Every time I have reported cheating nothing happens, that’s why I have stopped caring about cheaters.

If the class… doesn't seem that important it is easier not to care about cheating. Plus a little "help" on an exam in no big deal.

In 200 level courses professors are very unhelpful… [and] asking previous students for help seems more like getting tutoring than cheating.

Some suggested solutions

Administration and faculty should be more specific about shared learning experiences in groups…

Develop a policy on cell phone usage...

I think the degree of enforcement is not consistent across different departments… some are more strict.

I think the online program needs to ensure that the tests do not allow for cheating. Most professors do not change their exams... they should.

Faculty

How faculty & students learn of policy

Undergrads Faculty

U.S. Canada U.S. Canada

Faculty 63% 43% 41% 33% Handbook 26% 52% 51% 58%

Orientation 20% 25% 25% 15%

Note: Students - % noting they learned a lot from the source. Faculty - % who used source, no rating of how much learned.

% Faculty observing cheating

US Test Cheating 55%

Written Cheating 85% (86%)

N 11,282

Students vs. faculty Moderate & serious cheating Students Faculty

Copy on exam/crib notes 91% 98%

Plagiarism 91% 99%

Paper from mill 89% 98% --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

-

Collaboration 36% 84%

Written ‘cut & paste’ 56% 83%

Internet ‘cut & paste’ 57% 84%

Faculty reactions to cheating

U.S. Canada

F on test/assignment 56% 45%

Report student 52% 53%

Warning or reprimand 35% 35%

F course 19% 9%

Redo assignment 19% 16%

Lower grade 18% 15%

Faculty safeguards: Lost opportunity?

Change exams regularly 70%

Monitor students closely on tests 70%

Discuss views on integrity 65%

Info in syllabus about cheating 65%

Internet to confirm plagiarism 23%*

*Range 7% to 63%. 5 of 74 schools at 45% or above.

Technology a growing issue for faculty

In some way, it is a losing battle, due to the Internet. I find that students and even other faculty here and elsewhere are very confused about whether the Internet is "public domain." Students who use the Internet, which would be just about all of them, get confused and don't realize they are plagiarizing because they cut and paste material from Web sites into their essay drafts and lose track of where the info came from.

I fail at least 1 student per class for academic dishonesty -- In many cases I don't have enough evidence to fail more students -- but am relatively positive that they are copying internet sources -- especially for term papers and take home assignments.

Some (many?) faculty have given upI feel the burden of proof always falls on the professor. To attempt to hold students accountable for cheating takes considerable time in an already overburdened schedule - in my experience, it isn't worth the time…

I got no support from my chair and the student took it to a grievance. I lost lots of time, suffered a chilling environment from my chair, and ultimately, the student got off free of anything. Not worth my time ever again.

Areas of concern – Turnitin.com

My school is looking into technology-assisted plagiarism utilities such as Turnitin for papers. As long as students have access to the same technology to verify they haven't committed any plagiarism before submitting an assignment, I guess this is OK. I have some reservations about my work going into a pool of work that will be used in the future to check other students' submissions against. I'd prefer to be able to opt out of that.

Areas of concern – Turnitin.com

Some students are unhappy with the use of TurnItIn… because those students don't wish to have their papers become part of TurnItIn's database that the company then makes a profit on. They are not opposed to the general idea of checking that their paper isn't plagiarized, but they don't agree with the methods used by TurnItIn (specifically that the student's own work then becomes a part of the database used by TurnItIn).

Student support for Turnitin.com

It's great that we have technology such as "Turnitin.com" and other websites that can help decipher copied work!

[My school] should subscribe to web-based cheating detection services (like TurnItIn.com).

Giving faculty the ability to use programs tailored to detect [plagiarism] (such as TurnItIn.com) would … discourage students from taking this shortcut.

Student comments – Internet plagiarism

I would sometimes paraphrase ideas from the internet without citing them because I didn't feel that it was necessary to cite an unpublished source.

The use of the internet has made it easier to compile large amounts of information, reducing students' expectation of how long an assignment should take...

I think that a lot of the students just out of high school don't consider getting something off the internet and claiming it as their own is wrong. How can you expect someone that downloads music illegally on a regular basis and not considering it stealing to think of using someone else’s work as being wrong.

Faculty concerns – Internet plagiarism

Plagiarism is become irrelevant in the Internet age. When no one is given credit for their contributions, how can you teach students to care about acknowledging sources?

Students seem to think that copy/paste from the Internet is not cheating. And I hear students use hand-held devices during tests.

Faculty concerns – Internet plagiarism

[Students] do not (and perhaps cannot) evaluate [Internet] sources for their reliability. This is a very common problem and it has led to a real corruption in students' integrity. Again, students are hardly aware of the danger. I have seen many cases in which students unthinkingly use biased (e.g. promotional) sources as substantiation for academic papers. This is a deplorable state of affairs, and it never occurred before the emergence of the Internet.

Other faculty comments

I eliminate potential problems by making individual projects different for each student and covering a few topics in the out of class projects so that no ready answer can be found on the internet.

I think our current internet generation needs to know that surfing is often not research, and that stealing ideas is similar to stealing property. Our Univ. 101 course must deal with this issue...

Other faculty comments

Use of current software technology allows for scrambling of Q/As and provides the ability to include illustrations for testing purposes. The software generates 4 different versions of a test.

Students are now using each other's files to submit projects - we don't have enough security in our computer systems to prevent this. Unfortunately technology has become a two-edged sword.

Answer keys

You can buy complete teachers solutions manuals for any book off of the internet for approximately $4. Most profs are too lazy to make up exams so they pull from the solutions manuals, which = easy exam grades. (S)

Lots of students copy homework from solutions manuals… Faculty must strive to write their own homework problems to circumvent this… Students think they are doing great since homework scores are high and then exam scores are very low… (F)

Cell phones

Closer monitoring of cellular phones and other digital communication devices. Perhaps 'jamming' or disabling them some how. (S)

I once saw two students typing something into cell phones during a quiz. I had not thought of "text messaging" as a possibility for teaching prior to this incident, but I do think about it now. Keeping up with their technology is always a challenge! (F)

Computer exams

Many instructors see the unsupervised computer-delivered exam as a real time saver, but it encourages cheating. Therefore, the direction of academia is toward an environment that makes cheating easier. (S)

I am especially concerned about internet quizzes and tests, etc. At our campus they are… not providing a way to prevent students from printing the quizzes and working on them together. Also, how do I know that the student doesn't log on, then have a friend or relative take the quiz in his/her place? (F)

Computer exams

With advent of internet… the current policies are hit-or-miss and are not implementable uniformly or 100%. (S)

Faculty need to be informed about the policies, the emerging technologies that allow students to cheat in new ways. (F)

Policies need to be updated to take into account their use and abuse of technology. (F)