Make sure your students understand what constitutes plagiarism in your assignment, subject or course.*
Design your course and assignments to promote learning and minimize students' opportunities to plagiarize.*
Change your assignments for each time the course is taught.*
Include current information and personal reflection where possible as this is not so easily downloaded from the Internet and invites student engagement.
Include ‘process’ in the assessment as well as analysis, evaluation and synthesis.*
Check the steps in the assessment process i.e. check drafts or interim work (which may or may not be not assessed).
Avoid assignments limited to information gathering.*
Include an aspect of recasting/interpreting information to prevent students simply gathering and reporting facts.
Individualize tasks and create tasks which may have multiple solutions.
In some disciplines it may be useful to give students the same task but with differing data sets.
Scaffold assignments.
Resources
Subject librarians will be happy to help you design assignments that deter plagiarism
(Items marked with * are taken or modified from Top 10 Tips on Deterring Plagiarism - University of Kent)
Plagiarism class ice-breaker/opening
Scenarios addressing plagiarism
Present students with a number of scenarios that address the issue of plagiarism or other examples of unethical use of information or intellectual property violations. Ask the students to answer a set of questions, for example:
Examples of scenarios can be found in the following sources:
Exercise: Authorship, rights of authors, and responsible use of others' work
The following questions can be discussed in small groups with a summary to follow):
(Modified from Burkhardt, J.M., MacDonald, Mary C. (2010). Teaching information literacy: 50 standard-based exercises for college students. Chicago: ALA).
Your students can learn about plagiarism and ways to avoid it by taking a module with a final quiz.
Please note that the module was designed to be used as an introduction to plagiarism concepts. Once you add it to your course you can customize the information and examples to fit your course content and level. If you wish to incorporate discipline-specific examples, please reach out to your subject liaison librarian.
If you wish to assign the plagiarism module to students who are enrolled in an existing Canvas course or organization which you administer, please follow the steps below.
Note: The module may be updated as needed. If you want to use the current version, you should re-import the module from the Commons. Use caution, as existing student submissions will be lost.
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