I’m making a late post for my Online Strategies course about
Plagiarism and Cheating in online environments. In order to create this post, I
watched a video by Dr. Rena Palloff and Dr. Keith Pratt about Cheating and
Plagiarism. In it, Palloff stated that the rate of cheating in online and
traditional environments were about the same, and that from her experience,
students did not set out to be cheaters, and intentional cheating and
plagiarism is rare. Pratt then added that he created his assessments in such a
way that he didn’t care whether or not students cheated, because the
assessments and assignments were meant to reflect real-world environments. So,
a student could talk to a neighbor, or look something up in a book, but there
was more work to be done than that to complete the assessment. Palloff agreed,
and said that when the assessment requires one to apply available information
to problem-solving, it makes it more difficult to “cheat” in the traditional
sense. Here, the assessment requires more than memorization, but synthesized
application (Laureate Education, Inc., n.d.).
I think that is one of the most important points about
cheating and plagiarism: Cheating isn’t cheating because a student has found an
easy way to get the answers to a test. “Cheating” is cheating if and when it
undermines the learning process and makes what should be an equal playing field
unequal. If the assessment is measuring critical thinking and problem solving
rather than memorization, then looking something up in a book isn’t “cheating.”
It’s being resourceful, which is what we do in “the real world.” Therefore, the
construction of the assessment towards critical thinking and problem solving
can encourage intellectual and academic honesty. They can’t “Google” the right
answer because there isn’t one right answer. The student has to find one in
their own words…
Educating students early in the online environment and managing
expectations at the onset is also important to prevent unintentional plagiarism.
However, the research might not agree with Palloff that plagiarism and cheating
is rare, or that expectation management alone with deter the vast majority of
plagiarism and cheating. Cheating and plagiarism here, refers to lifting
partial or whole passages of another person’s work and leading one to believe
it is your own when it is not. A study at Penn State University using Turnitin
detected plagiarism in about 13 percent of cases, whereas manual detection only
caught plagiarism in the same set of assignments 3 percent of the time. Further,
the research showed that expectation management and education regarding
plagiarism may have made some impact, but the difference was not statistically
significant. So, tools like Turnitin seem necessary if you want to prevent
people from borrowing the words and thoughts of others without proper
attribution (Jocoy, & DiBiase, 2006). Again, the key here is not using
another’s work—that’s encouraged. It’s simply using another’s work without
proper attribution, or using so much of the work that it undermines the
learning process. Where it becomes clear that the student was trying to merely
complete the assignment rather than think critically about a problem and use
another’s work to support their own thought process. This may be painfully
obvious, but it seems worth it to point out what makes “cheating” cheating, or
wrong, or counterproductive to learning…
The best method to prevent dishonesty and cheating or “stealing”
of another’s work would likely be the way that we prevent all other forms of
stealing and dishonesty: Deterrence. You don’t have to make cheating
impossible. You just have to make it harder than doing the honest thing. Once
you reach that point, cheating loses its appeal. By making the assessment more
about critical thinking than facts, it makes cheating harder. Plagiarism
detection software makes it harder for students to find another person’s
thoughts on the Internet and pass it off on their own without getting caught.
Combine those two tools and methods and one of the only courses of action a
student has left is to ask or pay someone else to complete the assessment for
them. If the assignment is written, even in this case, a keen facilitator can
recognize the change in tone from the students typical writing to another
assignment they handed in. They would have to plagiarize nearly everything, or
nothing. The idea of cheating starts to look ridiculous, and the probably of
getting caught looks high. At this point, you’ve effectively deterred most
forms of cheating. And I think that’s the goal. Deter 97% of cheating, and
catch the other 3% that will be determined to cheat even when it doesn’t make
sense to do so. That’s my best advice…
References:
Jocoy, C., & DiBiase, D. (2006). Plagiarism by adult
learners online: A case study in detection and remediation. International
Review of Research in Open & Distance Learning, 7(1), 1-15.
Laureate Education (Producer). (2010). Plagiarism and cheating [Video
file]. Retrieved from https://class.waldenu.edu
No comments:
Post a Comment