Plagiarism & Student Cheating

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Additional Plagiarism Information

General Guides and Resources

  • Academic Misconduct: Guide for Instructors, Dean of Students Office, UW-Madison, includes UWS 14, the chapter in the UW System Administrative Code regulating academic misconduct.
  • "Combating Plagiarism" CQ Researcher v. 13, no. 32 (September 19, 2003). This is a complimentary issue of a subscription-based publication. It summarizes all recent aspects of plagiarism, including celebrated cases of writers and journalists, as well as by students.
  • Plagiarism: A Good Practice Guide, by Jude Carroll and Jon Appleton (May 2001) for the Joint Information System Committee, which "promotes the innovative application and use of information systems and information technology in further and higher education across the UK."
  • Both Inside Higher Education (freely available on the Internet) and The Chronicle of Higher Education cover plagiarism and cheating issues on campuses. (Some Chronicle articles are freely available; it is also in Academic Search, Proquest Research Library [both with one-month delays] and Lexis-Nexis [In Lexis-Nexis, select the "Sources" tab, then type Chronicle of Higher Education in the "Find a Source" box], on campuses subscribing to these databases.)
  • "Academic Dishonesty, Plagiarism Included, in the Digital Age: A Literature Review," by Zorana Ercegovac and John V. Richardson, Jr., College and Research Libraries v. 65 no 4 (July 2004): 301-318 (in Library Literature and Information Science Fulltext, where available). The authors looked for material on effective pedagogical strategies for academic integrity programs, because, as they said: " [i]t is simply not enough to define plagiarism, distribute neatly prepared citation templates for different formats, and say that plagiarism is wrong, punishable, easily detectable, and against honor codes, especially when applied generically across the board."  Instead, the authors favor including units on academic integrity appropriate to different educational levels and across disciplines. Based on Lawrence Kohlberg's phases of moral reasoning, they offer a research agenda for mapping the phases to pedagogical tools and strategies in the context of information literacy.
  • Plagiary is a refereed online journal that features research articles and reports addressing general and specific issues related to plagiarism, fabrication, and falsification. The first articles were mounted in January, 2006. "Fighting Plagiarism With Humor," by Jerry Bornstein Plagiary 2007 2(9): 1-7 (4 December 2007), describes a website created to parody term paper mills and, through humor, to help students understand plagiarism, and the consequences of academic dishonesty.
  • Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct, from the American Historical Association (January, 2005), includes a section on plagiarism.
  • For links to numerous other articles on all aspects of plagiarism, as well as copyright issues, see "Plagiarism," by Sharon Stoerger. This is a particularly good resource for tracing articles about scholars accused of plagiarism.
  • To read articles about plagiarism and cheating published in campus student newspapers, using Lexis-Nexis, where that database is available, do the following: Select the "Sources" tab, then type University Wire in the "Find a Source" box.

Miscellaneous Issues

  • "Forget About Policing Plagiarism. Just Teach," by Rebecca Moore Howard. Chronicle of Higher Education, November 16, 2001. Takes issue with the "digitized gotcha" approach that replaces the student-teacher relationship with a criminal-police relationship. Stresses role of teachers in crafting "authentic assignments" and other pedagogical reforms.
  • "Four Reasons to be Happy about Internet Plagiarism," by Russell Hunt. Teaching Perspectives (St. Thomas University), December 2002: 1-5. Provocative excerpt from a longer piece in progress. Hunt argues that the rise in plagiarism may lead to changes in practices he would like to see challenged: "1. The institutional rhetorical writing environment (the "research paper," the "literary essay," the "term paper")...; 2. The institutional structures around grades and certification ... 3. The model of knowledge held by almost all students, and by many faculty -- the tacit assumption that knowledge is stored information and that skills are isolated, asocial faculties...; 4. ... [A] model of how texts work in the process of sharing ideas and information which is profoundly different from how they actually work outside of classroom-based writing, and profoundly destructive to their understanding of the assumptions and methods of scholarship."
  • "Plagiarism: a Misplaced Emphasis," by Brian Martin, in Journal of Information Ethics V.3, no. 2 (Fall 1994), pp. 36-47. Argues that institutionalized practices like ghostwriting and honorary authorship are bigger issues.

Other Practices

Mounting Student Evaluations of Courses and Instructors

  • Teacherreviews.com
    Provides brief evaluation and overall grade student gives the course and professor. Requests $1 donation to view new reviews.
  • Pickaprof
    Requires (free) registration for use. Posts students comments alongside official student evaluations; graphs grades given in each course. Written up in The Baltimore Sun in "Making the grade with Pick-A-Prof; Web site: An online service lets students determine whether a professor is a soft touch for good marks," by Alex MacGillis, March 8, 2003, included in Lexis-Nexis on campuses subscribing to that database.

Editing Services

  • GradeSaver edits college applications, papers, theses, etc. Rate: $12.00-$30.00/page. Editors are "Harvard-educated."

Examination Analysis

  • Integrity "analyzes multiple-choice test data in order to evaluate the statistical integrity of tests and the academic integrity of students taking tests."

Examination Security

Examination security software locks down the hard drive and Internet access from computer-equipped classrooms and student laptops during test administration.

Mounting Class Notes from Lectures

  • Mathieu Deflem maintained information about the fight against this practice, from Sept. 1999 to May 2001. (He was then at Purdue and had the site up on a Purdue server. He's now at the University of South Carolina. He has the site up on a server there but says that the companies have all gone out of business)