Coping with Academic Dishonesty

Contributed By: Rie Uzawa

If you are in the position as instructor, almost all of you will face plagiarism issues at least once. Plagiarism is nothing new. The oldest known record on plagiarism goes back to ancient Rome. It is widely spread in any academic institutions as we occasionally hear about plagiarism scandal involving prestigious universities. In recent years, the development of high technology such as smart phone and internet further accelerates sophisticated plagiarisms that are hard to detect. As TA, I faced academic dishonesty issues of students as well. Whenever I found out students’ misconduct, it was never a pleasant incident to deal with. Thus, I decided to look into academic dishonesty issues for the meeting. We discussed about the following topics; a) the reasons why students cheat, b) how academic institutes handle plagiarism issues, and c) how we can prevent.

First, we discussed about the reasons why students cheat or plagiarize. Our collective answers are; a) academic pressure and b) unawareness of seriousness on the issues. According to the statistics in CQ Researcher (January, 2013), the major reasons or motivations for plagiarism are the same reasons as we discussed. It also reported ease of access to various technologies for plagiarism or cheating.

Next, we discussed about prevention for plagiarism and cheating. Each of us shared the methods we knew or had applied to prevent or detect plagiarisms or cheating. It included: a) including plagiarism policy in syllabus, b) teaching how to cite or quote, and c) using plagiarism search detecting software. I was curious to see how UC Davis handles this issue. I looked up Office of Student Support and Judicial Affairs website. The strategies they recommend overlapped with what we discussed at our meeting. I thought the website was very helpful and insightful for the guidance for instructors.

I brought up one journal by Dalan et al (Responding to Plagiarisms Using Reflective Means (2015), International Journal for Educational Integrity). The author of this journal applied Reflection Model” to prevent recurrence of plagiarisms or cheating. They used reflection essay to have the students who plagiarized exams. They considered plagiarism incidents as the opportunity to educate the students. They showed effectiveness of the model although they did not show any quantitative data for effectiveness. I personally thought their perception of plagiarisms as educational opportunity was interesting.

“Clearly, for many college-level writing teachers, plagiarism is deeply, intensely personal” as Biwas wrote (English Faculty Publications, 2015). I think most of us would agree as an instructor. As an educator, we should consider plagiarism prevention as a part of our instructions. It will help students as well as our mental sanity as an educator.