Online Paper Mills, The Internet and Plagiarism...

Hamlin, L. S. and W. T. Ryan (2003). “Probing for Plagiarism in the Virtual Classroom,” Campus Technology.

Unit Seven: The Internet and Computer Networks

Summary
With the trend toward increased online teaching, educators today are skeptical about the preservation of academic integrity in the virtual classroom. The Internet poses great opportunity for educational resources, but also provides students with additional opportunities to cheat. This is the focus of Hamlin and Ryan’s article, who examine how various types of assessment may or may not influence academic “virtual” integrity for courses today. What they found is that current research shows that while cheating remains a serious academic problem, current studies do not show whether the Internet has really changed the percentage of students who cheat. Many skeptics of the educational benefits of the Internet argue that online education worsens a student’s sense of “isolation and anonymity.” With the increasing number of online term-paper mills, such as Cheater.com and Gradesaver.com, students have an even greater temptation to plagiarize. Along with the advent of such “academic” warehouses, came plagiarism-detecting websites. Databases such as Plagiarism.org cross-references an uploaded student’s paper with a local database containing hundreds of thousands of papers. Ultimately, educators today are faced with preserving academic integrity, a task that must incorporate and acknowledge the growing and changing field of technology. Hamlin and Ryan’s advice to teachers is to encourage on-going student participation through the use of weekly responses to online discussion boards and periodic online (timed) quizzes, noting that students who are held accountable for learning on a progressive basis are deterred from procrastination and less likely to panic and cheat.

Reaction
As an English teacher, I know plagiarism will, unfortunately, be a reality I will encounter at some point in my teaching career. Even in my limited teaching experience, I often found that students relied heavily on “other sources” rather than their own voice. While I firmly believe that most students simply had never learned how to incorporate the ideas of others in with their own, rather than allow other texts to do their arguing for them, I know that occasionally, students intentionally submitted plagiarized (in part or in whole) term papers. I think there is a lot teachers can do to discourage plagiarism. First of all, incorporating modern novels and texts into the classroom literature base will decrease the likelihood of a student finding a “ready made” paper online. Secondly, teachers can design essay questions that encourage (and require) students to include their own self-reflection and life experiences as evidence for their arguments. Such student-centered assignments encourage students to be “invested” in their work and, I would imagine, decrease the reliance on other sources and experts. Thirdly, I agree with Hamlin and Ryan that frequent and ongoing accountability and engagement are key to limiting plagiaristic temptations. Frequent checks for learning and formative assessments require students to participate periodically in a course, rather than saving all the work for the end of a term. When a deadline looms and it’s 2 am, I imagine the Internet seems enticing to a young, exhausted student. Limiting the opportunities for this procrastination will lessen the likelihood of any reliance on outside materials. Finally, it may simply be boiled down to the idea that teacher don’t prepare students for using a variety of sources. Perhaps explicit lessons are needed that focus on how to take notes, paraphrase, rephrase and quote from sources. Such conversations may clear up any misconceptions students have about what counts as plagiarism and what does not.