Abstract

The Internet has changed the ways that students think, learn, and write. Students have large amounts of information, largely anonymous and without clear copyright information, literally at their fingertips. Without sufficient guidance, the inappropriate use of this information seems inevitable. Plagiarism among college students is rising, due to both the ease of information transfer and the lack of understanding among students about the expected norms of scholarship. When such students arrive in college ill-prepared to do college-level writing, professors face a choice--be either reactive or proactive. Eleanour Snow found that punishment did not help, and that her conversations with students caught plagiarizing often indicated that the students had no idea that their behavior was in any way inappropriate. In response she developed an online tutorial for students to teach them about plagiarism and how to avoid it. Providing examples of both plagiarized and properly paraphrased writing drawn from her students' essays, Snow's tutorial also includes quizzes to test student understanding as well as information on the crime and punishment of plagiarism both in school and in the world beyond. Snow describes how she used this tutorial in her own teaching, offers readers further information about similar tutorials currently available online, and advocates their use as a preventative measure to address the growing problem of plagiarism in student writing.

Citation

Snow, E. (2006). Teaching Students about Plagiarism: An Internet Solution to an Internet Problem. Innovate: Journal of Online Education, 2(5),. Retrieved September 1, 2024 from https://www.learntechlib.org/p/104292/.

Keywords

• Cheating
• College Students
• Computer Uses in Education
• educational technology
• ethics
• Guides
• Information Transfer
• internet
• Plagiarism
• Punishment
• teaching methods
• Tests
• Writing (Composition)
• Writing Assignments