Five things I learned about plagiarism while teaching this semester

Rasika Bhalerao, FY21 Communications Coordinator

As graduate students, many of us will go on to (or already do) teach courses. As we all know, our current way of teaching students, and higher education in general, is not perfect. While we work towards building new methods of teaching and overhauling higher education, we still need to address the serious issue of plagiarism. This semester, I have had the pleasure of teaching, and unfortunately also had the displeasure of handling plagiarism cases. Here are five things I learned in that process so far:

• I learned about this paper on the Regret Clause: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3328778.3366940
  • The paper is also available on the author’s website.
  • It lays out a policy where, if a student plagiarises, the student has 72 hours to invoke the “Regret Clause” (which means they tell the instructor that they plagiarized). If they invoke it within 72 hours, then their only punishment is a 0 on the assignment, with no further escalation.
  • It also mentions other common policies that don’t work.
  • It includes a helpful list of “Reasonable” and “Not Reasonable” actions (to help students know explicitly what is allowed and what is not).
  • Plagiarism’s risk is high. After the stress of the deadline is gone, students will realize that it was not worth the risk.
• If a plagiarism case happens, the best first step is to schedule a (brief) meeting with each student to find out what happened from their side of the story.
  • It helps to give the students the benefit of doubt. This helps filter out cases where two assignments just happened to look very similar by chance.
  • This also helps decide if one copied another, or they both copied off the internet, etc.
• If plagiarism occurred, and there is a policy laid out for next steps, you need to go through with them.
  • Some students may genuinely not know what is allowed in the beginning of the course, so explain it well in the first class. (The list in the Regret Clause paper helps.)
  • If (when) students claim they didn’t know the policy after this, you still need to follow through, especially if the policy is on the course website or syllabus (unless your best judgement is truly that the policy is unfair).
  • Usually the department’s punishment isn’t direct expulsion on the first offense, so you can remain calm.
  • You shouldn’t need to handle it all on your own. Ask your department heads for the policy on how to handle this. If anything, it is necessary to track these issues within the department to watch for repeated offenses.
• Give positive examples in class where you cite your sources so students know how it should be.
  • This way they know that it is okay to use online resources and talk to each other (as long as the work they submit is their own).
• Don’t let interactions with 1 or 2 plagiarising students affect your interactions with other students.
  • You can then put the incident behind you.
  • Once, when I was a student in someone else’s class, the professor projected a homework solution that somebody had posted to Github and then spent the class angry about it. This did not help the honest majority of students.

​It helps to be understanding and lenient on deadlines as students ask, especially during these difficult work-from-home times. I have found that the best policy is to be willing to accept late assignments as long as the student requests an extension before the deadline.