Nothing is more disheartening for an instructor than reading a student essay that turns out to be plagiarized. Students who plagiarize seem to be thumbing their noses at the virtues of honest academic inquiry. To avoid this problem, many professors have turned to essay submission sites such as Turnitin.com and Plagiarism.com to detect stolen work in their student's essays. These services can alert an instructor to possible plagiarism, but they don't address the underlying reasons students may be tempted to plagiarize in the first place.

Furthermore, by the time you catch plagiarizing students, it's often too late to salvage student learning...and it can make for an unpleasant scene for you. While plagiarism is still a problem in university classrooms, there are strategies instructors can use to avoid this issue before it comes up.

A basic question to consider is why do students plagiarize? Reasons can include the following:

Lack of Technical Awareness: Students may simply be unfamiliar with the appropriate documentation requirements for their field. Brief in-class refresher sessions can get students on the right track; stressing that the correct citation standards for the particular field are vital for establishing the credibility and professionalism of their work can also help. Try to encourage writers to see documentation of their work as an integral part of the research process, rather than some tedious "add on" at the end.

The UWC has several handouts that deal with paraphrasing, quoting, and crediting outside sources; our in-house library also has documentation manuals for all major styles.

Lack of Awareness of Writing Expectations: Students may plagiarize because they are confused by what constitutes originality in ideas or information. It is important to consider that plagiarism is defined by the context of the writing: what may be considered plagiarism in one circumstance may not be a problem in another. For instance, plagiarism in usually defined as presenting another's ideas as one's own, but many kinds of groupwork and team writing involve collaborative effort that builds upon the contributions of individuals. University researchers, for instance, often rely on grad assistants who may not be acknowledged in the final published work. In addition, students from other cultures may be accustomed to different standards in using the work of others.

The idea of context defining plagiarism boils down to expectations of purpose and audience in an assignment. For instance, consider the following example (from Klooster and Bloem's The Writer's Community, pg. 152):

A student is assigned to write a research paper about the legality of local rave clubs. He's about to go to the library to look for background information when his roommate says, "I wrote an essay on that same topic last year, and I have all my research notes. You can just use those instead of wasting time getting all those articles yourself." The student reads the notes and writes his paper based upon this information.

Although the writer above has written the essay himself, part of the expectation in a standard research paper assignment is that the writer will engage in legitimate research about the topic, and so construct meaning in an authentic way. The audience expects that the writer has maintained integrity in locating, reading, and considering the research material himself, all in an effort to present insight in an honest and knowledgeable way. This effort establishes credibility through a particular construct of expectations involved with academic inquiry. Thus, the plagiarism in the example above is a violation of the trust between the writer and the reader, a breakdown of ethical connection.

In a broader sense, then, plagiarism refers to any action that abuses the faith an audience invests in a writer's efforts.

Poor Planning: As much as we'd like to hope that students will make researching, drafting, and revising a priority, the reality is that some will not. Confronted with a looming deadline and hopelessly behind in their work, students may plagiarize out of sheer stress and despair. By making assignment stages clear and assigning due dates for particular sections, instructors can head off the tendency to plagiarize through desperation (see Structuring the Assignment below).

The Student Has Nothing To Say: Intimidated by expert sources and unsure of how to enter into an academic discussion, some students have a tendency to develop a "what-can-I-possibly-contribute" attitude. Students may drift towards appropriating the terminology, phrasings, and opinions of others as a measure of safety, feeling they have no authority or voice of their own. To prevent this, instructors can help develop a critical confidence and voice in students by modeling effective ways to interact with texts--both through sentence-level methods of paraphrasing and integrating quotations, as well as demonstrating to students holistic ways of analyzing arguments in a discourse community, placing themselves in this field of discussion, and incorporating these views into specific contributions of their own.

Student Choice: Ideally, we want to prevent plagiarism before it happens by removing the conditions that create it. Even so, a few students may plagiarize simply because they don't care, or because they believe they can get away with it.

Structuring the Assignment

One of the primary methods to prevent plagiarism lies in the design of the writing assignment. With particular design methods, you can reduce the likelihood of plagiarism before the fact. Incorporating the ideas below can steer students towards authentic writing.

• Make the Topic Specific: broad writing prompts such as "explain the impact of labor unions on early 20th-century American economic policy" can leave students floundering and perhaps tempted to appropriate information from expert sources.

  Instead, make the topic specific, hinging on some concrete idea, point, quotation, or idea from the class: "Using specific examples from class discussions and the text, explain how Richard B. Mellon's statement 'You can't mine coal without machine guns' characterizes labor-business relations in pre-WWI America."

• Tailor the Topic to the Class: Similar to the example above, choose a focus that specifically relies on a class concept, principle, or detail: "Using the ideas presented in Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities as a starting point, construct an argument as to what 'fairness' should mean in terms of public school funding."

• Create a Schedule for Completing Sections of the Essay: faced with a long research project not due for several months, students may procrastinate...and thus be tempted to plagiarize out of desperation when the assignment comes due.

Avoid this syndrome by making a specific schedule for when parts of the project should be complete. For instance, due dates for a tentative bibliography, a thesis statement, an introduction, a lit review, and a first draft encourage students to work consistently through the stages of a project. Reviewing these areas can also help the instructor identify small issues in student writing before they evolve into major problems.

This approach also emphasizes writing as a process. Incorporating a schedule of revision encourages students to be reflective about their writing, judging whether they are meeting expectations of content, purpose, and audience.

• Use Current Events in Connection with Writing Assignments: An assignment focus such as "Compare and contrast the tone, trends, and partisan positions of national political dialogue post-Sept. 11 with that following Pearl Harbor" can connect textbook knowledge with contemporary events. Students thus engage course content as an unfolding of meaning rather than a fossilized, static set of facts.

• Change Writing Prompts Regularly: this removes the temptation for students to use previous essays written for your class as the basis for their own.

• Discuss Plagiarism in Practical Terms: the standard lecture about plagiarism can be summed up as such: "Don't do it, or you'll be punished severely." But this approach does little to provide students with the tools to understand what plagiarism is, how to avoid it, and why they should.

Students sometimes plagiarize unwittingly, confused by the standards of paraphrase and quotation. The UWC has several handouts that deal with how to paraphrase and quote properly, acknowledging and crediting outside sources.

Students may also be unaware of the appropriate role of outside sources in their own writing, either relying too heavily upon this support or lifting information that should be credited. Stressing that adhering to citation standards increases the credibility and professionalism of their work can help.

• Consider a UWC Consultation as Part of the Assignment: a UWC consultation can provide writers with specific one-on-one feedback about focus, organization, clarity, transition of ideas, and repeating grammar issues. Trained consultants can also help students with paraphrasing, quoting, and integrating sources. Writers can schedule a consultation at any stage of the drafting process, from idea generation to final polishing. If you require a visit to the UWC as part of an assignment, it's a good idea to schedule a due date for this part of the assignment as well.

Remaining aware of student writing progress through the course of an assignment can also discourage plagiarism. Several methods are available:

• Due Dates for Individual Sections: this keeps students on track and working on the project consistently. These sections can be collected and quickly reviewed by the instructor, or the students can use peer review techniques to assess their own progress.

• Individual Conferences: setting aside formal conference time or simply making oneself available to students can be an effective way to check progress and motivate writers. Requiring students to explain their focus and research during these meetings can also help diagnose potential problems.

• Require Progress Reports: writers can be required to assess their own progress (formally or informally) as part of the assignment

• Annotated Bibliography of Sources: Requiring students to complete annotations for possible sources can discourage the temptation to plagiarize while encouraging analysis, summary, and evaluation of a text's usefulness

• Presentations: making students responsible for presenting their research and ideas to the class creates a public sense of accountability...this can help students to view their work as beholden to a social expectation, where plagiarism is unacceptable