Student plagiarism in essays is ineradicable, so we must abandon essays
Professor at the New York University Business School, Panos Ipeirotis, tells a fascinating story of how he unsuccessfully fought plagiarism among students of the computer technology course. He used the special anti- plagiarism program Turnitin . As a result, it turned out that the students:
Ipeyrotis stubbornly fought plagiarism, but eventually admitted defeat. Conversations with violators and hysteria of female students took more time from him than the lectures on the main subject. He turned against all students and even some teachers. Those with astonishment looked at his attempts to struggle with “windmills” and advised at least a little to change the topics of term papers each year.
As a result, the professor forever swallowed to fight plagiarism. He concluded that this is an absolutely useless exercise and you don’t even need to try to identify deceivers and use the appropriate software. It turns out more expensive. As students adapt, such a struggle turns into an intellectual battle of a detective against a gang of criminals. And the teacher is not a detective, he must teach and impart knowledge.
As a result, it became clear that it was necessary not to look for plagiarism, but to distribute tasks that are not amenable to plagiarism. Here is what the professor at the New York University Business School advises:
- very often they are involved in plagiarism: on the stream, every fifth admitted it, but in fact traces of plagiarism were in more works; this excludes the possibility of disciplinary measures being applied to students, because if some “law” is violated by many, then the problem lies in the “law” and not in the violators;
- over time, they learn how to deceive any computer system, share experiences with each other;
- categorically deny their guilt;
- very quirky in searching for "explanations";
- extremely negative attitude towards the teacher, who is looking for the facts of plagiarism and struggling with them (in the USA, the practice of teacher assessments by students is common, so a low score goes sideways - a professor can be reprimanded).
Ipeyrotis stubbornly fought plagiarism, but eventually admitted defeat. Conversations with violators and hysteria of female students took more time from him than the lectures on the main subject. He turned against all students and even some teachers. Those with astonishment looked at his attempts to struggle with “windmills” and advised at least a little to change the topics of term papers each year.
As a result, the professor forever swallowed to fight plagiarism. He concluded that this is an absolutely useless exercise and you don’t even need to try to identify deceivers and use the appropriate software. It turns out more expensive. As students adapt, such a struggle turns into an intellectual battle of a detective against a gang of criminals. And the teacher is not a detective, he must teach and impart knowledge.
As a result, it became clear that it was necessary not to look for plagiarism, but to distribute tasks that are not amenable to plagiarism. Here is what the professor at the New York University Business School advises:
- Public projects : projects based on open databases (for example, municipal statistics on the economy, crime, education, etc.), which are updated every year. At the same time, the projects themselves are also laid out online, which makes plagiarism meaningless: there is no point in copying a project from the last semester. For example, here is a list of works for 2009 and 2010 . In Russia, you can make good abstracts based on information from the public procurement site (which Navalny proved).
- Joint discussion : students present their project to the whole class and should receive good feedback. Social pressure is so high that presentations are always of the highest quality.
- Contests : to show students how the web works, Ipeyrotis gave the task to create a website and attract at least a hundred unique visitors. The student with the most visitors at the end of the semester receives a gift (usually an iPod). It works: for example, one student made a site that attracted 150,000 visitors in 8 weeks.
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Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/124415/
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