Avoidance Tips
1. Make sure students are not trying to plagiarize!
Some high schools teach students that plagiarizing is a good way to learn hard material or to improve writing skills. It is imperative that we reach these students early at Swarthmore with effective, illustratively, in-class activities combined with one-on-one discussions about plagiarism.
2. Inform students how to properly cite material, ideas
Students will be delighted if you give them a handout that you have designed, detailing citation standards that you want followed. See,
http://www.swarthmore.edu/Humanities/wa/FAQ/FAQ.htm#21 http://leeds.bates.edu/cbb/node.php?id=56 http://www.ctlw.duke.edu/wstudio/resources/handouts/.
3. Make your assignments interesting, with clear educational goals
Faculty don't try to come up with mind-numbing assignments that have vague pedagogical value, but students don't always appreciate writing tasks in the spirit we envision. If we can make our assignments exciting and interesting, students will take greater pride completing them by themselves. Also, emphasize that writing is important to how we learn.
4. Require rough drafts, notes
Faculty that skip the "rough draft" step tend to have higher rates of plagiarism. For students who have a difficult time with a topic, the task of paraphrasing is seems impossible, and thus their rough drafts might include large quoted passages (with intact quotation marks). These passages have a tendency of reappearing in later drafts in a slightly altered form but without quotation marks; often the student will include the citation at the end of the sentence. The rough draft phase is a good time to have a friendly discussion with the student about both "idea" and "phrase" plagiarism. Requiring students to attach all their notes (with dates) further reduces the option of a final draft magically "appearing" on the due date.
5. Require copies of all cited material
If you ask students to attach their referenced material to their rough drafts and final product, students will be much less tempted to include plagiarized segments. In addition, it is sometimes very nice for faculty to have easy access to students' sources as assignments are read, so requiring these documents need not be an overt threat.
6. Engineer peer-editing into class time
To generate a good discussion about citation, give students a highlighter and the draft of another student's paper, and then ask them to mark words, phrases, and sentences that "sound" familiar to the assigned readings. Then return the marked-up drafts to the original students. This is a good ice-breaker to a discussion on proper paraphrasing.
7. Change your assignments
If you reuse assignments, then you can be assured that there are past versions in one of the many hard-copy caches that individual students, dorms, and fraternities maintain. For the electronic files that are even easier to store and share, I would be shocked if students did not already use their "peer-to-peer" software to enable sharing of laboratory write-ups and other assignments.
8. Make your assignments obscure
If students cannot find good sources to plagiarize, they might resort to doing it themselves.