Plagiarism & Writing: Home

This guide provides support to faculty in identifying and addressing plagiarism and writing concerns.  If you are a student in need of writing support, see the Writing Center Libguide (linked below).  It has Writing Center, Online Writing Center, Virtual Writing Center, APA, and MLA information.

Plagiarism is using someone's words, work, ideas, pictures, art, paper, paragraph without giving them credit. 

This great article from Plagiarism Today may help you and  your students. This will open in a new window when you click the link to 5 Reasons People Plagiarize (And How to Stop Them).

Instructors are strongly encouraged to utilize the Library and Writing Center for help with Plagiarism.

Some Quick Tips -

1. Create a pre-test for your program (we can do it for you) that tests student's knowledge of Plagiarism and Writing.
   1. This will help generate awareness for your students that the program takes it seriously.
   2. This will generate awareness of where student weaknesses in writing may be so that help can be tailored to their specific needs.
2. Create stacked due dates for papers (we can help you with this). This means:
   1. Students build a paper through the course of the semester.
      1. Submit a topic, thesis and source check in the first 3 weeks (may also be known as a research proposal).
      2. Submit an article evaluation in weeks 4 or 5 in which they learn to evaluate source quality and the information presented.
      3. Submit a plan or outline of the research paper (this makes the focus on set up and organization) in week 7.
      4. Submit 1st third of paper (this can be called a rough draft if you wish).This is where students have the opportunity to practice their citing, see their thoughts come to fruition and get feedback before the final submission. This is where you have to opportunity to really look at how the students are putting their research to work within their own papers. This can happen any time after week 4, but we would encourage it to happen in Week 8 or 9.
      5. Optionally, students can submit the other thirds of their paper if you wish within 1 week after you have returned with your comments or concerns or you can simply have them submit their final in week 13. This gives you time to make comments and the students time to make changes based on your comments.
   2. Throughout all of these processes, if you or the student have concerns, you can be sending them to the Writing Center, the OWL or the Virtual Writing Center. If they need help finding quality sources (you will know this before the final paper is submitted or the week before the paper is due), you will be able to direct them to the Library for research help. This gives multiple opportunities for quick 1 minute reminders throughout the semester and pushes in the right direction for help.
   3. The purpose is to create writers of high quality papers. These type of papers are not written in a weekend or over the course of 1 week. They should be worked on throughout the semester. If you do not force the student to take the steps, they will often leave it on the back burner until it absolutely has to get done, in which case the quality research and writing does not have time to take place.
3. Give yourself time to grade the papers. If you have been looking at the citing and sources and are aware of the topic, it should help this process run a little more quickly and smoothly as you should only have to look at any new sources that they have brought into the paper (of course, you could have them resubmit their bibliography every time that they want to add a new source).

• Writing is learning - we learn and think as we write. All of us do this, which means that as your students are writing their papers, they are thinking and learning out loud. Having multiple mini-dates for a single paper allows them the time and feedback that they need. It does not have to be feedback from you, the instructor; feedback can come from fellow students as well.
• Writing is a process - as with anything a process takes time and revisiting. You don't learn to play the piano in a week, nor do you only play it the week or weekend before the concert. It is a process that you practice over and over. The word process means a series of actions taken to achieve an end.
• Writing does not happen overnight - as much as we would like to believe that we can just sit down and whip out a paper overnight, it does not happen. Nor will it happen for our students. Mini-due dates help reinforce this for us and our students.

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