On Teacher-Student Relationship (AKA ways to avoid plagiarism)

It always amazes me to read professors writing about their frustrating experience in dealing with plagiarism (today, another one made it to HackerNews,). The good outcome from that post is that professor in the end finds at least some alternatives (than writing-essays and completing-excel type) homeworks for his students, congrats&well done. Also, It's good to know that text analysis is now actually being applied, and seems to work pretty well (in Turnitin). However, as one that is standing in the bridge between a student and a professor (I was TA once, probably will be again next year), and one that often reminisce on my student days, I just want to entertain my readers with thoughts from my perspective--which I think are in-your-face obvious, but I have yet to see them been posted.

1.

"Do the students know what is plagiarism?" Of course they do. Before entering college, AP classes and even just the normal high school homework can be in similar formats as the ones in universities. Let's face it. No one needs to dig into the different levels of plagiarism, we all know what it is. Do they know the risk? For the ones that haven't been called on it, probably not at a personal level. But on paper, they all know that bad things will happen if the professor finds out the copy&pasting behavior.

When writing an essay, technical or not, it should be just as if you are writing a letter to your family, or a diary. It should comes from you, your own thoughts, your organization of what you see, hear, know and understand. No one would copy & paste snippets of text from various sources that doesn't even have a smooth logic flow and send it to their distant beloved as a "my life is great, how about you" message.

2.
"then why do student still plagiarize?"
Now, this is the big question, and I don't think the answer could be more obvious.

Because the students simply do not give a rat's ass about the homework.

The students could not care less about the homework. They do not give a single f**k about what they wrote, whether it make sense or not. If the professor say, "you don't have to do the homework, I would give you an A, but you won't learn anything", the student would thought it's the best day of their life. The word "knowledge" only came to mind before and after college, not in class. They don't event care if it would get an A or C-. OK, I was wrong, some elite student would care about the last one.

Why would they? Their career choice (athletes, technicians, brokers, consultants, .etc) rarely incur an essay-writing task. Except for the students that wanted to go for M.S. and Ph.D, which is the minority, writing essays is the least beneficial(interesting) way for the majority to learn. It is possible that after graduations, years later, they might say, oh, I wish I paid more attention in that class. But they will never say, oh, I wish I had written that essay better (for those that stays in academia, well, sadly, there might be cases like this).

3.

Is the above passages true for every homework? Big No. It's only true for the ones that either bore or befuddled the students. Thinking from another perspective, the plagiarism rate actually is a way to tell how suitable the homework is for students. If the majority of the class plagiarize, one possibility is that the homework has an uninteresting topic, or format. However, one may not rule out the possibility that you have a lousy class with bad morals--well, that really is the last thing anybody want to see.
From my experience (while I was a student), I've see a number of interesting homework that actually makes student want to do it by themselves. From an educational perspective, these homework actually works much better than writing essays. So in a way, plagiarism is bad for the student; but the professor, designer of the homework, is largely responsible for the educational outcome.

4.
"anyways to avoid plagiarism?" The link at the beginning of this post offers a few alternative that is suitable for computer science students, public projects, peer reviewing, and competitions. For years, there has been modifications on exams or homework, serving the purpose to help the student learn better. Can't remember everything? bring a cheatsheet, it's allowed. 2 hour is too short? bring it home and take your time. There should be better outlets than pushing student towards the direction of plagiarism. I can think of the following guidelines for designing homework:

• Use alternative format than essay type homework.

Writing is an essential communication skill. However, as I mentioned before, not many people would use it for their career nor find it interesting. If the topic is applied or technical related, make it a task, a project, a competition. Teaching cyber-security on WEP vs WPA protocols, why not ask the student to hack both and compare instead of writing an essay? Make the assignment, bring a route to the next class and ask everyone in class to hack it. Here is an awesome example of alternative format, from Stanford, JediBot.

• If writing essay is the only option, combine it together with presentation.

Talking to people is a much more frequently used way of communication than writing. In my opinion, oral skills and ability to make good presentation (intro, structure, good slides and graphics, posture, .etc) gets much less attention in education comparing to writing, while in both academic and industry, making good presentation is essential. Memorizing someone else's presentation is very difficult, most of the times students would go for "I will understand this myself" instead of plagiarism. From the teachers' perspective, this way also make grading the essay much easier--from the presentation, you get what the student is trying to convey, you can also read the essay during the presentation. The presenter get training in oral skills and the whole class exchange ideas. Triple win!

• Change the environment if possible, offer new opportunities.

library, classroom and home are the places where students associate with schoolwork. If once in a while this environment of learning could be changed, it will make a big impression on students mind and the information associated with it will last a long time. I still remember all the field trips that I did in the undergrads, environmental ecology, geology, much more vividly than, well, writing an essay. Conferences is another occasion. If funding permitting or if one happens in the university, or is close by, take students to a academic conference will widen the student's perspective as most conference presentations are the cutting edge development in a field. You might get a few more PhD applicants from your undergrad class, some of them might turn into a future academic. Do yourself, academia, and students a favor, take students to a conference when possible.

• Make project assignments, and also provides (reliable) resources.

By resources I don't mean adding wikipedia.org and a few more links for more text that student can read. If the student may conduct surveys, Amazon Turk or socialsci.com are two good places to start. Let the student know what equipment/service the university/department provides. From what I know, Penn State University has digital cameras, digital recorders (for interviews and recording experiments) that faculty and student can borrow, the university also has statistical consulting service where once you have data, you can book a one-hour session where statisticians can meet with you and give you pointers on what analysis you can do on your data. There is also a writing center. Let the student know what group of people they can talk to, let the student know the resources from the university.

• Collaboration.

Not only is working with others an important skill (that should be trained when in university), it also acts against plagiarism similar to a peer-review process.


If your homework or exam is designed under the above guideline and still there is plagiarism found, I suggest you first check your text analysis software, then you should start physically beat up the plagiarizers repeatedly --which is probably the best education mean to them--but I don't think that will happen:-)

After all, Inspiration is just artfully designed plagiarism.