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Detecting plagiarism

Academic Integrity advice from CETL

  • Communicate with students about what constitutes academic integrity in an online environment.
  • Ensure expectations and guidelines for assignments, assessments, and projects are clear for students, including whether activities are to be done individually or collaboratively.
  • Use tools in D2L such as question and answer randomization or shuffling questions, use of question pools, changing numbers in math questions, or blocking access to course content, to protect academic integrity on online assignments and quizzes.
  • Design questions that cannot be answered easily unless students have done previous work in the course; assign work that builds sequentially, or on prior submitted work.
  • Design different (or alter) questions for different sections of the same course.
  • Consider having students submit a short video or audio answer by phone or Kaltura in response to questions or prompts (helps ensure they have formulated arguments on their own).
  • Have students apply personal experience when answering questions, or require the incorporation of unique resources (e.g., current newspapers).
  • Include a self-reflection and/or critical thinking component in assignments and assessments.
  • Use multiple choice questions primarily for ungraded assignments or self-assessments.
  • Alternate standard assessments, such as quizzes and midterms, with case studies, portfolios, presentations, or discussions
  • Put one question per screen to reduce the use by students of “screen print” to copy the test questions.
  • Use authentic assessment (activities or projects where students demonstrate application of their learning), using rubrics where possible.

Suspicion of plagiarism?

The most common reason given by students regarding plagiarism is that they simply lost track of the source they used. So despite good intentions, we know plagiarism does occur. 

You know your students best - so you can often "hear" a different voice than theirs in a paper. Or perhaps there is language used that doesn't seem similar to their previous submissions. If a passage doesn't have a citation and you suspect intentional or unintentional plagiarism the following suggestions may help locate the original source.

Search tips that work in library databases and Google sources:

  • put a phrase within quotations to create a more precise search
  • remove the quotation marks and try a variation of the phrase or keywords if you aren't successful with your first search
     

Search in Library Databases

If you identify a part of the paper that looks questionable, select a passage or set of unique words from the paper. Then enter that text into a library database as a keyword search.

The quickest option is to use Single Search from the library homepage. This will search across multiple library resources (all the EBSCO databases such as Academic Search Complete, Business Source Ultimate, CINAHL, etc.)

To search Proquest databases with your passage, this link covers both CBCA & Canadian Major Dailies

Search in Google sources

Try searching your questionable passage or phrase in: