Winning Hearts and Minds in War on Plagiarism
To many writing instructors, going nuclear (expulsion threats) or high tech (detection software) have failed to stop cheating. So they aim for small victories, through new approaches to teaching about academic integrity.
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It s come to this: Writing professors are so desperate for new ways to teach undergraduates about academic integrity that they are assigning them to plagiarize.
That s what Kate Hagopian, an instructor in the first-year writing program at North Carolina State University, does. For one assignment, she gives her students a short writing passage and then a prompt for a standard student short essay. She asks her students to turn in two versions. In one they are told that they must plagiarize. In the second, they are told not to. The prior night, the students were given an online tutorial on plagiarism and Hagopian said she has become skeptical that having the students parrot back what we ve told them accomplish