The Increased Need for Academic Integrity in the Digital Age

There is an old saying, “Locks keep honest people honest.”  The problem is we rely so heavily on locks on our doors to keep us safe, that we forget that we left the window wide open.  Using SafeAssign to check student work is a lot like locking your door.  It keeps honest students honest.  But, there are many windows of opportunity left wide open for student to bypass the system.  By the percentage I received on the submitted ‘rip off’ paper, it is obvious there isn’t much effort needed in bypassing this particular system.  On a paper totaling over 1400 words, I changed only three words.  That is 99.7% plagiarized.  Yet the SafeAssign system kicked back a score of 54%.  When I read the report from SafeAssign, it ‘caught’ plagiarized sections within sections that were copied from the same source.  Yet the surrounding sections were not flagged as copied text.

Although I feel there is a place for tools such as SafeAssign, I think the best tool to catch plagiarism is education.  We must, as educators, teach our students the value of each individual’s words and reflection.  We must teach them to not only be inspired by others’ writings, but to respect their words as private property, not free fodder to anyone who cares to use them.  Education is the key to learning what is acceptable and what is not.  We live in a society that doesn’t willingly pay for music, movies, computer access, etc.  Even as teachers, we glean lessons off the web and ignore copyrighted text by making multiple copies to hand out to our students. Why would we expect our students to instinctually understand the rights and wrongs of plagiarism?  We can’t.  It must be taught, applied consistently, and reinforced.

We must also teach our children to value their own words.  They should be encouraged to freely show expression in order to become more confident writers.  If they feel they have something of value to say, they may think twice about simply reprinting someone else’s thoughts.

There have been times where I have caught students plagiarizing their work.  In most cases, the tip off has been a change in flow or writing style.  It is in the slight nuances of a student’s writings that the infraction becomes apparent.  That’s when I will copy and paste a portion of their work into Google to search for it.  I am seldom wrong with my suspicions because I become familiar with my students’ writing styles and abilities. One student in particular wrote poorly for a high school sophomore.  For my class, he was writing a short paper on Thomas Edison and it was brilliantly written!  He had perfect grammar and sentence structure.  His paragraphs flowed beautifully.  I knew there wasn’t a chance that this was his work.   When I searched the text, I found the entire paper online.  Had I simply relied on SafeAssign or a similar tool, I may have ignored my instincts on the situation or gotten lax on learning my students’ writing styles and abilities.  I do not know if this student had been taught the rights and wrongs of plagiarism before coming to my class.  I, at the time, made the assumption he had based on his grade level.  Now that I teach middle school, I make it a point to teach lessons on copyright use and plagiarism.

After we show our students how to use their own thoughts and are able to teach our students how to correctly use the materials of others as reference tools for growth, then we can achieve greater academic integrity.   The desire for individual expression and writing will come natural to students who are inspired and well informed.  But, as a safeguard, we should also always remember to keep the door locked!