The Searchers: Fighting Plagiarism in Distant Courses

Abstract
The problem of academic integrity is widely debated nowadays. Many
universities create their own Centers for Academic Integrity and provide
students and professors with tips for preventing plagiarism and academic
dishonesty. However, rapid development of technologies constantly
introduces new possibilities both for copy-paste generation and their
educators. Many educators believe that online environment and lack of
face-to-face communication encourages plagiarism and makes it easier.
Anyway, prevention is always better than cure, and plagiarism prevention
techniques should be integrated into the course along with plagiarism
detection techniques.
Present article restates the need for a complex solution that would work on
both sides of the barricade. The structure of the article may function as a
rough model or a tip-off for the process of addressing the problem of
plagiarism in distant courses.
Know your enemy
What are the different types of academic dishonesty? The question is not that simple as it
seems. We usually include passages on plagiarism policy in our curriculum but often fail to
develop and overall notion of academic integrity in an appropriate way. As a result, acts of
non-intentional academic dishonesty may occur, especially among first-year students, whose
academic culture has not already developed.
Another issue is a degree of concurrence in plagiarism policies for different courses. The
situation when these policies vary from course to course may be recognized by students as a
double standards policy.
Taking a students perspective in rethinking academic integrity policies may become a
productive way of inducting students into the environment of academic honesty.
McCabe et all. (1999) suggests that academic honesty can be manageable, and one of the
important means of managing cheating is establishing academic honesty codes and clear
communication of expectation regarding academic cheating.
That is why there is a strong need for a comprehensive university document that will provide
all the necessary concepts as well as expectations for high-standards of academic integrity - a
thing that post-soviet universities often lack.
Nowadays most Western universities do have their Statements on Plagiarism, Academic
Integrity Handbooks, Students Handbooks, Honor Codes, and the like. Academic systems
that have not clearly defined and enforced the institutional rules of academic honesty often
provoke a number of negative consequences, the most serious of which are: discrediting a
value of teaching, learning, and higher education in general; a tendency for reproducing
instead of producing knowledge; acquiring only temporal and disposable knowledge; lack of
trust between students and teachers, to name just a few.

The need for a university honor code is also grounded in human psychological motivation to
become a part of a special community. A number of researchers (see, for example, Bowers,
1964; McCabe, Trevio, & Butterfield, 1996; McCabe, Trevio & Butterfield, 2001) suggest
that University honor codes do have long-term enduring effects on students behavior.
A Statement on Academic Honesty first of all should include a conceptualization of the notion
of different kinds of academic dishonesty that would be shared by academic staff and
students: plagiarism, collusion, cheating, and falsification.
In order to prevent incidents of unintentional plagiarism a Statement should clearly define
such notions as acknowledgment, citation and inaccurate citation, paraphrasing, autoplagiarism. A Statement should also clarify what citation style is recommended and give a
link to style manual.
It is crucial that this document should be easy-accessible for all the students and staff in order
that everyone could get acquainted with university standards for intellectual honesty1. Some
universities (e.g. MIT) additionally provide printed copies of academic integrity handbooks.
However, a key factor of implementing academic integrity in university environment is not a
mere existence of a formal honor code, but its strong embedding in academic culture of
students and professors (McCabe, Trevio, & Butterfield, 2001). University faculty should be
well familiar with honor code requirements and do their best to enforce academic integrity.
A strong culture of academic integrity can exist at an
institution that has no formal code but communicates
the importance the community places on integrity in
other ways (McCabe, Trevio, & Butterfield,2001, p. 225).
Provided that a university has established its honor code of academic integrity, there is no
need to duplicate academic honesty expectations in curriculum (nevertheless, it should
provide a link to university honor code in order to encourage students in following it). It is
important however to communicate all the field-specific requirements for academic integrity
in every curriculum (e.g. computer code originality, using visual materials in creating own
products, etc.). It is especially important in distant courses where a teacher and students are
not involved in face-to-face communication, and the only chance to actualize academic
honesty rules is referencing university honor code and communicating your own specific
expectations through course curriculum, special announcement and related (easily
recognizable) resource.
Plagiarism in distant courses: Powder train
Factors that influence students dishonesty are often divided into two groups - contextual and
individual (see, for example, McCabe and Trevio, 1997; Yorke, Lawson & McMahon, 2009;
Schrimsher, Northrup & Alverson, 2011).
Among individual factors that influence academic dishonesty McCabe and Trevio (1997)
name age of students (younger students cheat more than their older colleagues); gender
(male students cheat more than females); level of academic achievements (those with
lower academic achievements cheat more than their more successful colleagues); parents
education (children of more educated parents cheat less); extracurricular activities
1 Some universities even require their students to sign up a so called plagiarism statement recognizing that they
are aware of university policy in academic integrity and that their work contains no plagiarism.

(those involved in such activities appear to cheat more) (McCabe and Trevio, 1997, pp. 380382).
Among contextual factors the authors name fraternity \ sorority membership (those
involved are more likely to cheat than those who are not members of any university
community); peer behavior (students who believe that their colleagues engage in cheating
behavior are more likely to cheat); peer disapproval (students whose colleagues criticize
cheating practices are less likely to cheat); peer reporting (students who believe that their
colleagues are not inclined to unmask academic dishonesty cheat more); severity of
penalties (the more severe are the consequences of cheating the less students are
predisposed to cheat); faculty understanding \ support for academic integrity
policies (as discussed earlier) (McCabe and Trevio, 1997, pp. 383-385).
All these factors have been proved by a substantial research among American students (see a
report in McCabe and Trevio, 1997) and are often grounded in psychological and
pedagogical theories (e.g. deterrence theory, social learning theory, differential association
theory). It was also found that the context that created at an academic institution can have a
powerful impact on academic dishonesty (ibid., p. 393), and the most workable instrument
appeared to be creating an environment where academic dishonesty is socially unacceptable
(McCabe and Trevio, 1993), i.e. an environment, where faculty policies and peer disapproval
form a context of non-tolerating cheating practices.
Some other contextual factors of students cheating include parents pressure, growing
difficulty of learning material (McCabe 2001), and seeing university education as an
inevitable process of acquiring disposable information that will be of no use in future
professional activities.
The situation in distant courses differs from campus-based university programs. Such
powerful context factors as peer or professor disapproval is much more weaker here, provided
that social connections in distant courses are usually deficient in more closer collaboration
between professor and his students, as well as in informal student-to-student communication.
Meeting in an online classroom just avatars but not real people makes teaching-learning
practices more anonymous and creates an environment that appears to be less demanding and
has weaker deterrent effects.
The other side of the problem is the fact that in distant courses students are engaged in a
context of especially intensive computer and IT-technologies usage, and the problem of
cyberplagiarism and Internet cheating arises as relevant as ever.
The Internet has raised new and significant problems for
both students and teachers. Younger students, for
whom the Internet is such a common form of
communication, seem to have difficulty understanding
its proper use as an academic tool. And many high
school students believe - or say they believe - that if
information is on the Internet, it is public knowledge
and does not need to be footnoted - even if it's quoted
verbatim (McCabe, 2001, p. 41).

Internet offers a wide variety of possibilities for academic dishonesty, including borrowing
papers from paper banks, university and professors web-sites, copy-pasting sentences or even
paragraphs from web-based materials without crediting the source, copy-pasting lists of
references from other papers and the like (Jones, Reid & Bartlett, 2005).

Preventing cheating in distant courses

Beyond doubt, prevention is always better than cure - and the case of cheating in distant
learning is not an exception to the rule. That is why plagiarism prevention techniques should
be integrated into the course along with plagiarism detection techniques. Plagiarism
prevention techniques consist in designing a distant course so as to remove opportunities to
cheat during the learning process.
As it has been already mentioned, the very first step in preventing academic dishonesty in any
classroom (including distant classrooms) is informing students of academic integrity
standards, i.e. alluding to university honor code or similar documents which actualize
university idea of academic integrity, as well as declaring field-specific policies that are
relevant to the course. It is also crucial to give clear instructions about prohibited use of
different devices and sources (e.g. Wikipedia, Yahoo! Answers) and citation style you prefer
in your course (APA, MLA, etc.). You may also introduce your students to some online
services that let easily collect, manage and cite different resources for a paper (such as Zotero,
RefWorks, and the like).
In order to attract students attention it is better to employ several communication channels:
course forum, news announcements, and a stable resource. It can be also useful to oblige your
students undersign the academic integrity commitment statement (if it is practiced in your
institution).
The research by McCabe et al. (1999) suggests that academic dishonesty can be effectively
managed with the help of above-mentioned strategies consisting in clearly communicating
expectations regarding cheating behavior, establishing policies regarding appropriate conduct,
and encouraging students to abide by those policies (McCabe, Trevio, & Butterfield, 2001,
p. 229).
Another important issue is creating an anti-cheating environment which includes being
supportive and encouraging students to be creative and aim at producing knowledge - as
opposed to simply reproducing it. You should also set the standards in preparing course
materials (carefully referencing sources in your lectures, attributing parts of books and
journals, and the like).
A significant step in the process of preventing cheating in online courses is designing
assignments that would be interesting, challenging, and not banal (see, for example McCabe,
Trevio & Butterfield, 2001).
Usually designing course assignments in an appropriate way may significantly decrease the
scale of cheating disaster. For example, assignments that travel unchangeable from term to
term create a favorable environment for cheaters as long as students often turn in papers that
have been written by their elder colleagues for this course some years ago. For this reason it
would be useful to change the assignments for each offering of a course, or at least vary essay
topics and task requirements from term to term.

Another pivotal plagiarism prevention technique is developing assignments that are less
vulnerable to cheating on the Internet - e.g., assigning papers that are as current and out-ofthe-ordinary as possible and requiring students to interpret the information they gather
(McCabe, 2001, p. 42). Sometimes it is also helpful to design several stages of preparing an
assignment and require students to submit multiply drafts that can be additionally discussed
through private forum threads or in-course chats (Gross Davis, 1993).
Detecting cheating in distant courses
The most common techniques of detecting cheating in distant courses are: (a) investigating
electronic documents properties; (b) investigating a style and vocabulary of a paper; (c)
investigating technical aspects of a document (fonts, font size, dashes); (d) exposing verbatim
or near-verbatim passages that are not properly referenced.
Investigating electronic documents properties
In order to have a full access to the history of a document and its properties require your
students to submit papers in .doc \ .docs format. Documents created in Microsoft Word always
have the Document Information Panel that can be viewed by anyone who opens the
document. The most important fields here are Author (and Last Author), Title, statistics
(the date file is created and last modified, revision number, and total editing time). These
fields can give a full account of the document and the process of its creation. Some marks of
suspicion are: the name of the Author and Last Author are not the name of your student
(however, remember that he might have used a friends computer); the names of the Author
and Last Author differ (your student might have used another students work as a source);
the date of file creation differs considerably with the date a task has been assigned; total
editing time of the document is small compared to its size (however, a student might have
created a new document in order to copy his or her final draft there). If any of these sign has
been recognized, it might be useful to continue the investigation.
Investigating a style and vocabulary of a paper
One of the most obvious signs of cheating is considerable difference in writing style, lexicon
and grammar. Such inconsistency often signifies that a paper is a kind of patchwork.
Sometimes you may also feel that the style and ideas expressed in a text are too sophisticated
for a student (especially if his or her previous performance in a course has been rather poor).
Investigating technical aspects of a document
Difference of fonts and their sizes in a document are also symptomatic for plagiarized papers.
Sometimes students in order to mislead an instructor do format the paper to general font style
but often fail to change the length of dashes: if you compose a document the length of all
dashes will be the same (as a rule, it is a short dash (-) that is also called figure dash;
however, when you copy phrases from the Internet, some en- () and em () dashes that are
longer than a figure dash may appear in your document. If a passage with em dashes is not
provided with a link to the source, you may suspect plagiarism.
Exposing verbatim or near-verbatim passages
If you have already detected some possibly non-original passages or you simply want to
check the paper the easiest way to check originality of a paper is using the phrase search in
major Internet search engines. I recommend using minimum two search engines, and my
choice is Google and Yandex for papers in Russian, and Google and Yahoo! for papers in

English. Remember that your students look for information in the same search engines and as a rule - use first-page search results. You may also use Advanced Search option of search
engines in order to refine your search.
However, in situation when auto-plagiarism occurs or a student borrows a paper from his or
her classmate global search engines are of no use. Some universities create their own
databases of students works with the phrase searching capabilities. A wider institutional
approach in deploying plagiarism detection software could be extremely useful for faculty and
at the same time have discouraging effect on students practices of cheating and plagiarizing.
However, if a university paper bank still does not exist you may create your own small
database of students papers that have been written for you course (as well as for other courses
of the same thematic field) in recent years. Storing students papers on your hard disk may
help to find the cases of auto-plagiarism and cheating quite easily. Windows users may use
Goggle Desktop as an effective phrasal search engine that have the same interface as Google
Search and quickly finds documents with similar phrases on your hard disk 2. Mac Users may
simply use Spotlight function integrated in every Mac OS.
Another option in exposing verbatim passages is using plagiarism detection services and
software (web-based or installed on local computer or local network). The most popular
services are CopyCatch, TurnItIn, EVE Plagiarism Detection System, iThenticate,
SafeAssign, Plagiarism.org, antiplagiat.ru and the like. Some researchers argue that using
plagiarism detection systems in evaluating student papers (and including appropriate warning
in a syllabus) may discourage students from plagiarizing since students who have a stronger
belief that plagiarism will be detected will be less likely to plagiarize (Martin, 2005, p.152).
Conclusions
Academic dishonesty in higher education is a complex issue that requires a complex solution.
The very first step in fighting plagiarism is educating: both faculty and students should know
what is academic integrity and ethics, what practices are considered to be cheating and
plagiarism, and what sanctions may be applied to the one for inappropriate academic
behavior. Hence there is a strong need to create (if it has not been already done) a
comprehensive document that will provide all the appropriate instructions (University Honor
Code). It is also crucial to teach students the rules of academic writing, referencing and
citation. The other side of a coin is training the faculty in plagiarism prevention and detection
techniques. All the teachers should hold to the same policy in penalizing academic dishonesty.
A university may work out its own strategy of fighting academic dishonesty or follow readymade guides that have been already issued in a country or region (e.g. for Lithuania see
Nevinskait et al., 2008). However, additional recommendations should be worked out for
faculty involved in distant learning as long as academic dishonesty prevention in distant
courses has its own specificity.

2 However, as long as nowadays similar search engines are integrated into most operating systems, since
September, 2011 new versions of Google Desktop are not available for download.

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