How to Discourage Plagiarism and Other Types of Academic Dishonesty via Assignment Design
Change assignments frequently
- Change your assignments slightly from term to term to discourage students from reusing previous students’ work.
- For courses that have multiple sections, change your assignments slightly from section to section to discourage the exchange of papers among friends in different sections.
Use in-class writing assignments
Short in-class writing assignments provide instructors with opportunities to:
- become familiar with and assess students’ abilities and styles early on so that sudden changes in their writing are more noticeable
- give students a chance to write extemporaneously, when they cannot become tempted by or mired in others’ words
Make your assignments specific:
Students are far less likely to be able to plagiarize a unique assignment, because sources available to them (for example, on the Internet) will not meet the specific requirements of the assignment.
Ask your students to write about a less well known document:
Rather than: "Discuss the importance of personal development in Naguib Mahfouz's short story "Half a Day.""
Try: "Discuss the importance of personal development in Mansoura Ez Eldin's short story "Deja Vu"."
Pose a more focused question:
Rather than: "What artistic movements influenced the Impressionists?"
Try: "In what ways does this particular Impressionist painting reveal the influences of earlier movements?"
Ask a question that requires application, rather than explanation of knowledge:
Rather than: "Explain the basic functions of the vascular, skeletal, muscular and nervous systems."
Try: "A cat jumps off the end of a table onto the floor. Describe how its vascular, muscular, skeletal and nervous systems contribute to this action."
Consider a tight comparison:
Rather than: "Analyze the attitude of Frederick Douglass toward white abolitionists."
Try: "How does Frederick Douglass’s perception of his audience change between his Narrative and his work Life and Times, and how do these two texts differ as a result?"
Use a “touchstone” assignment:
Ask students to connect their ideas to another aspect of the class -- use a point from lecture, a quotation selected from one of your readings (try to choose a less-obvious quotation), an image, or a graph.
Rather than: Discuss how women accused of witchcraft were treated in Salem in the late seventeenth century.
Try: Using Mary Easty’s petition, which she wrote in 1692 and which we discussed in class, explain the perspective of women who were accused of witchcraft during the Salem trials.
Tips for Assigning Research Paper Assignments
Some suggestions other faculty have found useful in discouraging plagiarism are to:
- replace a "traditional" assignment (such as an essay) with an alternative assignment (such as having the students create a concept map, or a screencast, etc)
- have students collaborate on a research paper so that they monitor one another
- assign short writing assignment(s) early in the class; this activity will give you an opportunity to see students’ writing capabilities (which makes it easier to notice anomolies that might appear in their later assignments)
- do not allow students to choose their own topic for a research assignment: provide them with a specific question (or a cluster of questions from which they choose) that limits their range
- consider using shorter, focused assignments along with longer papers, or in place of one longer paper, if several are assigned in the course
- require that students use specific sources (e.g. specific articles, specific journals, etc.)
- require your students to submit a bibliography in advance
- require a bibliography with short summaries of each source and a brief explanation of how the source is relevant to the student's topic
- require long papers to build from shorter, earlier papers
- require that students must submit their rough drafts along with their final draft
- require students to submit their written assignments via SafeAssign, TurnItIn, or another plagiarism detection tool.
Use an honor agreement
Ask your students to sign a statement of agreement concerning academic misconduct. Such a statement might say something such as, "I acknowledge that I understand what plagiarism is, and that I am aware of the serious academic consequences that can be imposed on me if I commit plagiarism. I am also aware of the consequences that can be imposed on me for committing other acts of academic dishonesty, including failing the assignment, failing the course, or expulsion from the university."
Adapted from materials developed by the Centre for Innovative Teaching and Learning at Indiana University Bloomington.