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Teaching and Learning Center
PO Box 1510
Pembroke, NC 28372

Phone: 910.775.4163
Fax: 910.521.6606
Email: tlc@uncp.edu

Location: Old Main, Room 241
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preventing plagiarism

Prevention strategies are available to educators to deter plagiarism. At first glance, it may appear to be a great deal of work, but these options may decrease the frustration of detecting and proving plagiarism in students' work at the end of the semester. Of course, all of these approaches do not have to be implemented to assist in the prevention of plagiarism. However, the more strategies applied, the less likely the students are tempted. Education may prove to be the best defense against plagiarism, and monitoring may be the second best.

  • Explain on your syllabus your position on plagiarism. Reference UNCP's Academic Honor Code, which provides details regarding the standards of academic honesty and integrity, violations (including plagiarism), penalties, procedures for handling cases, and advice to faculty.
  • Define plagiarism for your students and provide examples, such as improperly citing sources used, improperly paraphrasing a source, copy-and-paste techniques, and downloading papers from the Internet.
  • Explain the importance attribution and demonstrate the proper style required. Provide students with a location to access the preferred style manual. (The Sampson-Livermore Library provides access for many style manuals. Style manuals are available online also.)
  • Demonstrate for your students that you are knowledgeable in detecting Web plagiarism and are familiar with free and fee-based term paper sites. Remind them that you can access full-text databases as easily as they can.
  • Design your term paper assignments so procrastination is not an option for students. Early in the semester, assign topics pertinent to the class material or approve topics selected by students after some justification process. Topics that are regionally focused may decrease the accessibility to ready-made term papers.
  • Require students to research a number of resource formats for their term papers, including books, journal articles, Internet resources, and personal interviews. If appropriate, you may require them to conduct a survey to create some original research that has a local concentration.
  • Explain what resources are acceptable for the term paper and why. Information that is ten years old may not be acceptable for one topic, but may be for another. Many topics will require information that is less than three years old. Remind students that information found on the Internet is not necessarily valid and reliable.
  • Provide students with a project timeline as a guide for term paper deadlines. Include on the timeline a one page discussion of the students' intended research, an outline, an annotated bibliography of resources, and multiple drafts.
  • Require students to provide a copy of the first page of each resource they plan to cite in their bibliographies a week before the paper is due (or, with the term paper when it is due).
  • Explain to students that part of their final exam will focus on what they learned as a result of researching their term paper. Essay questions may range from explaining the process of doing a research paper, to synthesizing what they learned about their topic, to expanding on what further research would be appropriate based on what they found.

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Prevention Resources

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Some information concerning plagiarism and suggestions for its prevention and detection were confirmed or enhanced from a variety of sources, all of which are listed in the following bibliography.

 

Updated: Friday, February 15, 2008

Return to Web Plagiarism

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