The Increased Need for Academic Integrity in the Digital Age

Working with high school students I, unfortunately, get a first hand look at academic dishonesty. Recently I busted two students in the same day. I was handing out the tests to my 4^th hour class advising the students not to cheat because I already caught one that day. This girl in the back row asks me how I caught the first student. I finish telling the story, I walk back to my seat, sit down and look up and the girl who was asking my about the incident reaches under her seat and pulls out a cheat sheet. I was shocked that after I just told the story she thought she could get away with it.

An academic dishonesty concern that I have is with homework. It is hard to monitor how students complete their homework. When I see that an assignment has been copied, or a student turns in someone else’s assignment, I give them a zero and call home. When a student is copying homework from another class I contact the other teacher so they can proceed according to how they see fit. I am not sure how much homework copying happens, but I wonder if consequences were higher would their be less instances if would students just get better at it. 

This was an enjoyable assignment. I was looking forward to how well SafeAssign picked up on instances of plagiarism. I started to plagiarize my essay with passages from the assigned reading. I took phrases from the assigned reading and typed those into Google to find more passages. I copied and deleted several articles trying to find the words that fit into my essay. Once I found pieces of information that fit, I would include those and then delete the unnecessary parts of the article. The assignment said to plagiarize at least 900 words and then “massage the plagiarized content into a cohesive essay.” I did this by merging articles together. I would combine different articles and make them sound like they were from the same author. I switched the order of sentences in paragraphs. I changed some words into words that I would use.

After submitting my plagiarism assignment I was extremely surprised to see that my document was recorded as 54% plagiarized. SafeAssign found 5 sources that I had used. I noticed when I looked at what had been picked up as plagiarized, it was the large pieces of information that I did not edit very much were highlighted as plagiarized. The sentences and paragraphs that I edited to make the essay make sense were not picked up as plagiarized.

This leads me to believe that with a little work and reorganization I could get my plagiarized percentage pretty low. It did not take me long to compile the data and make the essay seem cohesive. With an hour or less, I could probably get that percentage pretty low. It seems by mixing different articles and combining them with my own sentences it throws SafeAssign off the trail.

I was really surprised at how easy it was to complete this assignment. I have always struggled with properly citing sources and using a bibliography page. I am a math teacher and math has always been my strong point. This assignment has helped me be more aware of how to produce a paper with integrity. It has also shown me how easy it could be to fool the system.

After completion of this assignment I had an interesting thought. I was interested to know what would have happened if I would have copied my sources from the last few pages on my Google search. Google tries to put the most relevant pages first, so if I went to the end, would SafeAssign have a harder time identifying those sources?

Purdue University Calumet. "Academic Integrity" Purdue University. January 8, 2011. http://www.calumet.purdue.edu/integrity/plagiarism_examples.html

Stack, Robert. Artwork by Robert Stack. January 12, 2011. http://www.rstack.net/large-view/illustrations/201465---16560/Illustration.html