Designing Plagiarism-Resistant Assignments: Best Practices

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Faculty can help their students with academic integrity by first designing assignments that are plagiarism-resistant. Research shows that careful assignment design can go a long way to preventing plagiarism (Cummings, 2003; see also Gibelman, Gelman, & Fast, 1999); Malouff & Sims, 1996; Kloss, 1996)

Here are some techniques for designing plagiarism-resistant assignments:

1. Consider dropping the open-topic theme. The more specific the assignment, the smaller the universe of information students can use to search and perhaps use inappropriately.
   
   
2. Know your field of research. If you require your students to do research, be sure that you have done the research yourself in advance. You will be familiar with many of the sources your students are using and you might recognize suspicious wording, etc. And if you demonstrate to your students that you have done the research yourself, you show your own commitment to the topic. You also give them reason to know that you won’t be fooled, and this in itself can discourage academic dishonesty.
   
   
3. Word assignments precisely. It might not be enough to tell your students to cite their sources. You might also need to assign them the specific citation style, give them examples, and point out resources where they can get help. The VAIL Guide to Citation gives detailed instructions for citing common publication types, and it points to other resources as well.
   
   
4. Incorporate information literacy standards into your assignments, particularly the need to critically evaluate information, synthesize it and use it, rather than simply collect it and quote it, paraphrase it, or summarize it. The American Library Association has put together a fine resource defining information literacy and listing the five competencies at Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education. The American Association of School Librarians has put together a similar page for secondary students, The Nine Information Literacy Standards for Student Learning. The relevant competencies here are:
   
   The information literate student understands many of the ethical, legal, and socio-economic issues surrounding information and information technology.
   
   The information literate student follows laws, regulations, institutional policies, and etiquette related to the access and use of information resources.
   
   
5. Become familiar with the student’s “voice.” Have your students write early in the semester or term. A potent signal that a student may have plagiarized is a sudden change in language, style, and “voice,” i.e. the way a student sounds in their writing. The VAIL Guide to Plagiarism Alarms gives a good overview of this and other signals that plagiarism may have occurred.
   
   
6. Structure long writing assignments in small chunks or drafts so that students can make incremental progress and not be led down the path of procrastination and plagiarism due to panic. Procrastination is a leading reason why students plagiarize in the first place (Roig & DeTommaso, 1995)
   
   
7. Assign annotated bibliographies, requiring students to provide abstracts of their sources in their own words. Librarians at Cornell University have put together a fine resource on the process at How to Prepare an Annotated Bibliography.
   
   
8. Have students turn in a log or journal of their research, including the names of the search tools used (catalog, search engine, subscription database) and search terms used. Sample their tools and strategies by trying to replicate a few at random. Ask questions if the search cannot be replicated. The University of Maryland University College instituted an undergraduate course, Information Literacy and Research Methods, in which the development of such a research log is a central focus.
   
   
9. Discuss student papers in class. Ask questions about the meaning of suspicious passages. If students cannot explain what they have written, perhaps they are not the true author. If students know in advance that they might be required to discuss their papers, this may deter some from plagiarizing.
   
   
10. Assign oral presentations. Have your students report on their research process. Prompting students with questions like “How did you find this article you cite? I would like to read it myself,” is a non-threatening way to begin looking into suspicious passages that are not in your student’s voice.
    
    
11. Substitute a short written assignment for the oral presentation. This can be a brief, one-page summary of their research process, including how they selected their sources. Ask students to sum up what they learned from their research.
    
    
12. Require recent sources, including some that are in print. If you only require Web-based research, this is more likely to tempt students to copy and paste the words of others since it can be easily done.
    
    
13. Assign students roles or specific audiences to address in their writing. The papers that can be found in most term paper mills are just that, i.e. term papers, and they are usually written in the third person with the teacher as the audience. If you assign your students roles as a researcher, someone advising an administrator who needs to make a decision, then it is unlikely that it will have the sound of a term paper.

In conclusion, designing assignments that are meaningful and challenging gives your students an incentive to learn, and when they have that incentive, they will do their own work.

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