November 2001 — Features

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e-cheating: Combating a 21st Century Challenge

By Kim McMurtry

In addition, there are many full-text magazines and journals available online, and students may also be tempted to download articles to turn in, as one of my students did. This is the lesson I learned after my first year of teaching freshman composition. In the second semester of composition, my students get an introduction to interpreting and writing about literature. Students read several short stories and choose one to write about. Out of 61 students, five decided to turn in papers downloaded from the Internet. I was easily tipped off when two students submitted identical essays, each not realizing that the other had also copied the paper from the Internet. I discovered, after the fact, that there are numerous essays available online on William Faulkner's A Rose for Emily, Kate Chopin's The Story of an Hour and Eudora Welty's A Worn Path. The following year I changed the assignment. I chose a more recent novel for the students to read, Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, did some online searching and determined that it would be sufficiently difficult for a student to find any prewritten essays on it.

4. Give students enough time to do an assignment. Keep in mind that students are juggling assignments in several classes. Help them plan their work by giving them enough advance notice of any assignment that requires research. You might even consider requiring that students submit a research proposal, an outline, an annotated bibliography or at least a topic idea early on. Students who have put off starting an assignment until the last minute are more likely to seek shortcuts, like plagiarism.

5. Require oral presentations of student papers or have students submit a letter of transferal to you, explaining briefly their thesis statement, research process, etc. Both of these tasks will discourage plagiarism.

6. Have students submit essays electronically. Whether via e-mail, to a shared directory on the campus network or on a diskette, this provides the opportunity for you to archive your students' essays electronically. Keep them organized in directories according to the assigned topic. Then, you can feel confident about assigning the same topics each semester or each year. If a student paper sounds familiar, simply do a word or a phrase search on that directory. For example, one student submitted a personal essay on her experience transferring from a large, state institution to a small, private college. The next year, when another student submitted the same essay, I immediately recognized it and was able to perform a search of my essay archive using the essay's first sentence and located it quickly.

7. When you suspect e-cheating, use a free full-text search engine like AltaVista or Digital Integrity (www.find-same.com). If a submitted paper d'esn't sound like that student, d'esn't seem to fit the course level or d'esn't seem to fit the assignment, take a phrase from the paper or the title of the paper and type it into a search engine. Or, if the student provides Web addresses as source citations, check them out. Sometimes, a student who has downloaded a paper from the Internet will actually provide that Web address in the list of works cited.