Plagiarism: the Teesside experience

Like many other university law departments Teesside has experienced an increase in plagiarism. The staff decided to take action and to run a series of workshops to help students understand what is acceptable academic practice and what is not. Here two staff members, Cath Crosby and Dave Powell, reflect on the rationale for the workshops, and offer a copy of the PowerPoint presentation they use with students – see downloads at the bottom of this page. You are free to download and adapt the presentation, so long as the original source is attributed.

In former times the problem of plagiarism was mainly confined to students copying each other’s work or copying from books. Although we have had cases of both in the last year, the explosion in plagiarism appears to be coming from the Internet and e-books. A number of Internet related plagiarism cases were exposed at Teesside during 2002-03, including a large number in one Year 1 assessment and a number of cases in subsequent years. The first year ‘outbreak’ was dealt with informally, tutors marking only the unplagiarised material, but all others went through the university’s formal processes.

Although both the informal and formal procedures enabled sanctions to be taken against those students who had attempted to cheat, we felt we had a responsibility to prevent as well as to police attempts to plagiarise. We felt students should know of the drastic consequences both internally (one final year student left without a degree because of plagiarism) and externally. We needed to make it clear that any student who, despite a plagiarism finding, obtains a qualifying law degree must be reported to the Law Society and the Bar Council and is likely to be prevented from entering the profession.

To help students understand what is required of them we decided to run plagiarism workshops for all students. We found some useful generic material on plagiarism, however due to copyright difficulties and wanting the information to be law specific decided to produce our own material.

The sessions were organised as presentations to year groups in lecture theatres in week 1 of the academic year. The presentation was given by the year tutor and varied in intensity. The delivery to Year 1 students was fairly ‘light touch’ so that we did not unduly scare the students, who were already apprehensive at the new experience. However, all students were told about the results of the previous year’s plagiarism cases so that they were aware of what can happen and take the message on board. The penalty for plagiarism in the final year is zero with no resubmission opportunity, while in earlier years it is a mark of zero with an opportunity to resubmit for a maximum grade of 40%.

Students were asked to sign a statement to say that they had attended the workshop. Absent students were chased up, told to watch the presentation on the university’s virtual learning environment and to sign a statement that they had done this.

Feedback from students was generally positive, mostly on the lines of:

• I didn’t know about it
• I didn’t think that was plagiarism

This is despite the fact that the student handbook includes a warning about plagiarism and that the university is liberally decorated with posters on the same theme. We believe the subject-based approach will be more successful, but the main element is communication – if you just put a warning in a handbook students do not read it.

As yet there have been insufficient marked assessments to tell what impact the sessions are having, and it will take a year until we can offer empirical data. However, our experience suggests that previous attempts to raise awareness of plagiarism have been unsuccessful. Now the students can offer no excuses about not knowing how seriously we take it.

Last Modified: 4 June 2010