Steps towards Solving the Problem of Plagiarism in Student Projects

Opportunities for Internet or print research are adapted from the intermediate academic writing textbook of R. F. Cohen & J. L. Miller (2003) to provide four suggested guidelines for university-level writing courses in English as a foreign language to counter the widespread problem of plagiarism, the causes of which include students' failure to realize that it is wrong to submit text downloaded from the Internet. (1) Topics chosen for student papers should require information to be digested, eg, a comparison of two items or questions that have no right answer. (2) Students, whose background may be largely bookless, should receive positive help in finding print sources & assessing the relevance of information they find. (3) Students must similarly be taught to evaluate websites. (4) Students should be encouraged to develop writing process portfolios by performing revisions & saving all such work in computer files. 29 References. J. Hitchcock