Hello, this is Jennifer Gonzalez, welcoming you to episode 63 of the Cult of Pedagogy Podcast.

In this episode, we are going to talk about how you can teach your students to avoid plagiarism.

Plagiarism can be a real bugger. Most teachers have had to deal with it in some form or another, and a whole lot of you still haven't quite figured out the best way to combat it.

Many of us issue stern warnings and threaten serious, soul-crushing consequences. Others also use software to detect plagiarism.

And while these methods can deter students from plagiarizing and catch them if they do, they operate on the assumption that all plagiarism is devious, that all students who plagiarize know exactly what they're doing, and our mission is to catch and punish.

Now, because I don't believe that assumption is accurate, I think we could be handling the problem with a lot more finesse.

In my own experience as a teacher and a parent, I have seen acts of plagiarism that I truly believe will rooted in ignorance. Take my fifth grade daughter, for instance.

A few months ago, she and her best friend were collaborating on a Google Slides presentation about a Native American tribe.

Reading over it as she worked, I found sentence after sentence written in language she never could have come up with.

When I asked her where she got the information, she told me point blank that she copied and pasted it from a website.

It took me forever to explain why that was wrong and what she needed to do instead. She seriously had no idea. She wasn't trying to cheat.

Eventually, I convinced her that she really, really needed to revise and even though she did, I could tell she was mostly humoring me.

So, okay, that's fifth grade, you say. Surely it gets better as students get older.

Marginally, let's take a look at college undergrads.

In two separate studies, undergraduates were asked to identify incidences of plagiarism.

In both studies, students' ability to correctly label plagiarism could best be described as limited.

In other words, a significant number of students have an incomplete understanding of what plagiarism actually is.

And if they don't always know when they're doing it, it's going to be pretty hard to get them to stop.

Now to be clear, I am not arguing that all students who plagiarize are innocent.

I have had students whose attempts at passing off someone else's work as their own was so blatant, I took it as a personal insult.

But I do believe we can cut way back on less deliberate instances of plagiarism by teaching students the skills to avoid it.

Unfortunately, now, students are mostly expected to learn how to avoid plagiarism by some kind of osmosis.

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