Teachers use different tactics to discourage plagiarism

With digital resources, plagiarizing is easier to do and easier to catch.

The 2014-2015 Curtis High School Handbook states:  plagiarizing, copying  homework, cheating on tests must not be done nor tolerated by others. Curtis administration and staff will punish it. Despite this declaration and a warning at the September orientation and reinforcement of this rule by teachers, students continue to cheat. During the orientation at the beginning of the school year, Mr. Sicilian said that he personally wrote to several  colleges to have certain students’ acceptances revoked based on multiple acts of plagiarism. “Corrections are at their best when they make us change our negative behavior,” he said, “Repetition of negative behaviors after correction is arrogance deserving censure and punishment.”

Ms. Bilotti, an English teacher at Curtis, has faced various issues this year with projects and homeworks, with students plagiarizing from the Internet and each other. This past month she assigned a project on the book “Grendel” by John Gardner in which she asked them to write various journals on different parts of the book. Ms. Bilotti noticed that many of the students had the same information, worded the same exact way on the same exact journals. “Once a teacher teaches a class for about a week, you get a sense of how each student writes and what level they’re on in terms of writing,” she said.

She picked up on the fact that many of the students were using the Internet and stealing information for their projects. She says that most of the time all she has to do is Google information that she feels is plagiarized, and it pops up on various sites.

From that point on, Ms. Bilotti made students and their parents sign an academic policy sheet to make them aware of the consequences of plagiarism. Consequences can be extreme or minor depending on the assignment and the teacher. Some assignments like the Grendel project, which had over a month to be completed and count for a large chunk of students’ grades, can drastically affect the student’s overall grade if a teacher gives that project a failing grade  for plagiarizing. For something like a homework, a teacher might simply ask the student to redo it.

Various students have admitted to plagiarizing. One student said, “In my elective class I often copy off of the people next to me, and sometimes take stuff off the Internet  but reword little things.” Another student said, “My Spanish teacher usually just gazes over the homework so a lot of the time I copy off a friend.”

There are many reasons students plagiarize. Alyssa Orcuilo believes  that students look to others for better ideas, assuming their friends’ ideas are better than their own.  Orcuilo said, ”It is also about grades. With the  Internet,  students can download and use college material for a high school class seeming smarter than they are.”

Arian Sterling believes the reasons are simpler. “Students are just plain lazy, and don’t want to put in the work.”