One Teacher’s Approach to Stopping Plagiarism

Shelby Scoffield, a high school English teacher from Mountain House, California, is like many others in that she struggles to enforce academic integrity standards in her classroom.

According to her, these problems became worse during the pandemic due to the rise of distance learning. However, even after taking time away to teach basics of academic integrity, she still faced an “onslaught” of papers with serious plagiarism issues.

It was at this point she opted to take a new approach, one that she outlined in an article for Edutopia. Rather than going to battle with plagiarizing students or their parents, she tries to work with them.

This process begins with a conversation with the student in question, a discussion that attempts to understand why the student has these issues. From there, the student is required to take an online course with assignments that are tailored to that specific student’s needs. 

That online course, which takes about 45 minutes to complete and is customized for the student, is required before Scoffield will grade any of the student’s other assignments. From there, the course includes a variety of assignments, all outlined in greater detail in her post, ranging from reading online information at various websites, using an online paraphrasing tool and grading its output and learning about well-known plagiarism cases.

According to Scoffield, this course has produced impressive results. She said that she has not had any issues with students after they took the course and noticed an increase in students coming to her directly for help.

In addition, Scoffield also notes that this eliminates the excuses of “I didn’t know” and “I was too scared to ask”. It also highlighted that, in most cases, it was simply a matter of the student having a genuine misunderstanding about the issue and not a desire to take shortcuts.

It’s a simple, elegant and beautiful approach. Its one that targets those students who are most in need and gives them a chance to correct themselves before the consequences become irreversible.

That, in turn, is why I wanted to highlight it here. In hopes that others will learn about it, apply it where they can, and refine it as they learn more. 

Why This Approach is Interesting

The power of this approach is fairly straightforward, it targets the students the most in need of extra help and extends that help in a way that is customized to their particular needs.

The approach is punitive, it is extra work after all, but not in a way that is damaging or harmful to their academic career. If a student is simply handed a zero or given a deducted grade for the class, they often have little motivation to change, as the damage has already been done. Likewise, having students redo assignments often provides zero motivation to not plagiarize, as the punishment is simply to complete the assignment that they would have done anyway.

Finding the balance between disciplining and helping students who turn in plagiarized work is difficult, but this approach does a good job, especially for a first-time offender. The student’s punishment is ultimately a frank conversation with a teacher and a 45-minute assignment, both are things that should help them moving forward.

Too many schools and instructors gets bogged down in trying to determine whether to help or punish students. This does both and, as Scoffield noted, eliminates many of the doubts and concerns that instructors have when faced with plagiarizing students. After all, once a student has taken this course, it’s pretty difficult to argue that they didn’t know the rules and boundaries.

It’s a very compelling approach and one that could be a very useful tool in many schools and teachers pockets.

Why Not Everyone?

This raises a simple question: Why not have every student take this course?

There are three reasons that I see for that. First, not all students need it. Many simply have a firm grasp of the rules and writing standards, and this would be wasted time that they could spend learning other things.

Second, it would make it non-punitive. If every student has to complete it, it just becomes part of ordinary coursework. This may, in part, explain why remedial lessons didn’t seem to help Scoffield’s class as much as this approach.

Finally, it would take too much time. The time it takes to sit down with the student, craft the course and grade it simply is not feasible on a large scale. Focusing this approach on the handful of students that need it the most makes sense.

However, it’s that time issue that may ultimately be its biggest obstacle. Teachers at all levels are constantly being asked to do more with less. Meanwhile, this is a very time-intensive approach that requires focusing a great deal of energy on one student.

It may not be feasible for many, especially those with larger classes, to take this approach as applied by Scoffield.

That said, schools can help with that. First, they can standardize and centralize the process. By creating centralized courses that teachers can use (and modify) they can take much of that burden off. It can also be centralized by having the conversation, customization of the course and grading of student work take place outside the classroom, possibly led by a student resource department. 

However, that may damage some other benefits of this approach. One of those being a tighter relationship between the student and teacher. Still, there are many times and many classes where it may not be practical for this to be a teacher-led process and that is where centralization of it can help.

Bottom Line

The reason that I wanted to write about this is simple. It is the first time in a long time that I have been truly excited about an approach to tackling plagiarism in the classroom, in particular in a high school classroom.

No, the process isn’t perfect. Yes, it’s likely that the 100% success rate Scoffield is seeing right now will drop off with time. But it’s an approach that disciplines without damaging, and it teaches without demeaning. Best of all, it’s tailored to that student’s needs, making it personal to them.

While this type of discipline is far from new, it’s been rare to see it applied to plagiarism. Even the best approaches to this challenge, such as the AMBeR Benchmark Plagiarism Tariff, did not incorporate anything like this.

So, while there are clear limitations on when and how this approach can be used, it’s something that is worth exploring, especially in high school and early college students. Though I can think of several resources I’d like to see added to it, it’s a great starting point and one that both Scoffield and others can refine over time.