Students cheating: What to do?

I have my own ways of preventing plagiarism on scholarly papers, most notably using turnitin.com and relying on the vigilance of the graduate teaching associates in our School. I'm also very careful, perhaps overly cautious, about student privacy as per the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). For example, I have on more than one occasion refused to tell parents who contact me how their child is doing in my class. Of course, dealing with "helicopter" parents is another subject altogether. Needless to say, these parents were none too happy that I was not forthcoming with the performance of their children in my class.

But when I read this article about a professor going "vigilante" on students he caught cheating, I had to take a step back and wonder how best we can prevent cheating and plagiarism rather than trying to catch students in a "gotcha" sort of way.

One of the ways I do this to make the turnitin.com match reports that tell me how high a match is to other papers and articles in the database (numbering in the millions) available to the students themselves. What I've found, and this is especially useful for graduate students, is that doing this helps students understand the importance of paraphrasing. First, there's less a chance that they will plagiarize if they have it in their minds from the outset to mostly paraphrase. Second, since a high match only indicates a match to existing text and not outright plagiarism, a closer look reveals how much the student is quoting.

This last part is important for graduate students, as I try to communicate to them that they shouldn't let other scholars speak for them; they shouldn't quote unless the original language is poetic, unique, and otherwise something they couldn't themselves put in a different but equally explanatory way. So, a student sees the match report and gets a first-hand look at how often he or she is quoting. A high match in this case may not mean plagiarism, but it does mean that the student's scholarly writing skills need work in terms of synthesizing ideas and paraphrasing others' ideas.

One certainly fallible way I do my part to prevent and educate students about cheating. I'm not saying the professor in the article linked above eschewed this attitude. It just got me thinking.