Grading research papers is an inherent part of a teaching career. Whether it's an internship report, dissertation, thesis or any other writing that needs to be graded, academic integrity is equally important. Indeed, to avoid plagiarism, all duplicated content must be clearly indicated, at a minimum, with quotation marks and the original author mentioned.
As a teacher, how should you react when these copyright guidelines are not followed in your students' writing? What should be done when faced with a suspected case of plagiarism?
Alleviate or validate suspicions of plagiarism
Be clear about what plagiarism is: definitions and forms
In general, plagiarism is defined as borrowing an idea, quotation, or image without mentioning the original author.
INSA (National Institute of Applied Sciences) of Lyon defines plagiarism as follows:
👉 "[plagiarism] consists of appropriating someone else's original work (an excerpt of text or speech, an illustration, etc.) without citing it or mentioning the sources,
👉 suggesting that you are the author of a piece of work that you actually borrowed from someone else,
👉 failing to cite the authors correctly,
👉 not identifying which passages have been borrowed and inserted into your own creation."
Plagiarism can take many forms:
- paraphrasing without citing an author,
- using non-copyright-free images and graphics,
- slideshows without any source,
- translations without citing an author,
- not respecting citation standards,
- poorly constructed bibliography...
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Provide evidence of copied content: analysis with Magister
To be certain that plagiarism is proven, you have a powerful tool: Magister. Magister similarity-detection software shows you duplicate content, whether it comes from the internet or another document from your institution or from a Compilatio partner institution. Click here to learn more about how document analysis works with Magister.
Analysing a document with Magister gives you three essential pieces of information, saving considerable time in grading an assignment that you suspect contains plagiarism:
👉 A percentage of similarities
👉 A list of detected external sources
👉 A side-by-side view, which allows for a precise comparison between the text of the analysed document and the text of the detected source