Jonathan Bailey, in one of his August article published in Plagiarism Today, gives us five trends for the coming school year around the issue of plagiarism. The first one is about essay mills which are about to get a lot more attention from schools but also from goverment who will try to shut them down. The second trend will focus on the issue of students’ privacy when submitting their work to a detection software.
I’m baffled by the next trend which will integrate plagiarism detection into the evaluation process « making it more akin to checking for grammar or spelling mistakes« . I think that a teacher who finds plagiarism would stop the evaluation process since the paper cannot be graded if it has been plagiarised… The student must have consequences from redoing the paper completely or partially to getting an F.
Fourth trend: plagiarism detection technology will be integrated into the writing process. Students will revise and correct their papers and check for plagiarism before handing it in. For students who use this software to check their paper, it will be reassuring to know that they have written their essays without mistakenly plagiarizing.
The last trend is a growing intolerance for plagiarism. While that is hardly surprising, what is really sad to see is that there is no trend on better educating our students on what is plagiarism and how to avoid doing it.
