Plagiarism is an issue that many teachers have to deal with. Since copying and pasting is so easy, the temptation to cheat is sometimes too great for students to resist. In this article, Alloprof shares tips for teaching students about the importance of academic integrity (especially in the age of artificial intelligence) while helping them learn to cite sources and embrace their creativity.
Once students reach high school, they should be introduced to the concept of academic integrity, as they may face serious consequences for cheating and plagiarism once they start their post-secondary studies.
Here are a few ways you can approach this topic in class:
Emphasize the benefits of doing things yourself.
Remind students that plagiarism is a violation of copyright law and intellectual honesty.
Teach your students the importance of citing their sources and giving proper credit to authors and creators.
Explain that sources are used to support their arguments and lend credibility to their work.
Help your students put together a bibliography and improve their research skills and writing skills.
Maintain an open, non-judgmental dialogue with your students, foster an atmosphere of trust and mutual respect, and make your expectations clear.
Encourage your students to be brave and take responsibility if they ever do plagiarize someone else’s work. School is a place where students can make mistakes and bounce back from failure.
Emphasize the fact that every student has a unique voice and unique ideas to share, and help them develop their confidence.
The best way to prevent students from cheating is to get them interested in learning. With this in mind, here are a few suggestions for making homework more motivating while discouraging plagiarism:
Favour projects that require creativity, critical thinking, and originality.
Give assignments that require students to analyze primary sources and recent events, as well as projects that showcase students’ individuality.
Assign projects with multiple steps that involve making plans, research notes, and drafts, as well as giving oral presentations or writing a paper.
To avoid the grey area between collaboration and plagiarism by collusion, you can encourage your students to work together on outlines or brainstorming, but require them to write their papers on their own.
Set a minimum number of sources that students must use in their work.
Have your students practice acceptable ways of paraphrasing the words of others. This includes citing their sources correctly. This knowledge will be useful for the rest of their education.
Make it a habit to remind students that they can come to you for help if they get stuck or do not understand what to do.
As text generation tools are becoming increasingly advanced, it is more important than ever for teachers to take steps to prevent AI-based plagiarism in their classrooms (in line with their educational institution’s guidelines, of course). Here are a few tips you may find useful:
If you encourage or allow students to use AI for certain tasks, make your expectations clear and give specific instructions, for example:
Describe how they used AI: document the questions they asked or instructions they gave the AI tool, preferably with screenshots.
Explain why they used AI for this assignment (brainstorming for inspiration, learning more about a topic, improving their understanding of a context, summarizing an article, getting a simplified explanation of a concept, finding turns of phrase, etc.).
Include a bibliography of sources that back up the facts, concepts, and statistics sourced from the AI.
Place any direct quotes from AI-generated text in quotation marks.
When using direct quotes or paraphrasing information sourced from a generative AI model or chatbot, cite the AI tool in parentheses.
Include a full citation in the bibliography.
Etc.
Take inspiration from this spectrum. On one end, you have schoolwork done entirely by AI, and on the other you have work done entirely by the student, with many scenarios that fall into a grey area in between. You can use this tool to decide what you feel is acceptable and unacceptable use of AI tools in your classroom, depending on the context.
Remind your students that AI is not a scholarly source, nor is it better than Wikipedia (in fact, it may be worse).
Make your students aware of the issues that can be caused by inaccuracies and biases in AI-generated texts. Generative artificial intelligence models promote a specific worldview, since they base their output on a dataset of texts written primarily in English by white Western men.
Remind your students that exploration and sharing their lived experiences, cultural backgrounds, and worldviews are crucial aspects of their education that cannot be replicated by an AI model.
Show your students side-by-side examples of texts written by chatbots versus those written by humans. Although AI models imitate the human voice, they sound unnatural and lack spontaneity. In short, AI-generated texts are robotic, neutral, and generic. You could discuss the following topic: “If you got a letter from someone you liked, how would you feel if you found out that their words didn’t come from the heart, but were actually written by a bot?” All the more reason to practise creative writing!