Plagiarism is not a trivial problem. According to McCabe, Treviño and Butterfield (2001), 58% of university students surveyed admitted to some form of serious cheating on their written work (this included plagiarizing, fabricating or falsifying a bibliography, turning in work done by someone else, and copying a few sentences of material without footnoting them in a paper).
All faculty members need to work together to reduce the amount of plagiarism in our classrooms. The four basic steps are:
- Making sure your students know what plagiarism is and helping them to avoid it.
- Preventing plagiarism by designing your written assignments appropriately.
- Detecting plagiarism in the submissions you receive by learning the telltale signs and familiarizing yourself with anti-plagiarism tools.
- Punishing plagiarism once it has been detected.
McCabe, Donald, Linda Treviño, and Kenneth Butterfield, "Cheating in academic institutions: a decade of research". Ethics & Behavior 11.3 (2001):219-32.