You’ve chosen a teaching career to help young people learn, grow, and discover talents. And whatever subject you teach, you assign essays and other academic papers to your students, right? No wonder:
Essays aren’t only about writing skills development. You assign them to teach critical thinking, creativity, analysis, and communication skills. The problem is that not all students understand the role essay writing plays in their post-school success. Let’s face it: Many students hate such tasks and are ready to do anything to avoid them.
That’s where the issue of academic integrity violation appears.
You take a student’s paper, read it, and… it doesn’t feel right. This particular mentee never used such word constructions and deductions before, and this essay doesn’t sound like it was this student who wrote it. You take this essay, go to a plagiarism checker for teachers, and… voila!
Your teaching instinct was right. That paper has obvious signs of plagiarism. What will you do now?
As a responsible educator, you understand the possible reasons behind such a result. More than that, your student might plagiarize accidentally and unintentionally.
So, instead of blaming a student at once, consider the benefits of a plagiarism checker service you use to see the weak points of your mentees’ writing skills and teach them to distinguish between original ideas and poor paraphrasing from third-party sources.
Here’s how:
Use Plagiarism Checker to Help Students Write Better
First, a reputable plagiarism checker service will help you recognize the problem and see if your mentees cheat (or need more skills to communicate original ideas and arguments in their essays).
Second, the comprehensive reports you get from a plagiarism checker for each assignment allow you to see the aspects of student writing to pay attention to and solve the problem:
- They might need more research skills.
- They might need to learn how to paraphrase and give credit to sources.
- Or, maybe they don’t understand the concern of academic integrity and don’t know the consequences of plagiarism.
Finally, you can use the features of a plagiarism-checking tool to encourage students to improve their writing.
Make Them Understand Academic Integrity
Plagiarism checkers communicate the issue of academic integrity, making students understand it’s wrong to copy others’ works without proper citations. Using a plagiarism checker service, you’ll see if your students need extra explanation (lectures, training) on academic integrity. (Add it to your curriculum if necessary.)
How you can teach students to control academic integrity:
- Give them enough time to write an essay; teach time management so they know how to plan the process and meet deadlines.
- Explain to them how to cite sources and include quotations.
- Tell them blogs and websites are still someone’s original work, so they also require proper referencing.
- Encourage them to ask you questions if they need clarification on whether they use a reference page and in-text citations right. Nurture trusting teacher-student relationships in your classroom.
- Teach them to add value to the information they share in essays. Explain that they should also include their original insights on the assigned topic.
Teach Them to Paraphrase
A plagiarism checker can help you see the problem of wrong (poor) paraphrasing and understand when it’s necessary to teach proper one to students.
Draw a line between plagiarism and paraphrasing. Make your students understand that “write an essay with your own words” doesn’t equal “change the word order or synonymize words of the original resource.”
Explain how to paraphrase correctly. Tell students they should refrain from copying the resource but get a sense of information from it and represent it the way they understand it (without looking at the original text).
Make it clear that:
- It’s okay to rewrite if they do that in their writing style and by adding new material.
- Students should give proper credit to their sources: citations in a reference list, quotation marks for direct quotes, mentioning author names when paraphrasing their ideas, etc.
- Shared language (tech-related terms, conventional designations, commonly accepted vocabulary) is acceptable.
Introduce Helpful Tools to Them
Your students can also use corresponding tools to improve their writing and check their works for plagiarism. Why not introduce reputable and helpful resources to them?
Check plagiarism check reviews, and recommend a trustworthy tool your mentees can address to revise their writing assignments. Also, you can introduce reliable AI-checking tools for students to see if their papers don’t sound robotic and amateurish. Plag checkers can also assist with proofreading: They recognize grammar and spelling mistakes, help with citation generation, and see poor synonymization.
Share such reputable instruments with students and encourage them to check their essays before submitting. It can help them learn proper citing and avoid unintentional plagiarism in papers. They’ll scan writings to highlight the potentially copied parts and revise them accordingly.
Sure, you need to reveal all the features of those tools to students and explain how to use them to make it easier for your mentees to write their academic papers.
Teach Proper Research and Referencing
Your task as a teacher is to explain the significance of research skills and critical writing to students. Many young people need help understanding how to evaluate resources and how to use them in papers to support their arguments; otherwise, teachers see wrong information in texts or irrelevant evidence in references.
Research and references matter in academic writing, so proper paraphrasing is legitimate. Teach critical evaluation and efficient judgment for students to know how to find resources for their papers and how to understand if they are relevant and worth using:
- Tell mentees to use quotation marks for direct quotes; explain why they can’t paraphrase them.
- Quotation marks are also necessary when citing up to three lines of poetry.
- Explain that lengthier quotes don’t require quotation marks but should still mention the author in-text or in the reference list.
- Tell when direct quotes are better to replace with paraphrasing to prevent their overuse by students.
- Explain the difference between personal, commercial, and professional websites. Thus, evidence from the .edu and .gov domains will be more reliable for academic essays than those from personal blogs, Wikipedia, or social media accounts.
In a Word
Despite their digital literacy, students can still misinterpret academic integrity and plagiarize or wrongly attribute others’ ideas in their essays. Use a reputable plagiarism checker service to recognize the problem and help your mentees solve this problem.