Instances of suspected or actual plagiarism are prime opportunities to engage in conversations with our students. Kristen Hoffman, adjunct in English, argues that we should not make assumptions about our students and their motivations but rather focus on teaching them how and why to cite sources correctly.

Plagiarism is a common obstacle faced in education for both student and teacher. The reasons for plagiarism can be a simple fear of failure, lack of time to complete the work, belief that the citation process is unimportant or potentially students' lack of inspiration for the assignment.

But what about the students who don't make a conscious decision to plagiarize? What are the reasons they may commit plagiarism? How do we best handle the cases in which the student unintentionally plagiarizes? And, in this age of artificial intelligence, how do we most efficiently navigate the originality report produced by plagiarism detection software?

The primary reason for unintentional plagiarism is lack of understanding of the conventions of the style, whether MLA, APA, Chicago, etc. Students often lack the necessary skills required to write in the assigned format. Most know that they shouldn't pay someone else to write their essays or copy and paste paragraphs from online sources, but we can't just assume that apathy is the main culprit, when in fact, it's most likely lack of resources. Often, students are penalized for plagiarism because the instructor assumes that the student has knowledge of citation from a prior or concurrent course when often this is not the case.

Imagine this scenario: In October, a student is assigned a research essay in PSY101. The student is concurrently taking ENG101, but the English professor isn't covering MLA until November when the class is scheduled to start research writing. Furthermore, the psychology professor requires APA, which the English professor will not cover at all. Whose responsibility is it to teach APA style? The psychology professor? The English professor? A high school teacher? Or, should the student self-teach the skill?

When I, an English professor, start the research writing phase of my class, I take a census asking which of my students have knowledge of MLA. Many times, no one raises their hand. If they all have knowledge, I still don't assume it's a clear understanding of how to implement the rules of the style correctly. I have found that students coming to us from high school have sometimes been taught an outdated version of MLA or a teacher's adaptation of it. So, I teach it. I open a Word doc on the projector (or a screen recording, if online). I go through all of the steps, and then I repeat them using Google Docs. I start by teaching the technical formatting aspects like margins and headers, but then I spend a great deal of time over several class sessions discussing how to evaluate and choose sources, integrate sources effectively and correctly cite sources.

These are complex skills that many with graduate degrees still have not mastered. I make sure that students are aware that even as I work through my dissertation, I frequently consult the MLA guide or a website like Purdue OWL because the conventions are ever changing, and there are too many rules to simply memorize.

It's important to set clear guidelines for what you expect from the students, including what constitutes plagiarism. Many, if not most, students believe that plagiarism means stealing someone's words. I have found many times, both in the classroom and in the writing center as a tutor, that students do not know that ideas, theories and concepts are also intellectual property that require citation. Providing students with citation guides is helpful. The writing center can help by providing guides for the various styles for professors to distribute as well as by guiding students through the process of formatting their essays in one-on-one sessions.

When assigning written work that I will be running through Brightspace's Originality Check plagiarism software, I'll take several steps to set up the students for success, which will ultimately lighten my workload. I include a blurb on the actual assignment indicating that I will use the plagiarism checker and that students should utilize it also to ensure that they've done their due diligence. We discuss how to use the report to check for citations, etc.

In the past, I've been absolutely certain to check the box in Blackboard that allows the students to review their reports. I have heard from other professors that they don't allow this because they feel like it's "cheating," but I feel quite the opposite. I believe that the students who don't intend to plagiarize will use the opportunity to remedy the problem, either through the writing center or by asking for the instructor's guidance. The students who intend to cheat may either still submit the work or be scared into rewriting the parts that are not their own. In two out of three of these scenarios, the instructor has reduced their own workload by putting the onus on the student.

But, we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water, right? Plagiarism software reports can still be useful. The report should be used when there is evidence discovered by the instructor that the student has likely plagiarized. The instructor can use the report to discover the exact source of plagiarism as confirmation or evidence. In these cases, a conversation with the student can still be eye opening. I cannot stress strongly enough, though, that there is still the possibility that the student did not intend to plagiarize and needs better resources to correctly cite their work. Recourse should still be focused on educating the student rather than imposing punitive punishments. After all, we are here to teach.

During the grading phase, I ensure that the student has attributed the work correctly. Just because the originality report indicates that 33% of the work is unoriginal, it does not mean that the work has been plagiarized. In fact, I have found that 25-33% is the average amount of unoriginal text a student might have in their essays. Again, these automated plagiarism checkers are scanning only for strings of words that match other strings of words, so if your student has quoted anything, it will be flagged as unoriginal even if there are quotation marks around it and a parenthetical citation after it. There are several indicators that the student made an attempt to cite the work:

• The student used quotation marks around the words that are not their own, with or without a parenthetical citation.
• The student said "According to…" with or without the inclusion of a Works Cited entry.
• The student put something after the quote in parenthesis, perhaps a page number or the last name of someone, with or without the inclusion of a Works Cited entry.
• There is an entry on the Works Cited page that doesn't match any in-text citations.

If there is evidence that the student has made an attempt, albeit a failed attempt, at citing the material, penalizing the student for plagiarism might not be the most effective approach. Instead, approaching the situation as a teaching moment is likely to reap the greatest reward for the student as well as the teacher. A dialogue can be most helpful, such as asking a student to clarify an idea that sounds complex or out of character of the student's voice. Many times, students utilize a thesaurus to sound "smarter" but don't know how to check that the synonym is the same part of speech as the word they're replacing, so a conversation with the student may clarify this. A simple, "What were you trying to say here?" can uncover a lot, from simple syntax errors to an attempt to plagiarize.

As we move away from the decades of Blackboard use, I think this is an appropriate time to think through how we're using the software and what we can take with us to Brightspace. Since we are lifelong learners too and some of us are still students ourselves working through advanced graduate degrees and researchers publishing in our fields, all of us can think back to a time when we weren't quite sure how to cite something, and even with all of our expertise and guides, we still weren't confident that we did it 100% correctly.

So, how can we demand that our students get it right the first time around? We can't— but we can set them up for success by providing them with ample instructions, resources, reassurance and respect.