5 Things Students Need to Know About Plagiarism in 2022

1As we discussed earlier this month, the 2022 school year is shaping up to be a very interesting one when it comes to plagiarism and other issues of academic integrity.

For many, it will be the first “normal” year since the start of the pandemic in 2020. However, that pandemic brought with it a spike in academic integrity issues. That spike has resulted in pushback from both instructors and schools as they seek to combat the issue.

In short, the landscape of academic plagiarism is changing and students are caught in the middle of those shifts. New technologies and approaches are being introduced to combat plagiarism, some of which may be unfamiliar to students, and the landscape of plagiarism looks very different from what it did just a few years ago.

To that end, here are five things that students need to know about academic plagiarism for the 2022 school year to avoid running into any issues in this space.

1: How to Write in a Cleanroom

If one thing has become abundantly clear over the past few years, it’s that many students don’t understand how citation integrates with the writing process. Far too many students think of citation as something that takes place during the editing process, after the first draft is complete. However, that is not the case.

Handling citation after one has finished writing a piece opens the door to serious mistakes, including passages that were copied but not quoted, missing citations and forgotten sources. 

Citation should be part of the writing process and, most importantly, research and notes should be kept fully separate from the writing document. Anything pasted in to that document should be cited immediately. 

I call this approach writing in a cleanroom. The idea is to create a permanent separation between your original writing and outside materials so that you don’t copy verbiage accidentally, that you paraphrase correctly and that you include all the needed citations.

It’s a simple change to the writing process that can prevent plagiarism and give you confidence that your work is original.

2: Avoid Free Plagiarism Checkers

If you do a search for free plagiarism checker on the internet, you will undoubtedly find there are no shortage of sites offering the service. However, these sites should not be trusted.

First, some of the sites have been caught submitting the essays they check to essay mills. In short, if you submit a paper through one of these services, it’s possible that you’ll find your work for sale on an essay site just weeks or months later.

However, even if they are ethical and don’t sell your work, such checkers are generally of very low quality and are more limited than the ones your schools will likely be using. 

If you are concerned enough about potential plagiarism to want to run your work through a plagiarism detection tool, see if your school has a way for you to access their tool. You can also use tools such as Scribbr, which partners with Turnitin, to perform quick checks for a fee. 

Either way, using free online tools isn’t likely to tell you much about your paper and may put you at risk for exploitation. It’s best to stick with either legitimate paid services or access the service your school uses.

3: Avoid Online Paraphrasing Tools

Similar to plagiarism detection tools, you can find a slew of services online that claim to provide “paraphrasing” tools. However, there are serious problems with those tools.

First, paraphrasing is not simply rewriting text. Paraphrasing is about taking the facts and information you read in a source and putting them into your own words. If you start with the source text, you’re not paraphrasing, you’re rewriting.

As such, online paraphrasing tools are, at best, misnamed. They are rewriting tools, and the quality of that rewriting varies wildly. Many still leave significant chunks of original text, and others do an incredibly poor job of producing readable verbiage.

Furthermore, any text that comes from such a service will not be in your voice or style and that can create its own set of problems due to the changing tools that are being used to detect plagiarism.

4: Expect a Greater Focus on Authorship

One of the major changes in the past decade has been the rise of contract cheating. Though online essay mills may dominate headlines, studies show that most contract cheating isn’t for money and happens on a more personal level.

This has produced a game of cat and mouse. Contract cheating isn’t easily detected by plagiarism detection tools, which are looking for matching text against a database. However, recently, there’s been a steep growth in tools that use algorithms to detect if a student’s writing is their own.

Turnitin launched such a tool in 2018 and Unicheck has a similar service for their product. Now we are even seeing free tools, such as the one just launched by Academic Integrity. For years, instructors have had suspicions of ghostwritten papers, but little way to validate those feelings. That is changing.

Do not be surprised if you find yourself being challenged on your authorship, even if it has n’t happened before. This is especially likely if there is a major shift in your writing style. 

5: Expect Assessment to Change

This may not be true at all levels, but one of the big changes that is slowly taking place in academia is a shift in the way instructors assess students.

This takes a variety of forms. Some are taking large assignments and breaking them into small parts, such as requiring multiple drafts of an essay. Others are experimenting with new types of assessment, such multimedia projects and presentations. Still others are using the same techniques but offering more assessment opportunities. 

The reasons for this are many. There’s a hope that creating more engaging assessments might result in more engaged students. Likewise, there’s a hope that giving a variety of assessment types will help students who struggle with essays, public speaking or other types of assessment.

However, one of the key benefits remains that such assessments are harder to cheat on. It is much more difficult to plagiarize an essay that’s turned in at multiple phases, and it’s difficult to mask a lack of knowledge when answering questions in person. The goal is to encourage students to interact with the information by basically making it impossible for them not to.

While the traditional essay won’t be going away, I would expect more exploration and more movement in this space in 2022.

Bottom Line

Academia is, much like the rest of the world, it’s at a crossroads. The pandemic shook things up and many of the trends that got a boost from the pandemic, such as distance learning, aren’t going away.

The one thing that is certain about the 2022 school year is that it will be very different from the 2019. 

For students, this could be a tricky year to navigate and much of what makes it difficult is the likely changes to assessment, much of which is an attempt to stop or reduce plagiarism and cheating.

That, combined with the various pitfalls that students can find online, makes it important for students to be aware of these issues and not fall into some very easy to miss traps.