Plagiarism happens in many courses—not just writing courses. However, it tends to be very common in writing classes at the University of New Haven. In this section, we describe approaches for avoiding plagiarism and handling it when it occurs.
Two potential ways to avoid plagiarism are to design writing assignments that are unique and to regularly change your assignment sheets. For example, crafting an assignment based on the direction of a classroom conversation about the discipline or a particular real-world application of a course concept might make the students less likely to depend on external sources or automatically look for online sources. Changing assignment prompts from semester-to-semester might appear to be time-consuming at first; however, the time invested on the front-end to create a new prompt might be saved in handling plagiarism cases as you are trying to grade assignments later.
Unfortunately, while this approach can help if you’re concerned about students finding papers on the web, it does not deal with situations when students get others to write their papers for them (and coming up with unique assignments is more difficult in some fields than others). Thus, something else we strongly suggest is that instructors collect a writing sample early in the semester. Within the first class period or two, we recommend asking students to do an impromptu in-class writing. You can tell them that the writing does not count towards their grade, but it is useful to make the prompt you ask them to write challenging or at least related to the course content (rather than, for example, asking them to write about what they did over the summer). You can use this prompt to compare with a student’s first submitted assignment if you have concerns that the paper may have been written by someone else.
The Writing Across the Curriculum Canvas site contains a few links that might be useful for you to require students to read. These resources define plagiarism, common knowledge, and so forth. The Purdue OWL offers handouts and lesson plans related to plagiarism: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/section/3/33/
