I am indebted to my colleague Ed for making me aware that today (February 19th) marks Prevent Plagiarism Day.
How sad but how predictable to find that the piece starts by casually linking plagiarism with technology, in particular “…the rise of the internet…”. The accusation that another has ‘stolen’ their work and declared it theirs is nothing new. True, the internet has greatly increased the the ease with which it is possible to locate and yes, copy text, but it is that next step of passing the work off as yours which is plagiarism and this, I would argue, cannot be simply blamed on technology. (And while we are focusing on the internet, it should be remembered that it has helped give people a route to publish their ideas and so establish authorship, or to openly licence but also, since media of all kinds is much more likely to be online, it has made unlicensed reuse much easier to spot.)
If today is apparently about preventing plagiarism, not detecting it, why is there no mention of what might be behind it? Surely it is only by understanding issues that we can have a hope of tacking them. The piece suggests that technology identified as “…plagiarism checker tools…” can provide the solution, again predictable as technology was originally linked to the cause of the issue, or at least its increase. But such technology in no way prevents plagiarism, so what will?
If academic integrity is so very important this needs to be reflected in the time and care we give to teaching students about it; it can’t just be about ticking an own work declaration box before work is submitted for assessment.
The rapid expansion in generative AI and easy access to it has served to emphasis our lack of clarity over what constitutes students’ own work; it’s complicated and really always has been. Perhaps this can serve as the push needed to examine our entire assessment process to see how it can be made to better fit its true purpose.
