reducing plagiarism

In the mid-semester projects the students show amazing creativity. Especially in deriving and building their physics models and explanations. However we have noticed over the years that some groups cut and paste from the internet whole paragraphs (or more) for the introduction, i.e. the section that describes the device.

I have described the down-side of this type of plagiarism in lecture. Mainly the argument that in their future careers writing a report/developing a project that builds on an existing idea is an efficient and good thing to do, but the source of the idea should be acknowledged, and doing so does not harm your case/project/pitch/report. However presenting an idea as your own when it is not leads to a negative impression of you.

There are other arguments why students should not plagiarize, but I've found that this practical argument of "use the good ideas that you find, acknowledge them, then extend the ideas" resonates with the students.

This semester we are also trying a new tool that searches the web for plagiarized text. The tool is safeAssign and it is a new part of webCT. The students usbmit their draft project to safeAssign then the students and TAs see a report which contains an estimate of the amount of plagiarized text, as well as a color-coded highlight to which internet sources the text seems to have been cut-and-paste from.

So far the tool has worked with reports ranging from 0% plagiarism to over 90% plagiarized :( Since the students see the reports, the goal is for them to redo these sections before they submit their final project.