Research on plagiarism in higher ed, by Dora Clarke-Pine, associate professor, School of Education, Department of Psychology and Counseling

Dora Clarke-Pine focused her research work last year on determining unconscious acts of plagiarism in higher education. She is planning to submit her findings for publication.

Dora Clarke-Pine focused her research work last year on determining unconscious acts of plagiarism in higher education. She is planning to submit her findings for publication.

Clarke-Pine conducted three studies. One was a pilot study that involved a random sample of 65 doctoral dissertations from American Psychological Association-accredited universities. In this study, she discovered that 52 dissertations, or 80%, contained at least 10 plagiarized words or “word lifts.” In a study of 100 dissertations, again from APA-approved universities, 82% of the dissertations exhibited plagiarism of at least 10 words. Part of her researched also looked at plagiarism incidences in dissertations from religions versus non-religious universities. In this study, which examined 120 APA-approved universities, she found no significant difference in plagiarism rates between the two types of institutions with 81% of all of the dissertations having at least 10 plagiarized words.
 
Her research also cited one study that noted that 40-50% of students could not correctly identify plagiarism. In her research she concluded that plagiarism is widespread even at the dissertation level of well-known higher education institutions. She concluded that to effectively combat the problem, academia would need to do several things. One important change would be to identify a “nationally” recognized parameter for plagiarism (e.g., five words in a row, word for word). Other changes would include giving students an increased number of shorter writing assignments so that critical feedback can actually take place. After all, it is the feedback mechanism that is necessary for students to actually improve their writing skills.   
 
Clarke-Pine presented her research at conferences last year at Harvard and Cambridge. Additionally, over the last two to three years she has incorporated specific activities into her classes in which students practice identifying and avoiding plagiarism in their research papers. She said these anti-plagiarism practice activities have yielded excellent results as opposed to the previous method of simply discussing the problems of plagiarism and telling students not to engage in it.