I thought my idea of making all of my old student sites Editor’s Only in order to avoid kids trying to plagiarize from old assignments would work until I realized that our good friend Google not only points to pages, it also caches them.
I just know that this is going to be an issue at some point if it isn’t already. It’s not going to be that hard for one of my students to search for key words from an assignment and come across the answers posted by one of my students earlier in the year. Even though the site itself may not be accessible, Google will oblige by displaying the page as it was created, with all of the key search terms highlighted. Nice.
I don’t have many good options here, I think. I could change every assignment every time, but some assignments really can’t be changed in any appreciable way because of the content involved. I could do a Google search of one line from the answer to every assignment to see if there are any hits, but that would be far too time consuming. I could have kids hand in some assignments on paper and only do their reporting and beat work online, but that kind of defeats the purpose, at least in the way I envisioned this. I know I’m talking about maybe only 20% of what I do, but it’s still enough to get me thinking. (BTW, my original thoughts on this here.)
Publishing is a wonderful thing, but it also opens up many new doors for abuse. I’d love to say that it’s nothing to worry about, but it is. Right now, for many of the kind of read and answer questions types of assignments I give, I can’t be 100% sure that a student’s work is his own. Thoughts or ideas welcomed as always.
Google is usually very good about respecting your wishes and if you set up a few things you can stop it from caching certain pages or from crawling part of the site. Take a look at these URL’s:
Stop cache:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/3.html#B2
Info for webmasters:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/
I’m not sure how easy it is for you to change the template with Manila. I know with MovableType it’s quite easy. This is one of the reasons I like software that’s easy to customize.
I recently had to deal with a very serious case of plagiarism in my class (my blog posting on this topic) –
one idea I came across to deal with it is to have students write a first draft of an assignment well before it’s due. That way, they go through the revision/editing process (never a bad idea) and you (as the instructor) see the rough draft – and the progress made between that and the final version. It’s extra work, but I think it’s worth it.
Kara…with stories and projects I require to see all of their work…it’s just the homework, reader-response type stuff that I’m struggling with. For instance, I have them come up with five potential story ideas a week. If they wanted they could find hundreds of ideas that my former students have already posted. Those are the kinds of things that I can’t really check for process.
Ryan, thanks about Google…I’m going to check it out.
One of the authors of ScriptyGoddess.com has posted many tips on how to keep Google from spidering and/or caching pages. If you do a search on the Scripty site you should be able to find the information – but if you don’t see it, let me know – I would be happy to help.
I take another approach. In fact, I require that my students read everything that has been written and published on the web in answer to one of my questions. I expect my students to move on from the discussion of past students, agreeing, disagreeing or bringing another perspective. Even if the next assignment is nothing more than a clearly thought out review of other people’s answers properly cited and reviewed there is much benefit in that. In fact, turning 50 minds onto a subject that has already been written and reviewed I have had some students make leaps in thinking that have been isntructive to me!! I want them to read everything and then to move on.