Check out this interesting article by Professor Jeff Karon (University of South Florida) on plagiarism and how to prevent it.
Here are some other tips you
might find useful:
Be proactive in preventing
cheating on papers and assignments. Let your students know that you
expect them to do their own work and that cheating will be punished in your
class.
Put your university’s policy
on your syllabus. You should also be familiar with your university’s
procedures on reporting cheating so that you follow the appropriate steps if
this becomes necessary.
Define the term plagiarism
for your students. Many of them do not understand the difference between
citing and copying someone else’s work.
Give specific and timely
topics on papers so that students cannot simply access the internet for
commercially produced papers. Thus, a paper on sexual harassment in the workplace is easily available for
sale. A paper on sexual harassment policies in local companies in your
town is probably not.
Have students turn in
outlines and/or first drafts of their papers to you earlier in the semester and
then have them attach those drafts to the final paper when it is due.
Require students to turn in
copies of all sources cited including websites, journal articles, and pages of
books used.
Read the
Bibliography. Dates should be required for interviews and websearches. If these
dates do not fall in line with what is reasonable for the semester due dates,
that should raise a red flag (tip submitted by Timothy Johnson).