Stocking speaks on plagiarism

Published: November 20, 2005

Professor Holly Stocking talked about fostering a moral climate in the classroom during a multi-campus conference on Plagiarism Prevention offered Nov. 18 by the Teaching and Learning Technologies Centers at IU.

Stocking spoke about specific ways she supports students
to work with integrity in her senior-level ethics class. These include discussing the negative consequences of cheating both to students as individuals and to community trust and standards; providing instruction on paraphrasing and citing (through Laura Plummer of the Bloomington campus writing program); giving students access to the plagiarism-detection software, Turnitin.com, so they can
detect any unintentional acts of plagiarism on their own; and requiring signed honors statements for student work.

Stocking recently has begun to reward students for ethics when she grades student work.

"We seldom reward students directly for ethical behavior in
our classes, and this is one way to do that," she told conference participants.

Students who use Turnitin successfully, who appear to cite their work properly, and who sign the honors statement can earn an A on the ethics component of their papers, she explained. This means that even if students perform poorly in a technical sense, they can still earn superb grades -- as well as the teacher's respect -- for their ethical actions. The final grade on the paper is a combination of the grade for ethics and the grade for technical mastery.