I agree with you that prevention is better than punish them. In Thailand, some students particularly the freshmen are always confused about what is count as plagiarism. I normally include plagiarism on the course syllabus and discuss it and the kinds of penalty incur in details in the class introduction. With non-native English speaker students the majority of the problems are sometimes due to their limitation in summarizing and paraphrasing skills. I found the Online Writing Lab by Purdue University to be useful for raising awareness in students as well as providing some exercises for summarizing and paraphrasing skills.

Hello Suphinya: Thanks for your answer. You are quite right when you say that sometimes the students do not really know what is plagiarism. I believe that is very important to clarify them the concept at the beginning of the course.

I also agree that students often do not understand the importance we place on plagiarism. In the University where I teach (UK) we also make issues about plagiarism clear from the beginning of the course. This has been much more effective since we have had a taught session in the first year on plagiarism. I start by asking them why we should refernce sources and most students are not clear. Once they are told, and then shown how not to plagiarise - using paraphrasing and summarising exercises they seem to plagiarise less.

I agree with all the above-mentioned replies. But I think that sometimes acquainting students with the harms of Plagiarism is not enough and some extreme measures must be taken to prevent them from Plagiarism, i.e. after clarifying the concept, when the students begin to write end-of the-term papers and present it to the teachers, teachers practically, with the assistance of online Plagiarism Checkers, display the plagiarized sections in their papers and punish them. Although it seems aggressive but I did it and it really worked.

As Haider said, online plagiarism checker software is great and I think that a lot of schools and universities are incorporating these into their content management systems. There are some free online checkers like www.grammarly.com but I haven't actually used them personally. They would be a good resource for students though, to check their own work before submitting it.

I think if students are made aware of how serious an issue plagiarism is (it is theft of other people's ideas) and what the consequences are then it is a big deterrent. Secondly, it is important that they are taught and have opportunities to practice research skills like note taking and writing essays etc. from notes. This is something that we try to teach at high school but it does take a lot of reinforcement.

I usually assign multiple papers throughout the semester. The first is within the first few weeks of class. If students plagiarize, whether it is detected through programs like safeassign or by my own detection, I do the following:

1) Notify the student to meet with me.

2) See if they understand what plagiarism is. If they do, then I give them an F on the assignment and tell them that they will be reported to the university if it occurs again. If they do not comprehend plagiarism (and trust me, some students have no idea that they plagiarized!), then show them how it was plagiarized, explain the concept, and have them repeat the assignment.

3) If student plagiarizes again, report to the university and fail your class.

I have never had a student get to step 3.

I can mention that in Romania there are many cases in which students enjoy plagiarism. I know that many of them do it because they are lazy to do personal work with their ideas and their interpretations. In this aspect, when they find a book that treats the same subject transcribe entire paragraphs of text - source.

For other students, they write in parenthesis the reference.

Anyway the plagiarism checker software makes very good job and immediately find people who have plagiarized. However students whose works are palgiate will receive lower grades on papers / thesis.

In my university, all the work passes through turnitin before submission which gives similarity index report. We also mark the work on Moodle and we can easily see the areas that work that belongs to student and that which is not his own. Depending on the extent of copying and pasting then there is a procedure to be followed to establish whether student was deliberately cheating or not. There is a range of punishment depending on extent of the Problem. Work may be discarded and has to do and resubmit. If its very serious the student may be expelled from university

Inspired by what happened in universities around me and by a special private project about ghostwriting, I think that a big part of the problem of plagiaraism can be solved by organisationnal means.

On one side,  clear rules at the organisationnal level (e.g. the university as a whole) should be published to show the consequences of plagiarism. On the other side, special courses on "writing papers" should be offered to students; theses courses should include dedicated time to plagiarism and its consequences.

Also, to raise trust on this topics, plagiarism by  professors should also be openly discussed and punished by the same rules applied to students.

Now that I have left university and working on my own as freelance Tutor, Lecturer and Training Consultant, I have changed my view on plagiarism. I have increasingly seen this problem among students studying online for access to nursing, nursing, Masters in Public Health, MBA and MSc. The problem has increased indeed due to proliferation of use of internet and this is posing a challenge to how will help these students to deal with issues of plagiarism. Based on this experience and feedback I get from what their tutors teach them, I believe that all of us educators should see this as a failure of ourselves to help and educate our students to reference properly though some students are more interested in passing their modules regardless of not knowing how to present their work. Mature students see learning how to reference as a waste of time and thinking that we are just making their lives difficult for nothing. The young ones are keen to learn but it appears from what I have been told , that tutors do not have time to help them effectively. My suggestion would be that every university or college offering courses online should include study skills from very beginning and also the marks awarded for proper referencing should be increased from current 5 to 15 which can work as motivation factor. This will also help to prevent students pass the module and graduate without knowing how to reference correctly.

Plagiarism is a serious academic offence, and our institution has only turned to using Turnitin. Other than that the institution doesn't take it very seriously. However, I think if a student is found guilty of intentional plagiarism, s/he should fail that subject and if it happens again, s/he should be expelled from the institution.