I don't think that students deliberately plagiairise......although there are a few chancers!

Getting your students to submit their assignments to Turnitin (or equivalent). They get to review their similarity reports and make appropriate changes. The tool allows multiple submissions, so students can gage the improvement in their writing. At the formative stage, I have removed myself from the process.

I have been doing this for a while now and the students love it.....it helps them , help themselves! And less stress on me...

Then they have to submit their final document, which I use for marking.

Clearly explain the guidelines to avoid plagiarism and back this up by submitting a percentage of assignments to turnitin, or similar plagiarism detection software.

I don't think that students deliberately plagiairise......although there are a few chancers!

Getting your students to submit their assignments to Turnitin (or equivalent). They get to review their similarity reports and make appropriate changes. The tool allows multiple submissions, so students can gage the improvement in their writing. At the formative stage, I have removed myself from the process.

I have been doing this for a while now and the students love it.....it helps them , help themselves! And less stress on me...

Then they have to submit their final document, which I use for marking.

Education and awareness is important. Many faculty members and students think it is ok to copy paras from other papers, even without acknowledging the source! Ensuring a monitoring for plagiarism when small scale works are done -- assignment, review reports, etc -- in an institute and punishing the guilty will go a long way in weeding this out. It is important to share the message that quality is far more important than quantity -- at the top management/decision making level.

Beyond this, we can use tools, etc to check...

I agree that "weeding this bad practice out" is critical to quality and integrity in an institution.

But I think educating your students first and making them aware of the "sin" earlier in the assessment process, is a far more effective stance. Most of the students don't realise the extent to which they copy, until it glares them in the face. And there are tools that help with this.

So, my students use Turnitin more than I do. I just create the space for them.

Discipline must go hand in hand with nurturing.....just my thoughts

What I see in my practice with students, mainly freshmen in higher education, is that they only consider plagiarism to copy an entire work.

Maybe because they are accustomed to copy and paste what they do in social networks and share files (movies, music, books, etc.) over the internet, your perception of plagiarism and copyright does not coincide with the academic and legal definition.

I agree that education should be the main tool to combat plagiarism, especially with those entering the academic world, but for those using plagiarism intentionally, punishments should be more rigid.

We do not use TurnItIn, due to copyright considerations (the documents are stored on an external server and kept there, as far as I know). However, we track plagiarism using plugins for the Moodle LMS that we use. Once your administrator has installed and configured these plugins correctly, you need only set a checkmark to have submissions rated (which takes a while, so do not expect instantaneous results!).

Teachers and teaching assistants see a percentage score of similarity next to each submission and can click on this to see more details: who was the author of other "similar submission", up to a line-by-line comparison.

The interesting point is that the students themselves also see this percentage score next to their own submission (they do not see other students' scores or submissions). Thus they can already see that their submission is "suspiciously similar" to at least one other - however, they do not see the names of the authors of the other submissions. This has led to some "funny" discussions, where student X on being confronted with this admitted to copying from student Y - but the similarity was also high for student Z...

The good news for us is that plagiarisms are checked, students are aware of it, and it does not cost our valuable time to do this manually. Also, the work either stays on "our server", or is deleted from the external servers, thus serving the (strict) German copyright and privacy laws.

The stance that I take with students is that for papers they need to show credit for any non-original thoughts. I also make assignments which require critical thinking and analysis. I make a big deal of the fact that the assignments are there to prepare them for the final, and if they cheat I will know by how they do on the final. I also masher the majority of the grade come from a project that I watch them on all semester as well as the final.

It takes some time to develop professionalism. Once students understand what constitutes plagiarism and why it is not acceptable, they must go on to develop research and composition strategies that are inconsistent with plagiarism. Our students' first papers resemble scrapbooks: series of long quotations (appropriately cited, for the most part) with a few transitions tossed in to glue it together. The real challenge for them is learning to paraphrase appropriately. Based on the mistakes they make in paraphrasing, I suspect poor reading skills (or reading habits?) are a large part of the problem. Policing is another matter. Turnitin.com flags web-based plagiarism, but their coverage of books and journals is spotty. It misses as much as it catches, but the students seem to be intimidated by it and may put forth a bit more effort than they do on papers that are not subject to plagiarism scans...

better to keep supervisor responsible to check and monitor plagiarism

Undoubtedly, we must turn to electronic tools as a deterrent mechanism.

It is necessary to submit each work that is going to be evaluated to a similarity analysis.

URKUND is a good tool.

This process must be accompanied by an intentional educational activity, aimed at persuading students.

The universities must have this forecast in their legal bases, that is, both the persuasion and the control of the results through the comparative-electronic way.

There are other similar problems that approach in the following work:

Chapter Quality of life and education in the knowledge society

Interesting question & nice contributions. I am following.

Although some institutions use Turnitin and similar services to reduce the chances of plagiarism, still students who plagiarize always find a way around it. So Turnitin is not that effective.

In my opinion, since plagiarism is a serious academic offence, therefore, 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.

I agree with Abdullah Noori's point that intentional plagiarism should result in failure of the course and a second offense should result in dismissal from the institution. Unfortunately, higher administration is not always supportive of faculty during this process. Increasingly, concerns about retention seem to take precedence over ethics. Accreditation, politics, and money have become critical factors in the decision-making process (perhaps they always were...).