As teachers, we all remember the first time we busted a student for plagiarizing. A range of emotions accompanies such a discovery. I'm angry at the student for trying to take a shortcut on the assignment. I'm saddened that the student is too stressed or lazy or apathetic to actually attempt to complete the assignment herself. I'm shocked that the student thought I wouldn't catch him. And I'm satisfied that I have the professional chops to sniff out the mildest whiff of plagiarism.

It's the middle of the term at many K-12 schools and universities--AKA cheating season--and bloggers are weighing in with stories about plagiarism, theories about its causes, and methods for discouraging cheating on written assignments.

Happy Chyck shares a recent bust, delineates the telltale signs of plagiarism, and asks her students to bring. it. on.

Here are some clues Detective HappyChyck gathered:

• Student approached me at the beginning of the class and asked what the missing assignment on his grade was. We spent 2 days in class working on it last week. How could he not know what it was?
• After the student learned from his classmates what the assignment was, he was convinced that he did the assignment. Oh, really?
• I check my electronic in-box, which jogged my memory. He had turned in an empty document. Common kid ploy. They hope that I'll just check off the list off assignments by looking at their names in the file names and not actually open and check the assignment. Is it possible he was trying to dupe me, or was it a technical error?
• I told the student if he could show me the completed assignment on his computer, I'd accept it. He said he threw it away. If you ever look at these kids' computers, they look much like their backpacks. Funny how when they need an assignment, they've just cleaned and thrown things out. Up until that moment they are teenage pack rats.
• A few minutes later the student tells me he's found the file on his computer. He brings it to me to look at, and he says, "Here it is. See, here's my name." He is talking about his name labeled on the inside of the document. Thanks for showing me that you put your name on your paper kid. That's not weird at all.
• The assignment is very well done. I'd even say it's an A paper. The kid is not an A student. We're talking lacking ability here. I accepted the assignment from the student, but I looked up the assignments from his nearby friends. None of them turned in the assignment.
• Not many people earned a solid A on the assignment. I looked up the students who had a perfect score on the assignment. The girl who sat one row over and two seats back had a perfect score. Bingo.

Their heads are probably still spinning. Did you see how fast I discovered your cheating ways, children? Still wanna mess with me? I guess it's time for me to tell the story of the time I benched (or rather their actions landed them on the bench) half the baseball team because they were a bunch of cheaters.

A couple years ago, I was a teaching assistant for two very different classes. Within a single week, I caught a plagiarist in each class. The first student plagiarized--I kid you not--an ethics paper. The second student--and again, I'm not pulling your leg--plagiarized an assignment where he was required to plagiarize. I'm still trying to figure out which situation is more ironic.

Allow me to explain. The professor of the second class, Bob Ostertag, asked students to write papers composed entirely of brief quotations from websites. The assignment was brilliant, as it forced students to think about writing: about essay organization, sentence order, phrasing, and the practice of research. It was lovely. Students color-coded their sentence fragments to match entries in their bibliography. One student, however, had clearly just taken a series of markers and underlined random phrases, claiming they were from particular sources. Instead, he had copied and pasted the entire text of a single web page. (You can listen to Ostertag talk about plagiarism, copyright, and other issues in a video filmed during a talk he gave last spring at UC Davis.)

Why do students cheat? Lauren Forcella gathers hypotheses from teens. I'm disturbed by the distinction made by one student between "cheating" and "'white' cheating"--a concept drawn, I think, from lies vs. "white lies." Go check out how Forcella and teens explain the difference between the two kinds of cheating. Where do we draw the line? What's acceptable? We need to make our expectations clear.

The blogger at Matrika suggests that a "succeed at any cost" ethic in some cultures contributes to cheating.

Barbara Sibble offers another explanation:

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 has changed the way our nation views testing and achievement. Educators are held accountable for the academic performance of their students while students are required to meet certain criteria in order to be promoted. As we become more focused on test taking as a measure of achievement, are we encouraging students to cheat their way to a better grade? According to McKeachie & Svinicki (2006) over 400,000 results showed up on Google when "cheating in College" was typed in. Some of the other statistics reported were that cheating among high school students has dramatically increased over the past 50 years, college-bound students who are above average are cheating, and between 75% and 98% of college students who took a survey reported that they have cheated in high school. It is obvious that cheating is not restricted to low performing students.

How can we discourage students from plagiarizing?

Kenley Jones offers one solution: make cheating socially unacceptable:

Although my high school teachers threaten to punish us to the fullest extent of the law if they caught us cheating, I don’t think anyone took the warning too seriously. Chances were our teachers would never find out if we stole a research paper off the internet or copied someone’s essay; however, our classmates would inevitably discover the truth. In a class of only fifty-eight students, news travels fast, and everyone seems to know everything about everyone else. The rare instances of cheating in my school were greeted with a general outpouring of contempt from students. Maybe we valued intellectual creativity and the freedom to come up with our own ideas. Or perhaps we were simply noble minded scholars concerned with the academic integrity of our school, but for the sake of honesty, I will offer a different view on why we didn’t tolerate cheating. A student who stayed up late to finish writing a lab report for physics couldn’t respect the fact that one of her classmates merely copied someone’s report. Students faced the issue of academic integrity with an attitude that said, “If I have to work hard, so should everyone else.” The fact that cheating wasn’t socially acceptable did more to build up our school’s academic integrity than anything else.

The blog of the American Association of School Librarians reports on a presentation by Virginia Morse. One of the solutions presented is seeing assignments as a process instead of a product, which means tracking and grading the process of research and writing as well as the final paper. This is a fabulous idea, and one I've tried to implement myself, albeit in a limited way. Another terrific way to combat plagiarism is to create a completely unique assignment. If your assignment is imaginative enough and one of a kind, your students can't copy it from elsewhere.

Did you plagiarize when you were in school? If so, why, and what was the result?

And if you teach or are a student, what are your tips for discouraging plagiarism?

Leslie Madsen-Brooks helps university faculty improve their teaching. She blogs at The Clutter Museum, Museum Blogging, and The Multicultural Toy Box.