Abstract
Developing a Comprehensive Plagiarism Assessment Rubric: Defining “plagiarism” is not simple, and its complexity is too seldom appreciated. This article offers a comprehensive plagiarism assessment rubric from a four-year study of analyzing students’ plagiarism. From qualitative analyses of 120 students’ paraphrase samples, we identified seven plagiarism dimensions and employed a five-point Likert-scale to rank each dimension’s severity. Then, we enlisted editors, reviewers, and research supervisors to refine the severity of the plagiarism dimensions to articulate a plagiarism spectrum. We produced a Plagiarism Scoring Rubric to categorize 127 plagiarism combinations out of the seven plagiarism dimensions’ composites. Finally, we described how the Plagiarism Scoring Rubric, accompanied by the severity indices, supports instructors in scoring students’ plagiarism and enables students to understand proper crediting of prior work better when citing and paraphrasing.
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1. Appendix A: https://figshare.com/s/67c74cb3425e81613083
https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.14702742
2. Appendix B: https://figshare.com/s/a8a16a13e8c04f9da334
https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.14702781
3. Appendix C: https://figshare.com/s/56e2cab50fa3d846c2e3
https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.14702973
4. Appendix D: https://figshare.com/s/35ac0193a3b8b70de44a
https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.14702985
5. Plagiarism Composite Severity Calculation
https://figshare.com/s/e4c80d0884c0cb5b7186
https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.15052890
6. A Model of Plagiarism based on Corpus Severities and Probabilities
Notes
While our research applies to both students’ and researchers’ textual plagiarism, this paper focuses on student plagiarism because that is the source at which the plagiarism that editors and reviewers encounter ultimately begins.
In linguistic studies, L1 and L2 respectively refer to first and second language learners.
English as a Foreign Language
In this section, Student refers to “student participants” who voluntarily took part in three task cycles and produced writing or paraphrasing corpora. Reviewers, editors, and research supervisors refer to “reviewer participants” who took the survey. “Expert reviewers” refers to those outside the study who provided feedback on the survey without taking the survey to be counted as a data point.
Abbreviations
- L1 and L2:
-
in linguistic studies, L1 and L2 respectively refer to the first and second language learners
- EFL:
-
English as a Foreign Language
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Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge Dr. Edward Nuhfer, who served as an experienced reviewer, provided perceptive comments, and strengthened efforts at paper quality assurance. We would also like to show our gratitude to Dr. Ian Geoffrey Kennedy for sharing his pearls of wisdom with us during the course of this research. We thank Dr. Abdorreza Tahriri and Hamed Delam for their timely insights. We would like to offer our deep appreciation to all the “Student Participants” and “Reviewer Participants,” who so generously took part in this project. We are also immensely grateful to ResearchGate members for answering researchers’ questions and shedding lights on the way of project progress.
Funding
This work was partially supported by Larestan University of Medical Sciences (Grant Number: 1399-69).
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Moohebat administered the paraphrasing tasks, extracted the plagiarism dimensions, designed and distributed the plagiarism assessment survey, analyzed the data, calibrated the severity indices for the plagiarism dimensions, produced the plagiarism-scoring rubric, and wrote the research project and the manuscript drafts. Paul designed “Plagiarism Composite Severity Calculation" and "A Model of Plagiarism based on Corpus Severities and Probabilities,” and was a major contributor in designing the plagiarism assessment survey and study concepts and theories. Abdol Hossein designed the quasi-experimental study of assessing student paraphrase and was a major contributor in designing the course-teaching schedule and qualitative scheme of plagiarism. Reza was a major contributor in survey scaling and proofreading the manuscript. Kyle was a major contributor in forming research questions and study concepts, proofread and edited the primary and final drafts, and produced the final report in LaTeX to submit for final publication. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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For the ethics approval of the task study, “student participants” signed a consent form.
The research ethics committee of Larestan University of Medical Sciences certified the survey study.
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Additional Files
Plagiarism Assessment Survey Data This file contains all of the Plagiarism Assessment Survey Data for this project. https://www.figshare.com/s/b9d9fda7a9aa32b74575https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.21302052
Table 6 This file contains the Plagiarism Scoring Rubric. https://www.figshare.com/s/55d05abf1ea2e7d9e078https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.21302184
The Project Procedure This file contains the Procedure of Developing the Plagiarism Assessment Rubric. https:///www.figshare.com/s/15482f5a4b4b22f046eahttps://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.21302559
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Shoyukhi, M., Vossen, P.H., Ahmadi, A.H. et al. Developing a comprehensive plagiarism assessment rubric. Educ Inf Technol 28, 5893–5919 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-022-11365-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-022-11365-1