1. Keep your priorities straight. What he means by this is that teachers should not become so preoccupied with fighting plagiarism that it negatively impacts their teaching. While one should take it seriously, efforts on this front should not eclipse other areas of teaching that are actually more important;
2. State your policy in your syllabus. This is very straightforward, but quite important when you find yourself having to deal with a plagiarism case;
3. Talk about it openly. I have found this to be my most effective tool in dealing with plagiarism. After I had a class in which half the students plagiarized to one degree or another on a research paper, I realized that ignorance was a big part of the problem, that people who were well intentioned were doing it because they weren’t fully aware of what constitutes plagiarism. Since then, I have been more vocal about it and tried to explain it in greater detail before having students turn in assignments. The problems I had previously encountered dropped precipitously after I took the time to explain plagiarism better;
4. Make plagiarism difficult. One idea he has that I’ve decided to implement in my classes is to have students do an in-class writing assignment first that I can then compare to out-of-class writing assignments they do later so I have a baseline to compare it to;
5. Don’t penalize the non-plagiarists. I very much like this point and share his attitude: I always work off the assumption that students are honest and not trying to cheat. Like Jenkins, I would never limit writing assignments to the in-class variety, because I think that serious writing takes time and I don’t want to use up a lot of class time on such activities simply because I’m afraid people will cheat if they don’t do their work in class;
6. What about the software? He doesn’t like software like Turnitin, for a variety of reasons. This is not a problem for me, since students in my classes write in French and there is no equivalent French software;
7. Let it go. As he remarks, “Either you can be a teacher or you can be the plagiarism police.” I’m not sure if I’m capable of being as aloof about it as he is, but he does make a good point: when I find myself fixating excessively on borderline cases, it negatively affects me and my teaching, as well as my relationship with my students. Sometimes, I should just chill. As a student once said to me, “Hé prof ! Soyez zen !”
Overall, I very much enjoyed a refreshing counterpoint to the typical sorts of articles one reads about plagiarism.