What are the best practices for designing plagiarism-proof assignments?

One of the best ways to direct students away from plagiarism is for corporations like LinkedIn to pay professional writers to write content, instead of posting AI-generated nonsense and asking us to edit it for nothing. LinkedIn is clearly sending students the wrong message by publicly modeling unethical practices.

I’m a teaching professor who geeks out on course design, and assignment details and curricular materials are one of my biggest creative outlets. In the basic public speaking class I teach, I change the subject matter of every assigned speech every time I teach the class, so the temptation to recycle high school work or re-give somebody else’s speech is minimal because it doesn’t fit the latest iteration of the assignment. In survey classes, I pick very recent studies on subjects I think they’ll find interesting, and I have them sign up for one, read it, and write me a book report. The odds that they can find a friend who wrote on a study from my approved list are low, since I remove old ones and add new ones every time I teach the class.

Ensuring assessments are varied is essential. The central topic or theme can be the same (as it's not often we are looking for new knowledge in undergraduates), because it is the synthesis that is important. An assignment objective should be broken into smaller chunks with differing assessment methods used to measure outcomes - one of which should 'stress test' knowledge and understanding. This, combined with alternative task questions randomly distributed, will make it very difficult for plagiarism to occur.

Often I change the structure and format of the assignments by asking for creative stance. For instance, teaching blog writing in the Business Communication, I ask for visuals to support the blog content. Another technique is instead of giving case study report, I ask students to make a power point (visuals and bullet points with proper in-text citation) to present the case study. Using a storytelling approach through visuals is also a creative approach that has helped me reducing the plagiarism cases. In test exams, I give them hypothetical scenarios, seeking personal or professional life examples. By doing so, students refrain from copy-pasting content.

My personal stance is that plagiarism detection tools have still limitations. It depicts three words and increase similarity index. The cases of similarity should be dealt case-to-case. Similarity is a tricky thing and in some courses (modules), it would not work. Plagiarism checking tools should be the start point, but not the ultimate decider of the fate of the article/assignments/project. Proper training should be given to students in the orientation phase.

I have used Turnitin for several years as a tool to mark University students work. It is great at detecting overtly copied chunks of writing providing the original source is held on their database This is not always the case and it does not pick up paraphrasing that merely changes some of original wording of a whole paragraph whilst maintaining the style and writing of the original author. Turnitin does require markers to be vigilant of plagiarism and not rely solely on the software. I have found it most useful to identify where my students need help with their writing skills.

Tools have their limits, but you can try with services such as Copyscape or Hrecorder (which can have uses beyond a professional capacity, too). At the end however the question will be whether you want to focus your time and attention on that, or instead let your creative powers flow. What goes around comes around and eventually you will know who copies. I use it as a filter to find out who I do NOT want to work/collaborate with.