Plagiarism at a minimum exposes a certain degree of sloppiness in a student and at worst reveals a serious character flaw that needs to be dealt, that of stealing ideas and/or the artistic arrangement of words from an author and claiming it as their own. Nobody is immune to the potential of committing plagiarism, of course, whether accidental or deliberate. Nonetheless, I firmly believe that the fostering of key habits in a student's research and writing, not to mention a mindset that cares about what's at stake, can help minimize the risk.
Here at Baptist College of Ministry I have the privilege of teaming up with a colleague to address all the students in the college on the matter of plagiarism. We host an hour long session on the topic, and then we make every student take a test (designed by me) where the main goal is the ability to distinguish between plagiarized work and acceptable work, especially correct vs. incorrect paraphrase.
The test must be passed perfectly, though it can be retaken multiple times (probably about 35% pass it perfectly on the first try). After failing to pass the test the second time, each student must meet with a faculty member to go over the test and discuss each question, after which they will take it again. Some students require more "hands-on" coaching, and that's fine; the point is that everybody understands enough to pass it perfectly in the end.
All answers are multiple choice. Thanks to Populi, the answers to the questions are randomized, so nobody can simply memorize the order of the questions and keep trying until they get it right via brute force. The first four questions of the test are basic, common-sense questions about the nature of plagiarism and how we handle citation here at BCM (e.g., we use footnotes, not endnotes).
For the next three questions, we make the students study an article from the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society and, focusing on specific paragraphs of material, distinguish between good citations of that article and plagiarism of that article. The two, well-written articles we utilize are: Timothy T. Larsen, "Literacy and Biblical Knowledge: The Victorian Age and Our Own," JETS 52, no. 3 (2009): 519–535, or Kirk R. MacGregor, "Biblical Inerrancy, Church Discipline, and the Mennonite-Amish Split," JETS 60, no. 3 (2017): 581–593 (we alternate between the two, depending on the year). I chose these two articles for the exam because, (a.) they are interesting, and (b.) they are not technical (i.e., requiring knowledge of technical terms, etc.). The questions then consist of examples of good citation using those articles vs. poor citation using those articles (i.e., a hypothetical writer who plagiarizes Larsen or MacGregor, either not citing them or citing a sentence or series of key words without putting the sentence or phrase in quotation marks)
The test is "open book" in the sense that they are encouraged to have a digital or physical copy of the article open, including a physical copy that has been highlighted or marked up. They may also have scrap paper with their notes from the previous failed exam, etc. It is impossible to cheat on this exam (unless you are looking at somebody else taking it) because, again, the answers are randomized.
Each student will probably take the exam twice in their college career (and all seminary students take it once). This does not, of course, totally vanquish plagiarism unto the nether world of academic dishonesty where it belongs, but at a minimum it reinforces to the students that plagiarism is (a.) undesirable and (b.) can be avoided if you use your brain.
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