Plagiarism

Why is it that so many students must think me incapable of a simple Google search?

In most of my classes, I assign extra credit projects. (Yeah, I know I'm nice, but my exams are killer so it evens out). Typically students are given two choices: create a HW/exam question for this class or design an outreach experiment to elementary or middle schoolers on a topic from this class.

In both cases, student answers are always rife with plagiarism. HW/Exam questions are often taken directly from the text or from an alternative text. As if I am not familiar with all the texts in the field! And experiments are often copied line by line from a webpage!

Given that these are extra credit assignments, I chose to not award credit for plagiarized answers. But what about the gray area, not exactly plagiarized, a few words have been changed, but virtually identical to a webpage or book problem. For this I usually give 1/2 credit, taking off 1/2 for lack of creativity.

And to top all of this off, we have a long plagiarism discussion at the beginning of the course. Students were very careful not to plagiarize in project reports, but I guess in extra credit its okay? Ah, so frustrating.