BC TEAL 2026 Annual Conference

Plagiarism has become a serious concern globally, especially with the rise of GenAI tools enabling AI-generated plagiarism, called AIgiarism (Tang, 2024). Indeed, plagiarism has been redefined as presenting the words or ideas of another person, or those generated by artificial intelligence, without reference to the source, for an advantage in an evaluation context (Peters, 2023). L2 students often resort to GenAI tools to compensate for their underdeveloped language proficiency. While universities have developed academic integrity guidelines, instructors seek practical strategies to prevent, not just respond to, plagiarism (Liu, 2025). Yet, research on preventing plagiarism remains limited (Eaton, 2020; Gustilo et al., 2024; Scurr, 2025; Sopcak & Hood, 2022). Thus, this presentation reports on an original study exploring university instructors' strategies to prevent student plagiarism.
To pool the wisdom of university instructors on their perceptions of plagiarism prevention, the study draws on individual semi-structured qualitative interviews with 59 instructors in North America and Europe, collected through an international research partnership in 2023-2024 and analyzed using NVivo 15. By employing a grounded theory approach to gain a data-driven perspective (Corbin & Strauss, 2008), the researchers adopted an inductive method to select relevant excerpts, code them into themes, and categorize the themes into structured groups. Based on the analysis, the report shares 30 selected plagiarism prevention strategies aligned with different stages of the student writing process. Examples include positive instruction first, “deplagiarization” demonstrations, multi-layered assignments, progress checks via Google Docs, interactive conferences, and “share chat” links. Session participants leave with actionable takeaways.