Catching a student who plagiarizes entire sections from the Gettysburg Address is easy. But how do instructors (high school or college) manage to nail those who do get caught?
Submitting a paper above one’s sophistication is a good tipoff, but what next?
Powerful or no, I can’t imagine Google tapping into the factory-line term paper biz, nor accessing 99.99 percent of the assignments turned in by last year’s freshmen in Lit 101. If papers aren’t “published,” there’s no easy way to verify authorship, is there?
Catching a student who plagiarizes entire sections from the Gettysburg Address is easy. But how do instructors (high school or college) manage to nail the remainder?
Submitting a paper above one’s level of sophistication is a good tipoff, but what next?
You learn how. Hard to explain sometimes, but you get a feel for it after a few years. Phrasing, tone, references, spelling mistakes…they can all raise red flags. In my subject, I regularly read most of the better web sites on topics I assign in class. I remember things I read, so if I see them again in a paper, I generally know. Then I can check if they copied or just paraphrased. There are other tricks as well.
There are services now that will compare student papers to publications. I was talking about this with one of my friends who now teaches philosophy at UC Berkeley. Apparently the philosophy department uses one of these services to determine if students are plagiarizing. They seem to think it works pretty well.
There are also sites like www.TurnItIn.com that will search the net and locate plagiarized passages for instructors.
Remember that students who are so lazy as to do this are also probably so lazy that they stole from convenient websites. Thus it is pretty easy to find the same text that they stole online in a quick search.
It probably is possible to get away with plaigerism. But in general, any student smart enough to get away with it is probably also smart enough to not need to.
Which, unfortunately, doesn’t stop them from trying.
Speaking of which, this thread could be construed as an effort to figure out how to avoid being caught while plagarising. :eek:
And, while I know commenting on the Google ads is passe, I just have to state with some amusement that two of the three ads right now are for sites providing term papers (and the third is for the previously mentioned turnitin).
While a postgraduate, I caught one plagiarist. Unfortunately for them, not only had I happened to have read the article they ripped off just weeks earlier, but it had also been written by the professor running the course. Whoops.
There’s other cases where I suspected plagiarism but had no proof. However, because the result was a sequence of paragraphs which made no sense in relation to one another, they got a poor result anyway
(1) No two people write exactly the same way. When you read something, you get a little “ding” when something sounds exactly like something else you’ve read recently. Figuring out where you’ve read it is generally a trivial task – most professors/TA’s will know who’s friends with who in the class, and 99% of the time people copy off of their friends.
(2) Formatting and spacing. For handwritten things, people who are copying often misplace words/phrases or omit them entirely. Often they’re rejoinders or transitional words that people would omit as they copy phrase for phrase. “The American Revolution was characterized a great period of turmoil in nation’s history.”
(3) When someone’s performance on an exams (or other monitored activities) is grossly out of proportion to their performance on homework (and other unmonitored activities).
I had a teacher who would just take a sentence, paragraph, phrase etc… and google it. She said that tended to work out pretty well for it. On a side note, my wife was taking an online class that I was helping with. The way assignments were turned in was via a message board. It was a very sloppy system and the whole process was easy to screw up. Anyways, one of the things I really didn’t like about it, is that you could see what everyone else turned in and vice versa. I was looking at what others had turned in for an assignment and I noticed one person who seemed to be writting better then someone that would be taking a high school english class in college. I googled a phrase from it and it popped right up. So googling is one way, but the writing level is what tipped me off.
BTW I turned the student in to the teacher (in an email) along with a link to the orginal paper. Dumbass did it again, and I turned him in again asking the teacher why I (writing as my wife) should spend so much time on this paper if this other student can just copy someone elses work, the teacher said they would talk to the person about it. The following week, I found that persons assignment, googled it and up it popped up. This time I demanded that the teacher make that person re-write all of the assignments or fail the student. I told the teacher that if one of these didn’t happen, I would turn both the student and the teacher (for doing nothing to stop it) over to the dean. I think it stopped after that.
Most of the plagairism I’ve caught has been of the cut-n-paste variety. As others have said, it’s actually pretty easy to notice when you go from typical college student writing to, well, not. Suddenly they’re using more sophisticated vocabulary, the style smooths out, etc. Much of the jump comes from the fact that they’re copying things they don’t understand (otherwise they could just paraphrase it and cite it, like they’re supposed to!) so they are unable to create a reasonable context for the pasted bit. So you come across phrase, sentence, or paragraph that doesn’t mesh with what’s around it, you type a portion of it into Google, and the source pops up, usually.
It’s also not hard to tell when they’ve ripped off a whole article by a professional writer, because they’re not professional writers; they’re taking the class in order to learn how to write like somebody with a college education. I’ve been pleasantly surprised a couple of times when I Googled like crazy to try to “out” a paper that was too good, and couldn’t find it anywhere. I photocopied those papers, then looked at the student’s work on future submissions . . . In every case, the quality of their work was consistently good to very good. So sometimes they’s jest smrt!
The hardest thing to catch would be them copying an entire paper from another student at the same level. All the essay topics I’ve graded have been quite idiosyncratic, not the sort of thing you could easily find online, so the biggest worry was that they’d copy a paper from another year. To try to head this off, the head instructor for the course would vary the topics and grading criteria (which the students recieve as part of the assignment) so that an A paper from last year might squeak by, but it wouldn’t still be an A, because A papers have to do a very good job covering the assigned topic in the prescribed manner.
One time in high school, a particularly boneheaded classmate plagiarized a paper by copying it, verbatim, from an encyclopedia. This would have been obvious enough, but as he was copying, he somehow skipped a page, and his copying was apparently so mindless that he didn’t notice. So, in the middle of the paper, he abruptly switched to a completely unrelated topic (whatever was next in the encyclopedia).
His subsequent oral presentation to the class was rather confusing for us, and embarrassing for him.
Sometimes it’s a section that’s a lot more sophisticated, or just different, than the student seems likely to be capable of.
Sometimes it’s specialized, technical, or outdated language- I caught one about Malcolm X when I noticed the phrase “house negro and field negro,” which I didn’t think would be likely to be part of a modern 10th grader’s vocabulary.
Sometimes, it’s based on the student’s work. My students turn in drafts and notes as they go, and if a child who I have not seen do any work turns in an excellent essay, I am suspicious.
It doesn’t take more than a minute to google a sentence or two and see if any matches come up.
And, yeah, there are ways to not get caught- for example, copy from a book rather than from the Internet. But my little plaigiarists, who I think are often doing it the morning it’s due, are not bright enough to work these ways out.
Google has never let me down. Of course, the dorks make it pretty damn easy by simply copying and pasting things from different sites, or just rearranging paragraphs. Also, even if the student paid for a paper, Google can still find the summary or first paragraph of the essay, which works like an advertisement for the rest of it.
What gets me is that I tell them from Week One–and mention in the syllabus–that I know all the tricks and that I am very good at Googling. And still they do it.
vivalostwages how do you know google has not let you down? Do you mean that everyone you think has plagiarized you have been able to prove it through google?
Maybe it’s been said in different ways, but when a student turns in a paper that makes points that he doesn’t seem conversant with in class, the bell goes off. Often, a student will adopt a general point of view on some topic or some overriding concept, and then his paper will betray him by contradicting his own in-class assertions. Sometimes, sorry to say, the “student” does not recognize subtleties in another writer’s work, and doesn’t even realize that he is, in effect, arguing with himself. When that happens, I first start to think, why is this student taking this position? Soon, it becomes unfortunately obvious that the student isn’t, in fact, taking any position at all. Rather, he’s copying someone else’s views. Plagiarism is sometimes easier to spot when you’re not looking for specific phrases, but concepts and larger scale notions. When you see that, it’s clear that this person is not the originator of the work. xo, C.
Google isn’t close to Deep Web, and Deep Web doesn’t access 99.999999 percent of all college papers written in the last 30 years. Well-written college papers are targets for would-be plagiarists and given that only a statistical handful can be readily computer-accessed suggests there is a potentially vast reservoir of untraceable material. Given that Google queries only the top molecule of the proverbial iceberg, you can indeed credibly state that Google has never let you down, but can’t categorically conclude that your search has been exhaustive.
BTW, does strong suspicion that someone didn’t write a brilliant essay enough to incriminate someone as a plagiarist?
I raise these questions because I’ve read articles that suggest plagiarism is out of control–and largely uncaught.
This is tricky, if only because of the fact that a person is considered innocent until proven guilty. If you don’t have proof that plagiarism was committed, it doesn’t do any good (and it can do a lot of harm) to accuse someone of plagiarism.
It probably is true that plagiarism is largely uncaught, but that it due to several reasons.
One is that many instructors/professors/teachers are too lazy to try to find proof of the plagiarism, or they simply don’t care if students plagiarize. In many cases, too, they may simply accept a D or C paper and not bother to look for plagiarism because “what student in their right mind would plagiarize with a bad paper?” (If the student’s goal is to submit a paper that is worth a substantial part of the grade, allowing them to pass the course without any effort, then the student doesn’t really need an A-quality paper, but many instructors/teachers don’t realize this.)
In addition, before the Internet was available, and even to some extent before Google was available, it was virtually impossible to find the source of plagiarized material, unless by some incredible luck/stupidity both students turned in the same paper to you in the same semester. I know that I saw plagiarized papers back in the 80’s, but I had no way to prove it, so the students usually got away with it. When you suspected plagiarism back then, you could confront the student to see if they had any clue what was in the paper, and if they didn’t seem to have any knowledge of the information that was included, you could claim plagiarism. (This could also work today, but most students are too lazy to buy papers from other students, when they can simply copy and paste papers from the Internet.)
Even with the Internet and anti-plagiarism tools, it can be hard to catch plagiarists who actually pay for someone to write an original paper for them, or who buy a pre-written paper, or who copy the paper from a printed source that is not available online. Since the pay-for-papers sites have their papers behind a login screen, Google, TurnItIn, et al. have no way of adding that text to their databases. (Most of the pre-written papers are probably available for free on another site, though, so most of them could be caught with a little more perseverance.
This is why, in most cases, the final course grade is based on more than just a paper. Ideally, much of the work on which the final grade depends should be completed in the instructor’s presence, like the final exam, so that the instructor is relatively sure that the student at least did some of the work required to get credit for the class. The glitch is online/Web-based courses, where the student and instructor never see each other face-to-face, and there is no easy way to even administer proctored exams.
I’ve been pleasantly surprised a couple of times when I Googled like crazy to try to “out” a paper that was too good, and couldn’t find it anywhere. I photocopied those papers, then looked at the student’s work on future submissions . . . In every case, the quality of their work was consistently good to very good. So sometimes they’s jest smrt!