This may be true, but the majority of students who plagiarize are also not going to be searching the 99.999999 percent of the college papers written over the years. They do a quick Google search and find something to cut and paste. If the students can find it on Google, so can the teachers.
Plagiarism is a form of forgery. Sort of by definition, it is impossible to know how many forgers (or plagiarists) get away with it. The good ones are not detected.
Teachers handle a lot of papers. The plagiarist must create a document that will be read as part of two endless series (series one, papers from him; series two papers from all the students the teacher sees). His product must not attract attention as being too different from (or too similar to) all the other papers in the two series.
Do that, but make sure it gets an “A.”
I once had an uncle who was a mail sorter. He handled so much mail he could tell by feel if an envelope was overweight. He just got good at it because he did it so much.
Yes, every time. They don’t even try to change the text, and rearranging it does not matter, so…all I have to do is enter one sentence, or even part of one, in quotation marks in the search box. Then the link to the stolen article, essay, etc. shows up right away.
I think they’re just hoping I’ll be too busy to notice that their writing in the paper does not match their in-class writing at all.
Point of clarification: I get a number of students who should not be transferring into composition just yet, since their English is not up to snuff. So when they write something in class, it barely makes any sense. Then when they have an outside essay, all of a sudden the writing sounds much more polished and far beyond their abilities…but that’s because they never actually wrote it themselves. It’s a dead giveaway. We can’t tell force them to drop a class; it’s their choice to stay in it if they want to. And if they choose to plagiarize after all the warnings, well, that’s their decision too.
The statistics are for illustrative purposes only, of course. 
That said, you never saw my fraternity’s backlog of term papers and exams. If our frat house was par for course nationwide–and I wouldn’t be surprised if it were–that’s a huge inventory.
I might point out that while schools expel for plagiarizing, this nation has a noted presidential scholar recently caught for plagiarizing and neatly weaseled her way out of any culpability. I doubt her denials would have satisfied a university ethics panel.
Typing a few sentances into Google actually catches a lot of plagiarized papers. In my teaching experience (in the sciences) I catch many papers that are downloads from WebMD or Mayo clinic. Many plagiarized papers have big sections lifted from these types of sources.
Other services include TurnItIn- a subscription service that searches for profit paper mills. I don’t use that one, and Google has worked fine for me.
In terms of unpublished work, it is difficult. You are right, writing style that differs from previous assignments and, for my science classes, using extremely technical terminology not covered in class, or defined by the author is a dead give away.
Often, if you suspect plagiarism pulling the student into your office and asking will get a confession.
I might also note that this is GQ, not IMHO. :rolleyes:
Of course, that’s not foolproof. I was reading a paper from a student that discussed an obscure civil rights leader. Since I knew nothing about the man, I grabbed one of my many books on the Civil Rights Movement to see if I could get some corroborating info…and you can see where this is going. That was just some shitty bad luck for my plagiarist, I guess.
As an aside, if someone asks for help in committing plagiarism, it’s really fun to give them an essay from the Postmodernism Generator.
I was accused of plagiarism once as a freshman; the professor apparently didn’t believe that I’d come up with the analytical method I used in the paper on my own and asked me where I’d gotten it from. Thankfully, she was satisfied that I was telling the truth when I replied that it was in fact my own work but that I’d be greatful to be pointed in the direction of writers who were using the same method. Since she was simultaneously saying that it was good work and that she thought I was capable of plagiarism, I wasn’t sure whether to take it as a compliment or as an insult.
There was a physics professor at UVA who caught several hundred cases of plagarism a few years ago. It was a very popular physics course for non-majors, basically something people took to fulfill their science requirement. I guess some of them assumed this meant they wouldn’t have to do any work. It was practically true . . . as I understand it, the only assignment from the course that was at all time-consuming was one paper at the end of the semester, which just had to explain the physics behind some everyday technology or phenomenon. Evidently even this was too much for people, as it turned out a lot of students were getting their papers from a bank of previously submitted papers. I guess they figured the professor wouldn’t remember anything submitted a couple years ago, even though it was the same professor teaching the course.
As it happened, the professor did recognize some of the old papers, and what’s more, he still had copies of all of them saved. Once he suspected cheating, he actually wrote a program himself that would search through them and find passages that matched ones from the new submissions. He ended up finding several hundred matches, and then turned the lot of them over to the Honor Committee. Too bad for them, because UVA has a somewhat controversial “single-sanction” policy, where anyone convicted of an honor offense (like plagiarism) is expelled.
Wow, that part about pre-internet days really surprised me. Suppose the topic is the Roman forum, so the lazy student looks the subject up at the library and gets a few good books on it. Then they begin to pull the information out that they’ll steal and put it in their paper. Now the only way that’s lazy it not including a cite. They’ve done the work and the research, all they would need to do is quote or paraphrase, add a cite and it’s a legit paper. With the work taken to do a plagerised paper in pre-interent days, I can only imagine that with the internet plagerism must be more common now.
Before the internet it would just be taking a few extra steps to submit a fully legit paper. The research for potential plagerised material is the same research for legit material, as long as the student cites it. That’s amazing how things change over time.
Not if their fraternity (or whatever) is keeping filing cabinets filled with old papers in their basement. (Something I have heard of happening.) Then the work required to plagerise is just looking through a drawer to find a paper for the same course dating from when a different instructor was teaching it.
Luck/stupidity it may be, but it’s not incredible. I’ve seen it happen several times. On homework assignments right next to each other in the stack. Sometimes, it’s even the same handwriting. I sort of feel insulted by those… How stupid do the students think I am, that they think I won’t catch that?
Another trick I use is to pre-sort the ones with the wrong answer by what answer they gave. Two students who copied off of each other (if they got it wrong) will both get the same wrong answer, and sometimes it’s so spectacularly wrong that it’s distinctive. Even aside from catching cheaters, this helps keep my grading consistent. But of course, this only really works well in objective subjects like math and sciences.
It was computer science that I taught, not English or Philosophy, but the principles are the same. It centers around knowing your students and knowing the subject.
As for copying from books, students tend to forget that professors read, too. If there’s a particularly good book about the subject you’re studying, odds are good that the prof’s read it–and might even have a copy. It’s particularly amusing when you recommend a book or magazine to your students and they’re stupid enough to copy something from it. Do they think you recommended it without reading it first? Sheesh.
I had one student turn in barely adequate work all quarter, and then an absolutely stellar end-of-term project that included more than I’d asked for. It took all of three minutes to find the thing on the Web. Why he thought I couldn’t find it, I’ll never know. He hadn’t even edited the comments in the code.
Have you mentioned that on here before?
I remember a while back a compsci teacher talking about someone who turned in a program that had been handed in before. However the way I remember it was that something in the code didn’t work and when the teacher went looking for it they found that the variables were offensive names for the teacher or something like that. I’ll attempt to find it the thread, but that might be difficult.
When I TAed a Pascal/Assembly Language class in 1975 we wrote a program to create a signature of a program by tracking where variables were declared and used. We had found that copiers would basically change variable names, but nothing else. (They were smart enough to change comments.) We found a few. This was pre Web, lucky for us.
We use Turnitin at the school I teach at.
I teach students who are just learning to research and provide citations, so a lot of what I use it for, at least in my Junior High classes, is to see what portions of their papers have been quoted or paraphrased, and see whether they have been properly cited. Then there’s the issue of how much original writing the student actually did beyond clear quotes and minimally-altered paraphrases. :rolleyes:
In my high school classes, I’m usually picking off the plagiarizers. They know what they’ve done and can’t believe they haven’t got away with it. I do Turnitin demos for them, and I’d say well over half turn to plagiarism on first instinct.
The literature is littered with surveys showing that a lot of college students today don’t see their coursework as something that builds their academic skills, but as just another obstacle in their path to the “A” they deserve just by being themselves. Their eithics don’t prohibit them from plagiarizing, because they’re just supposed to turn in an A-level paper, right? Does it matter how they get it?
Even when caught plagiarizing, my budding college-students-to-be are often extremely unclear on the concept as to what, if anything, they’ve done wrong, other than get caught at something that got them into trouble. Sad.
What’s nice about Turnitin over Google is that it uploads the entire document, as opposed to having to copy and paste portions in the hopes that you picked a plagiarized passage.
Their database includes billions of URLs, particularly page mills, but even more importantly, it contains every single paper ever turned into them. So if there’s some new paper mill that’s not on anyone’s radar, or a newer book that you may not have read so that you don’t recognize passages, if 75% your student’s paper matches something submitted to a college 5 states away, you know something’s up.
Good memory. I mentioned this one in the same thread as the post by Monstre that you linked to. That was a great thread.
Voyager, most of the students were smart enough to change the comments and the variable names. This particular student changed the comments at the very beginning, but left everything else alone. I had one student dumb enough to leave a copyright notice in some code he swiped!
I want to also stress the “stupidity” aspect of the majority of cheaters. If they had any brains and weren’t lazy*, they’d do the actual work. Thus they cheat so very, very badly that it really is easy to catch them.
*Actually, I’ve got a lot of students over the years who spent more time avoiding doing it right than doing it right. But that’s usually not cheating. Just idiocy.
Keep in mind that known plagurisers are a self-selecting sample. You never catch the clever plagurisers so obviously the caught plagurisers are stupid.
I have a friend who has a copy of a cosmology report he did in High School on his website. He gets about 5 or 6 hits a year from people googling key phrases from .edu domains, obviously looking out for plagurisers. It seems that it’s quite popular.