Wouldn’t that be “the majority of cheaters who actually get caught”?
I’m not a teacher. However, I’m the daughter of a Spanish teacher, and even I can tell, just by a quick read of the papers, if its a student’s own work (she normally calls me over for second opinions on stuff, so I get pretty familiar with writing style.)
I also once worked on a group research paper (I HATE those), and had the task of putting all of our work together into one document at the end. I realized at that point that some of one of the girl’s part sounded awfully familiar- a quick google search turned up that it had been poorly paraphrased.
I also once had an ex-boyfriend send me plagiarized poetry. I realized it by the third poem when I saw how different the writing styles were.
It’s pretty easy to pick out when someone claims work not their own.
As a sidenote, in the past, while researching stuff, I’ve managed to accidently stumble across some of those sites selling papers- I can’t even imagine why anyone would use them; they seem so poorly written.
Slight hijack, but I fail to see why that would be considered controversial. That policy should be S.O.P. in every university in the country.
[/hijack]
Yep, that was me. One of the many tales in my “Stupid Cheater Tricks” thread.
The standard tricks they attempt in copying on computer programming assignments are:
- changing the formatting, spacing, etc.
- changing the variable names
- switching around the order of functions
But there are still too often plenty of “tells”, and most of the time, the plagiarists do (1) or (2), but not both.
But for the last few semesters, I’ve been using a very nice online tool that helps detect the likely cases of copied code. And it’s amazingly simple to use – I just type a simple unix command that runs a Perl script, sends off a whole set of directories to an online tool, and formats a web page with the results. It is not fooled by the old “change the variable names” trick either. Results include side-by-side comparisons of any pair of code submissions, along with percentage of matching code flagged by the tool. I still look at all suspicious ones by hand, to verify. But it’s great at discovering the ones I need to look at more carefully.
Awwww, shucks… Thanks! 
One other common “giveaway”, at least in my classes…
Students getting brilliant assignment scores, but somehow coming up with Fs on the tests.
Especially since I ask coding questions on the tests in the same format and approach as what they saw on assignments – if they truly did their own work on the homework and understood it, they would have no trouble on the tests.
Absolutely. This has been my view (and course policy) for a long time now. The test average is worth a higher percentage than the homework (out of class) assignments. And I typically have a policy (on the syllabus) that the test average be a passing grade (C-) for the student to qualify for a passing grade in the course. (I will waive this if I am quite sure the student is doing their own work, but I’ve seldom had need to).
No.
In the UK there is a national database open to all universities and colleges. This has all published articles and book titles in one database and, to check for plagiarism, you simply upload the suspicious work (we have a policy of testing a 10% sample of all work too) and it shows a side by side comparison with a traffic-light system (red for 90-100% similar sections, amber for 70-90% and green for less). Of course, most comparisons only highlight properly cited quotes so these do need to be checked manually.
Best of all, whenever a university uploads an essay to check, a copy of the essay is also added to the database, not only increasing its size exponentially but also ensuring that future students anywhere in the UK using that paper will also run the risk of being caught. In fact I have heard, second hand, how a student at one institution was caught passing his work to his younger brother, studying at a second institution. On being caught, both were thrown off the course, probably because you don’t want future doctors behaving in this way!