My wife is a teacher. She recently assigned a book report on Sounder. One of her students turned in a report that scored very highly. Unfortunately, this student is not known for her skills in this area. In other words, she MAY have gotten the report from another student or, most likely, from a website that provides already published book reports. I know there’s a site that aloows teachers to track this sort of thing, but I’ve had no luck fining it. The bad part is that she needs to know BEFORE Thursday morning!!
One thing I’ve seen suggested is picking out a phrase or two from the essay and entering it verbatim (in quotes) into Google.
For example, I went to cyberessays.com and poked through their stuff at random, settling on “Ordinary Atheist”. I then did a google search on “ordinary atheist” and “life is doomed”, and that page was the first hit. The next several hits seem to be that same essay at other download-your-term-paper sites.
I can attest to the effectiveness of http://www.turnitin.com. I had a couple of suspicious papers last year, and found out about the site. They had a free trial offer going (maybe they still do), and they were able to help me find the site from which the paper was lifted. If I recall correctly, the fee for a regular “membership” was not too high, but I didn’t join. Essentially, all I had to do was send in a sample paragraph from the suspicious paper, and they were able to find where it came from and give you a link to it. It’s nice to have at least a small way to fight back against the amazing amount of cheating that goes on because of the internet.
