This week's tip is for my fellow instructors. (Nooooooooooooo... the school year is not just about over. Some of us teach all year round.) While none of us want to deal with the ugly problem of plagiarism, it is an unfortunate reality.
Just last semester, I had a student who was turning in questionable work. This student had poor writing skills, and was not technically proficient in the subject matter. The first paragraph of his/her work reflected this, but the remaining paragraphs (which were in different font), were correctly written, and reflected a high level of technical understanding. It was an obvious 'cut and paste' job. How disappointing. The student that knows the least walking into the class, has the potential to learn the most.
There are a number of resources and tools available to help instructors detect plagiarism:
Plagiarism.org
offers
interesting information on plagiarism, and a link to the Turnitin
web site, which is an online resource for educators. Turnitin
has a great tutorial of their services.Plagiarized.com
has some examples of plagiarized papers, as well as a list of indicators
to tip you off.
Robert
Harris, who wrote The Plagiarism Handbook
, lists strategies for prevention in his
"Anti-Plagiarism Strategies for Research Papers
" article.Eve2
is an essay verification engine, which boasts over 40 million searches in
the past 2 years. There's a new version coming out, and Canexus.com
is looking for beta testers.Plagiserve
cites a database of 70,000 term papers to check suspected papers against,
as well as Paper Mill monitoring.Plagiserve
will deliver a report within 12 hours of submission. Plagiserve
is affiliated with EduTie
,
another interesting site with a great tutorial.Hope this helps! Feel free to email Lesley if you run into any problems.