While I love to teach, one aspect I am not fond of is plagiarism. In 15 years of teaching, it still amazes me the inventive ways students try to take someone else’s work and pass it off as their own. One of my student’s even tried copying and pasting text from an online paper from another professor who I knew. Like most instructors, I take student plagiarism very seriously and I talk about it at the beginning of class and before each assignment. Some students plagiarize deliberately like purchasing a paper while other times it is accidental like paraphrasing another’s words. There are several ways to detect plagiarism in your students’ work including:
Assignment Criteria
Give very explicit instructions on how an assignment is to be turned in and how a paper is formatted. Papers with strange margins, varying citation references, and odd capitalization are signs that a paper is not original work.
Out-of-Date References
Look for dated references and hard-to-find resources in papers your students turn in. Strange references often come from papers purchased or borrowed online.
Work Progress
Since writing is a process, require your students to turn in all drafts of a paper. Single drafts of a paper are a red flag to any instructor.
Web Tools
Ask your students to submit their work electronically and run each paper through a plagiarism checking service to search for copied material. There are many web tools available to faculty members to detect plagiarism, some sites are free and others require a subscription service. Ask your college if there is a subscription service or use a free site to check the paper for copied passages.
Compare and Contrast
I start out the semester by having students do in-class writings and then compare the student’s written class work and compare it to assignments done outside of class. Sharp contrasts between in-class writing and outside work often indicate plagiarism.
