1) Reputation. It helps when a student hasn't been showing up for class. He or she doesn't know what's going on, and is more likely to seek help from other sources. Being a jerk is predictive of being a plagiarizer. My wife has warned me of problem students in the past, too. Also, if the quality shifts drastically--from really awful to graduate-level work, or vice versa.planet p wrote:I've always wanted to know how professors know their students' work is plagiarized.sighyoung wrote:It's best not to trash my class in public and rudely turn in papers late without any explanation when a simple Google search will reveal that two of your papers are plagiarized, and that you will therefore fail the class.
2) Lots and lots of of style giveaways--phrases, ideas, or big words that students would never use, or are just plain wrong. Weird expressions and idioms that pop up in a paper, as if the paper were written by someone in the Netherlands. New kinds of punctuation, grammar, and syntax mistakes. A bibliography of texts last consulted in the late Renaissance. A paper that undermines its own thesis, within the same paragraph.
Mind you, my particular student doesn't know what a semicolon is for, so she sprinkles semicolons like Bacos throughout her paper--just to make it tasty and sophisticated. A sudden fluency in semicolon use would be a definite giveaway.
To prove plagiarism, I just Google lots of suspicious passages, and if I'm determined enough, other search engines. It's easy to do a pretty nuanced search in these search engines. Sometimes I can't prove plagiarism, but sometimes I definitely can, and then I print out and highlight passages from both the plagiarized paper and the original source.
One semester, I had a student who could wouldn't bother to write more than a sentence per paragraph, and suddenly she produced a 25-page lesson plan on Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun. I found the original source in .00000258 seconds on Google.
Other student wrote on a text with such a minor character that only a professor would write on it--turns out the student plagiarized a published article, found in .000007659 seconds.
My current student is an arrogant sociopath. She wasn't showing up for class or turning in her work, and was really angry at me for not writing a recommendation for her (which I've only declined to do three times in 27 years of teaching). She then boycotted my class, and would send her late work to me in e-mail attachments, without an accompanying letter--just so I know how angry she is. Perfect candidate for a Google search.
Her paper was on an Allen Ginsberg poem that she knew nothing about, since she skipped class. The first sentence discusses the Beats and Flower Children, which was something she wouldn't know about, and was a silly conflation. Simple search: she got the sentence from gradesaver.com
So, this is promising. Let's try this sentence here, which is way above her writing ability: ding ding ding. A match to an online blog. Only one word changed.
O.k., let's try another sentence. Ding ding ding. And another. Ding Ding Ding. Turns out the whole paper is a cut-and-paste job with minor changes.
So--any sign of plagiarism in her other work? The second paper does look like it was written in Uzbekistan in the mid-1970's, but it's just crappy--can't connect it to anything.
So--let's try paper number one--parts of the whole thing. And what do you know: the entire conclusion was plagiarized.
I then put together a dossier of incriminating evidence, correspondence, and so on, and ship it off to the undergraduate chair of my department and the office of the Dean of Arts and Sciences. The idea is to shine so much light on these roaches that they just vanish into the woodwork. And they typically do.
