Training Plagiarism Detectives: The Law and Order Approach

Following on from my previous column, this one looks at plagiarism catching. It's a mixed-emotion activity, combining the thrill of the chase and the horror of revealing sin. This might seem like a nasty topic. Plagiarists, after all, are people like us. Some of them have sinned out of ignorance,

Catching plagiarism, however, is important, in both the message it sends and the number of students it may deter from committing the same crime. If we can train the catchers to be plagiarism detectives and show the would-be deliberate perpetrators how easy it can be to catch them, we're halfway toward eradicating plagiarism.

Consider this example: I easily found the Web site a student had used and realized that he'd copied it pretty much word for word to create the first half of his paper. Then the Web site material ran out. "Good," I thought. "He finally recognized the error of his ways, repented of his evil, and decided to write something that showed his own contribution to the subject." Not so. The same telltale signs of plagiarism started showing up in the second half of his paper, so I did a search and found the second Web site. Once again, he'd used it wholesale. Not a word of his research paper was his own except for the numerous citations in his bibliography-items he had never seen, let alone read.