Teachers: How do you detect plagiarism?

Question

I'm presenting a workshop to high school seniors about how to avoid plagiarism (in term papers) in college. If you're a teacher, how do you detect plagiarism? Is is a big problem among students now? Is it punished severely if you find it?

Answer 1

Well I'm not a teacher but my ENG 111 teacher used turneditin.com

We had to upload our papers onto that site and it will give you a percentage of plagiarism.  I got like 18% but I didn't plagiarized anything, it was just that my wording was just like someone else's words.  So I think that he said that if it was like less than 25% it was okay.

Answer 2

If the paper seems too well-written it probably is. Students can receive an F for the course, go on academic probation, or be expelled depending on the academic code of the school and the level of plaigiarism.

Answer 3

I'm a student, and many of my teachers use a website called turnitin.com, which scans the turned in paper against thousands of other papers which have been turned in before as well as websites.  It then highlights any plagiarized phrases and tells you where they are from, so quotes will show up as plagiarized, but if they are properly cited, it should be easy to see that they are directly quoted.

Answer 4

In California, plagiarism is a biggy in high school.  If  you think that a student's writting seems too good to be true, take a phrase from his/her essay.  Go up to Yahoo or any search engine and type in that phrase in quotes.  You should come up where they could have used it.  In school most kids get F's or suspended.

Answer 5

Im a student and I am answering this. Plagiarism is a huge problem in schools today as it is so easy to copy and paste from multiple website with the use of a computer. Its a serious problem because you can be kicked out of university for it. You can avoid it by finding your "voice" in writing (your own style)

so things automatically come out in your own words, this is the best i can describe it.

Answer 6

http://mit.edu/writing/NEW/Resources/Tea...

http://www.library.ualberta.ca/guides/pl...

http://library.shastacollege.edu/detectc...

http://www.blogherald.com/2007/05/21/how...

http://www.marywood.edu/library/detectpl...

i'm not a teacher, but i'm smart enough to use a search engine.

Answer 7

its called google and you use these little things "            "