I don't know what I'm doing wrong or right, but honestly, I can't
recall a single instance in my teaching in which I've caught someone
with the proverbial red hands plagiarizing. This can't be true since
I've been teaching as a grad student or part-timer or faculty member
since 1988, and as I sit here on a Sunday morning, I guess I can
recall incidents in which I spent far too much time researching to
find out if someone did or didn't plagiarize, but I can't recall any
dramatic scenes of confrontation of students over their work. Maybe
I've been lucky, maybe I've been fooled a lot, I don't know.

Because I had good mentors even way back when, I've always given
assignments that would be either difficult or time-consuming to
plagiarize. In classes like fy comp, I give assignments that were
either tied to a particular book or reading assignment. When it
comes to research assignments, I don't assign "research papers;"
rather, my students have almost always done some sort of research
project where they have to write a series of things on a topic, often
collaboratively. Things like that are hard to plagiarize.

Interestingly enough, I tend to have fy comp classes that go from
25-27 students down to about 15. Fortunately, I've always taught in
situations where this wasn't a problem.

Judy wrote in part:

>Last semester, I got two research papers that had been plagiarized
>-- one from fouressays.com and one from nine websites. I knew both
>papers had been plagiarized when I looked at them. In fact, I knew
>the one student (the fouressays.com student) would plagiarize before
>I actually saw the paper because he had been late on all of the
>assignments leading up to the multiple-source paper and had rejected
>any of my attempts to get him to refocus or rethink what he was
>doing -- classic warning symptoms of an impending plagiarism.

Two thoughts here: I can't say this for sure since none of us knows
how we would individually react/behave in someone else's experience
and such, but if the student who just got the essay from
fouressays.com had been in my class, she or he would have almost
certainly dropped or failed the course by the time this project would
have come around. Turning in stuff late and not formulating a
"focus" for a project are things that end up getting "graded down"
big-time in my classes. I'm kind of a big meanie in fy comp-- but
it's all about tough love for me. :)

Second, I'm not sure that the other student who got his or her stuff
from 9 different web sites was plagiarizing exactly. Technically,
yes, but was it a case of "theft" or a case of not knowing how to
cite sources? I'm constantly amazed how so many of my students,
freshman to master's students, don't realize that you have to follow
the rules of citing sources and giving credit where credit is due. I
get this kind of "plagiarism" all the time, but these are instances
where I tell the student they've got to rewrite.
>
>With both of these students, turnitin found the sources without any
>effort on my part. When I talked to both of these students, the
>evidence of their unethical scholarship was right in front of us in
>bright colors (since turnitin color codes the "borrowed" text and
>that same text in the original), and the students simply had to
>admit what they'd done.

I could see that as being a pretty handy feature of something like
turnitin. My only problem is I don't want to pay for turnitin
especially when I could do close to the same thing with Google...

--Steve
--
Steven D. Krause
Associate Professor, Department of English Language and Literature
Eastern Michigan University * 614G Pray-Harrold Hall
Ypsilanti, MI 48197 * 734-487-1363 * http://krause.emich.edu