Judy wrote in part:
>
>My point was and is that some people just plagiarize in spite of
>teachers' best attempts to teach them ethical uses of sources or to
>teach them anything else for that matter. And I don't think that
>these teachers necessarily do anything to encourage plagiarism. To
>me, some of this discussion smacks of "well, if people knew how to
>teach this stuff, students wouldn't plagiarize." I think that sort
>of implication is not terribly productive to put it in as polite a
>terms as I can think of right now.
>
Like I said in the message I just sent, I don't mean to imply that I
have the answers to this by any stretch of the imagination. All we
can really do in any conversation like this is generalize, right?
You're not going to (at least you shouldn't!) share the specifics of
the case, and we all should know that individual circumstances vary,
etc., etc.

But...

There does seem to me in all of this to be a point in which all of us
as teachers have to kind of "let go." As you write here Judy, there
are always going to be some people who plagiarize or try to
plagiarize no matter what we do. The question is how far are we as
teachers willing to go to catch it? I mean, I know people who have
spent hours and hours trying to track down what they were *certain*
was plagiarism only to not find "the evidence." And after a point in
time, I just have to wonder if it is worth *my* time to "get 'em."

If turnitin works for some folks to get 'em, that's great. But I
still find myself going back to the mantras (dare I say cliches?) of
plagiarism talk: structure the assignments to avoid plagiarism, the
plagiarizer is only hurting themself, etc., etc.

--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