How do teachers check for plagiarism?
Most teachers can tell because a plagiarized paper looks different from the student's other work. It's generally better-written than the student's other work. Then all they have to do is take part of the paper and google it.
How do students get away with plagiarism in high school?
I have a friend who told me that in high school (just a few years ago), she actually wrote no papers, but copied and pasted the entire thing from the internet. Isn't plagiarizing these days extremely difficult? How could she have gotten away with this?
How teachers could beat the plagiarism?
Stop asking such difficult and boring essay questions. Ask questions that require a student to think and write their own opinions, NOT just research dead guys and regurgitate information. That's how they can beat plagiarism - don't give them anything to plagarise.
Why do you think students think they can get away with plagiarism?
Because most of the time, they DO get away with. Sometimes teachers just can’t face another parent/teacher/principal conference with the irate parent swearing that their kid doesn’t cheat/you are wrong/you hate their kid/you are a racist and the principal letting the parent verbally abuse you.Some kids are very clever with their cheating. If they would spend as much time studying as they do devising ways to cheat, they would graduate as valedictorian.
How do teachers tell plagiarism from essays that just look similar?
Like several posters have suggested in this thread, changes in style from the student’s voice is a dead giveaway. Sometimes, that might be dramatic changes in punctuation and sentence structure from the students’ earlier essays or earlier parts of the same paper.Sometimes, in freshman composition papers, it is the use of advanced terminology that I wouldn’t expect in an 18-year old. (For instance, in a freshman composition paper based on their personal experiences, I wouldn’t expect to find references to typological readings, as most 18-year olds have no idea what medieval typology is.)In my own case, I have a little bit of background in linguistics, so it’s a dead giveaway when one of my students who speaks in class with Appalachian dialect traits submits a paper with linguistic markers that I would expect in a speaker from New Jersey or London, and that leads me to check the paper more closely.Whether a student calls the same outdoor activity, hiking, camping, ambling, or wood-walking is a bit of diction that links them to specific regions. The same is true for dash box, glovebox, or jockey box as a term to apply to the part of a car where you store the owner’s manual, or whether the student drinks pop, soda, fizzy water, carbonated bevs, or “cokes” as a generic term for all brands. When a student points out a yellow jacket swarm in the classroom, did the students call them bugs, pests, insects, stingers, wasps, or use the common Appalachian word waspers? If so, did the student’s word choice indicate a dialect that matches what I see in this particular paper?That diction sings out on the page as I read it. Out of four classes and maybe 90 students in my classes each semester, I pretty reliably catch about four students each semester who plagiarize, and usually it’s diction choice from a dialect that first makes my spider-sense tingle. Once the spider-sense tingles, it is usually less than five minutes to identify a passage from an online source by some quick Google-fu.This is why I usually don’t bother with Turnitin.com. It’s an excellent resource, but for me it’s been redundant compared to just knowing the student’s voice.
Should I tell the teacher if I noticed a classmate plagiarizing content in his essay?
Wow. I was kind of amazed at some of the answers here, even ones from instructors. Most schools have an honor code that a) forbids plagairism and b) requires students to report cheating, which would include plagairism.The sad part is that if you report it, some teachers will undoubtedly “accidentally” let slip who reported it. Personally, I think I would ask a question in class. “Mrs. Grimy, I don’t really understand this whole plagairism thing. If I copy someone’s paper, that’s plagairism, right? How about if I copy something I wrote last year? How about if I get it [off the internet, from the Bible, from a treasure map I found in third grade]? Can you explain it to me?”Of course, a lot of people think that’s passive-aggressive. It’s better than getting your kiska kicked, or your head flushed in the toilet. It also sort of prods the teacher into realizing you must have SOME reason for asking.In my experience, most teachers don’t recognize plagiarism unless it is taken from a work they are personally familiar with, or unless it is obviously written above the grade level the student normally writes at. And sometimes, when schools use Turnitin.com, they find stuff that isn’t plagairism at all. If the entire staff doesn’t understand how to use it, the result is a nightmare for both students and teachers. It is definitely NOT the holy grail in terms of preventing plagairism. Education is.
I got caught plagiarizing, how do I face my teacher?
I caught a student plagiarizing yesterday, and I have unfortunately caught many over my almost 30 years of teaching. Here is how I always hope my students will handle it:The student comes to my office, and when I ask, “Do you have anything you want to tell me?” the student says, “I’m sorry. I have no excuse. I was lazy/scared of failing/panicking/(insert other reason—reason, not excuse) and I did it and I’m just sorry.”In that case, I would sit down with the student and go over exactly how and why the particular case amounted to plagiarism, and how they can avoid it in the future. A student taking an attitude like that would go a long way toward repairing my trust in them.My policy on plagiarizing is clear, in line with my university’s policy, and spelled out in English and Japanese on my syllabus. I also go over it several times during the semester, to remind everyone, and I explain just what constitutes plagiarism. But I understand how confusion or panic can drive a student to do something like that.Early in my teaching career, I had a student’s parents actually threaten to sue the school because I caught the student plagiarizing. The case was very clear cut and quite egregious—the student copied an essay that was in the textbook I was teaching from for another class! AND she denied she’d plagiarized, insisting everything she wrote was from her own mind and she’d never seen that essay before and it was just a coincidence that 95% of the words of her essay exactly matched those of the essay in the textbook—yet the school backed down and asked me to let the student write another paper. I was disheartened and agreed—I was a new adjunct teacher, after all—but surprise, the student never got around to writing the replacement paper.That was definitely a case of what not to do.
How do teachers find out if you used plagiarism or not?
they check on the internet to see if you've copied anything.