Are your students plagiarizing? Here’s how you find out

Plagiarism is a hot topic among educators today. The Internet has revolutionized how students research, find and relate to information. Plagiarism used to consist of copying word for word from books. Nowadays a few simple key strokes will cut and paste information from any website into a student’s papers.

There are a number of ways teachers can figure out if their students are plagiarizing. There are a number of websites and programs that will help you do just that. You type in a portion of your student’s paper and run it through a plagiarism checker to see if those words appear elsewhere on the Internet. If they do, your student may have plagiarized. Check out these free online resources:

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Sarah Elaine Eaton is a faculty member in the Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary, Canada.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 26th, 2010 at 10:01 am and is filed under education, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

6 Responses to Are your students plagiarizing? Here’s how you find out

  1. Paul Clarke (@Paul__Clarke) says:
    March 22, 2013 at 10:54 am

    How are the plagiarism sites you mention better than just putting a sentence or two in quotes and searching via Google?

  2. Are your students plagiarizing? Here’s how you find out – HCS Learning Commons says:
    March 22, 2013 at 9:20 am

    […] See on drsaraheaton.wordpress.com […]

  3. Steve Smith says:
    March 17, 2013 at 2:47 am

    Useful post. Being able to indisputedly identify use of Google Translate would also be useful.

  4. Lora Giangregorio says:
    April 13, 2012 at 6:22 am

    Grey areas in plaigiarism are more difficult to track and far more common. Many students copy a paragraph, change a few words and then cite it. This is not the same as paraphrasing and would still be considered plaigiarism.