The secret (or, I guess, no longer secret) ambition of anyone who’s ever had to “google” a student paper.

I have to give you credit: plagiarism is tedious and dispiriting, but you’ve made it funny.

My all-time favourite: a paper on Luther lifted directly from the Catholic Encyclopedia. The student never quite got the point that the article damned Luther by faint praise.

Where I teach, we are not allowed to use turnitin.com. Fear of lawsuits. Use of the service requires entering text of the student’s paper into some sort of database: the concern seems to be that a student might argue that his/her words had been published/made public without permission.

I’ve never used it myself, either. But I don’t think we have a policy against it.

Fear of lawsuits… the concern seems to be that a student might argue that his/her words had been published/made public without permission.

Ha! Oh, the irony.

Been there. I’ve also received a paper with the URL printed at the top of each page.

Ugh. I’ve received identical submissions from multiple students, with only the font differing between them (to be fair, in this case we allowed students to work together on a specific assignment – but requested they submit their own write-up). It was depressing to have to explain – to very bright graduate students – that making cosmetic changes doesn’t qualify as “doing your own work.”

“My ambition, naturally, is to have a student quote my own words back to me … ”

A friend of mine at a prestigious university had her own words quoted back to her in a doctoral proposal (!). When she pointed this out, it was revealed that the doctoral candidate’s advisor had recommended simply copying my friend’s text since, naturally, she’d approve her own design. I’d never heard of such a thing, but, needless to say, it put my friend (a somewhat junior faculty member at the time) in a rather awkward position.

Now that I type it, I realize you almost never even hear the word “flunk.”

I’ve only had one student protest his zero. He actually demanded a grade review on the assignment, accusing me of racism because he would never cheat. When I gave his two plagiarized papers to the composition director, heavily highlighted in bright yellow, with the original source material, she agreed with my decision. The student quickly switched to audit my course, and I’m going to guess he’s still cheating nearly a year later.

My favorite plagiarized submissions include papers with obvious font differences and papers with sudden shifts from mediocre to sophisticated vocabulary. The biggest clues (outside of physical differences) that gave away plagiarism for me focus on sentence structure and vocabulary. When a student can’t spell “cosmopolitan,” but uses “myriad” properly, my Spidey-sense starts tingling. Sometimes I get really excited about nailing plagiarism, and other times, I’m really depressed about it.

It almost worked, but while I was in a conference with her and another student, the other student kept subtly (and then not-so-subtly) pointing to the torn corners.