Detecting and Preventing Plagiarism in the Internet Age

To: All Macalester College Faculty

From: David Chioni Moore, International Studies and English Departments

Date: Originally August 26, 2001. Lightly revised and updated August 4, 2008

re: Detecting and Preventing Plagiarism in the Internet Age

What follows is a brief note to Macalester faculty on plagiarism in the Internet age: what it is, how to detect it, and how to prevent it.

I originally wrote this because in May 2001 I encountered seven cases of plagiarism by five different students. Three cases were in my classes; the other four were from classes taught by colleagues who came to me for help. Thus I sense that plagiarism is far more widespread than most faculty believe, due heavily to the easy features of the Internet.

The Varieties of Today’s Plagiarism:
Contemporary plagiarism is multiform. To be sure, the most detectable type still exists: unattributed student borrowing of professional writing. Professional writing is available both in traditional print and, vastly more commonly for 18-22-year-olds, ubiquitously on the Internet. However, the Internet also affords easy access to nonprofessional student-written texts, on both commercial and non-commercial websites. In two 2001 cases, for example, I found that students had taken papers from websites at other colleges where faculty were showcasing excellent student work. A third, more personal transmission means is from the widespread sharing of files, jump drives, public computers and more among Mac students and from college to college provides.

In all three types (plagiarism of professional writing, of web-located student writing, and of writing by student friends), the plagiarized material can range from a few sentences to the entire paper.

How to Recognize Plagiarism as Such:
When students plagiarize professional writing, typically an abrupt change in style marks the material. The vocabulary and syntax almost glow on the page. The instructor sees that the style has shifted and far exceeds that student’s capacity, especially since plagiarizers are often (but not always) among the weaker students, and are also often (but not always) among the more desperate, last-minute students.

Plagiarized-from-students material is tougher to detect, since stylistic divergence is much less. Indeed, for-profit paper websites (such as SchoolSucks.com or PaperFetcher.com) offer much “bad college writing” wholly undetectable on competence grounds. Thus many faculty may be grading non-original material without suspicion. Still, however, some tipoffs may be seen. One is a change (though not necessarily an improvement) on an earlier style, since average college writing varies widely. However, if a student borrows from the same source twice, no change will be evident. Likewise, if a student plagiarizes her first paper and actually writes her second, the instructor may falsely suspect only the second. In addition, it can be difficult to recall a specific student style from a long-ago graded paper.

Easier to detect, within student-plagiarized work, is the “off-target” paper. Say for example that you assign a paper on gender in William Faulkner’s novel Light in August. Instead you get a paper which treats literature and gender, but across several different Faulkner novels, or comparing Faulkner to a writer not on your syllabus, or which tackles critics and/or theories not discussed in class. Such “off-target” tics can signal non-original work. One paper I examined in 2001 (and pardon me here in 2008 for not updating this essay more) began with vague words about our class, then took a wholly different tack for seven pages, and concluded by returning to more verbiage about the class. Adding to the puzzlement was that of the eight books in the bibliography, inexplicably six of them were not in the CLIC-net catalog, and a seventh was cited in a British edition different from the American edition owned by Mac. These and other “off target” signs can tip you off.

Lastly, sometimes one suspects a plagiarized paper for no reason beyond “general feel.” Still, I sense that more plagiarism occurs at Macalester than is detected by this feel.

How to Find the Source of Suspected Plagiarized Material:
Discovering the source of suspected plagiarized material ranges from easy to impossible. Of the seven cases I encountered in spring 2001, three were easy to discover, three were moderate, and the last could not be confirmed. In one easy case the student copied from another student in the class: 80% of two papers turned in overlapped exactly! It then remained to determine who was the author and who was the copier, and/or if there was a common third source for both. In the second easy case, the student wholesale copied from a printed source found readily in the library. In the third easy case, an “exact phrase match” search (discussed below) on Google revealed the Internet source in five seconds. But I have had, alas, a few instances over the years where I was convinced that a student was not the actual author of his work, but could not prove it.

The remarkable thing about this third case, however, was the ultimate scope of the plagiarism. The paper in question was a personal-confessional, clearly “studenty” paper – it seemed very plausible to me. But one unfootnoted passage in it suddenly switched to gifted scholarly writing. An exact-phrase match search on Google offered eight web locations for this distinctive passage. And, to my massive surprise, one of these locations offered not just the un-cited scholarly passage, but virtually my student’s entire paper. My student had wholesale taken, and only lightly modified, a long student paper posted by a proud department at another institution. Where the original writer had correctly referenced the scholarly passage, however, my copying Mac student neglected to preserve the original’s proper citation. In other words, had my student more faithfully copied the original student paper, complete with the scholarly citation, I would have congratulated him/her on excellent research, unaware that the rest of the paper was also not his/hers. Thus sometimes one uncovers plagiarism by chance. Following are five specific ways to track down sources of suspect material.

Discovery method one: Google
Students find things via Google, and so finding what students find should proceed the same way. Google is, as I’m sure you know, ultra-quick, highly focused, offers windows on to vast full-text universes, is up at 3:00 am; and is typically far more familiar than the library. Thus a web-search is the best first stop to track down suspect material, especially student-style material. For professional writing (and somewhat for student writing), choose a distinctive suspect phrase of 5-10 words from the paper (enough words to be more or less unique), and type that phrase “in quotes” in the fill-in box. When you put a phrase in quotes, Google returns only exact matches for the phrase. If you input words not surrounded by quotes, Google finds web-pages with all or most of the input words somewhere on it, ranked by the closest to exact. Try several suspect phrases from several different portions of the paper, with some “in quotes” and some without. Try books.google.com and scholar.google.com for scans of books and articles, too – Google now has astounding reach, breathtakingly useful in my own research as well.

Discovery method two: the library, and the e-library
Though your students might not physically go there when desperate, you might stop in to the library. If you think you can obtain the material quickly there (for example, if you recognize it as a printed source), you can get it in the “traditional” way. Or, think about how the student would have found information on their subject in question, and follow that path. You can also try any of our many full-text services – such as JStor, Expanded Academic ASAP, and Lexis/Nexis – which students and faculty often use for research. Use search facilities common in your field. Consultation with library staff can be quite helpful if you are stuck and want to pursue.

Discovery method three: commercial paper sites
Beyond the public and library search engines (and the pages and further links they lead to), you might look to some of the commercial websites. The paper-mill website world is scary. A glance at SchoolSucks, ABCpapers, IvyTermPapers, 12000Papers, RealPapers, and scores of others.1 The largest of these websites offer tens of thousands of papers on a huge array of subjects. SchoolSucks, for example, offers over 140 papers treating the contemporary Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe alone, in every imaginable permutation of analysis. These papers range from 3 to 15 pages, and go from the unfootnoted to papers with full bibliographic armament.

Once at one of the popular paper sites (I cannot rank them), type the theme of the suspect paper on their internal topic finder. From this you’ll get short descriptions of relevant papers, and you may find the paper your student turned in. You won’t be able to see the whole paper, only a synopsis, since the websites make money by selling the full texts. Costs range from $5 to $10 per page, with several cheater websites offering $3-5 per page surcharges for translations into bad student German, Spanish, Portuguese or Italian.

I have not personally found a plagiarized paper in this way, since the sites are so many, full-text searches within them are impossible, and one can only see a synopsis of each paper. But in principle one can track down some plagiarized work in this way. I am not sure what one would do upon identifying a likely commercial paper, short of buying it – an expensive option, and a waste if one is wrong.

Discovery method four: a conversation with the student
If initial library or online research does not work, one should speak directly with the student. Indeed, many faculty may try this approach first. Different faculty will handle a conversation differently. Some may wish to discuss the paper’s ideas, with which the student may be unfamiliar. Others may present some of the advanced vocabulary and ask for definitions. Or discuss the provenance of impressive cited sources. Others may confront suspicions directly. In some few cases (and at times with non-U.S. students), students might be unaware of what constitutes plagiarism in the first place. Though this information is in the student handbook, and though students are responsible for having read it, and though first-year courses are required to cover this subject, uptake can be uneven. You should not assume full student understanding of plagiarism – at the same time as you certainly don’t want to tolerate it with the excuse of ignorance. A conversation with a student may either a) convince you of innocence, b) result in admission, c) be inconclusive, or d) offer an opportunity for a memorable lesson.

Discovery method five: sleuthing websites
TurnItIn.com is a website for teachers who suspect plagiarism exists. Turnitin works in the following way. Faculty who sign up for the service require their students both to turn in print copies of their papers and to electronically submit their papers to Turnitin. Turnitin then electronically examines each paper, and emails a report to the professor, rating the degree of resemblance of each paper to any other paper in its database or freely available on the net. Turnitin thus depends on the participation of many faculty nationwide, and in its ideal can even catch commercial papers the second time they are submitted, since then they’ll get a match.

Typically, whole institutions subscribe to Turnitin, for use at faculty discretion. I have not followed the fortunes of this company since I first encountered it in 2001, and I believe that several other sites of this type exist. Macalester once had a trial subscription, but dropped it due to infrequent use.

If You Confirm Plagiarism: What to Do
If you confirm plagiarism, keep immediate written records of time of submission, nature of suspicions, nature and results of your search, and any conversations with the student. Also, photocopy or e-copy the paper in question. Indeed, the moment you suspect or detect plagiarism, copy the paper: this will enable you to mark it up, save it for post-semester research, or other uses. Then contact a relevant senior staff member in the Academic Programs office. I am not sure who just-retired Dean Ellen Guyer’s successor is in this role. If the student admits to the violation, the instructor and Dean decide on appropriate sanction within the guidelines of Macalester’s “Academic Integrity Policy,” found in the Faculty Handbook. Sanctions range from a grade of zero on the assignment to (for multiple violations) dismissal.

If the student does not admit to the violation, a hearing process ensues according to the Academic Integrity Policy guidelines. Please consult those pages for further details.

It may be tempting for faculty to handle some academic integrity issues privately with the student. Do not do this. While faculty are given wide latitude in running and grading their courses, it is imperative for all academic conduct incidents to be reported to the relevant College-wide authority. Your student may have been caught plagiarizing before, or may again in the future, with another faculty member. The only way to know this is if all cases are reported to the Dean.

Preventing Plagiarism Before it Happens:
My goal in this memo has not been to turn faculty into paranoid police. Only a minority of students, in my view, stray in this way. And of that minority who stray and are caught, most learn a hard, valuable, and permanently memorable lesson as a result. A good portion – especially those who strayed initially due to desperation rather than a deeper problematic condition – turn that lesson to good use and go on to Mac and post-Mac careers of genuine distinction. My hope is that all students will succeed the “right” way, using their own work and the cited works of others.

Still, I suspect that the now-total environment of the Internet and its massive easy copying opportunities will change the way instructors teach their courses. Instructors may require students to write using specific class sources and perspectives, or from fixed lists of library or reserve materials. This will reduce, but not eliminate, the incidence of borrowed papers. Instructors may also renew the use of in-class or evening exams. Among other things, exams supply an “unedited” baseline of student capacity. A highly specific unreturned two-page overnight-turnaround “reaction paper” in the first week of class can give instructors another sort of baseline.

For longer papers, the submission of prospecti, followed by drafts, might also discourage plagiarism. One could also remind students that using other people’s work is good, is central to elite scholarship, and is applauded when properly acknowledged. Lastly, I require students to provide not only bibliographies but also “generous acknowledgments” of all who helped (proofed, discussed, edited, etc.) on each paper. I note that scholars work this way, and that the longer and fuller their acknowledgments, the happier I am. Finally, the College – via the First Year Course program, valuable Library seminars, or other vehicles – may in the future also make adjustments to best fit the College’s programs to potential plagiarism in this new Internet age.

1If your student comes to class wearing an official SchoolSucks.com t-shirt, just $13.99 on their website, this may indicate possible plagiarism! SchoolSucks advertises the world’s “largest collection of free, but awful homework.” In fact, it is not free.

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