9 search for ‘borrowings’
Using Word
Consultancy
Being
aware of what you are up against is a useful starting point so think about
the plagiarist’s ‘craft’. How could you shortcut the
task if you had been given it?
Visit some homework ‘help’ sites and look at what is on offer.
A May 2002 Google search for ‘homework’ returned 4.6 million
sites; by September 2003 this had risen to 7.8 million! These sites vary
from the laudable, eg, the National
Geographic, to the exploitative ‘paper mills’, sites which
have a huge range of papers for sale. You can even select a particular
grade, presumably so you can stay in your own league and not make it too
obvious it’s not your own work. The Kimbel
Library maintains an excellent site tracking the ‘mills’.
They note that, ‘in March 1999, it had 35 sites on it. Currently,
March 2003, there are over 250 general sites listed.’ There are
also subject specific sites. Lovers of irony should visit ethicspapers.com,
providing ‘research papers to assist students studying ethics’.
If they don’t have it, they'll, ‘write one as quickly as you
need!’
Well known mills include, homework.com,
schoolsucks.com, screw-essays.com,
or cheathouse.com. These sites
may be filtered on school networks so try from elsewhere or have the site
unblocked. The best-known detection site is turnitin.com
which checks student work against potential sources and then reports back
to the subscriber. Students of subscribing schools can even submit work
through this site so it has been authenticated before handing up.
Steps any teacher can take before going to this expense include the following.
Search topics you set to acquaint yourself with what is available. Try
more than one search engine as they throw up different results. Note that
people rarely go beyond the first page or so of the sites returned. You
might casually ask targeted students which engines they find most helpful.
CD/online encyclopaedias are particular favourites of the lazy so check
these if nothing else. Having assignments emailed to you saves the tedium
of keying in suspect passages accurately.
Students may try to disguise plagiarism by changing the introductory paragraph
or the first line of other paragraphs so start looking elsewhere. Look
for technical terms and/or complex language and choose a ‘string’
of 5~10 words. Type or paste the suspect string into the search engine
find field enclosed in double quotes forcing a search for the complete
string. Search engines use different algorithms so some are better than
others. I usually start with www.alltheweb.com
because it looks for the string exactly as entered and will often return
a single accurate hit. Google is currently the most popular engine and
what a plagiariser finds with it will also be found by the righteous!
Before giving up on a search try different suspect strings and different
engines. Colleagues who tried this technique found the results ‘quite
scary’, particularly as they were not initially suspicious and were
simply experimenting. Remember, if you don’t find anything it does
not mean the work is not plagiarised, only that you did not find it. Your
intuition could still be correct.
You may wish to practise this technique using the examples
you will find here.
Links to the homepage of this website is permitted for educational purposes.