On OrangePhilosophy, an essay about plagiarists and how to catch them, by Mark Steen:
...I hold that the following, if they come up, give you prima facie reasons for searching the web (or other sources). Almost none of these are at all sufficient for indicating that plagiarism has in fact occurred, however.
Indicators:
1. Bad Writing/Good Writing
This, of course, is the most common cause for alarm, and sets bells off in even the beginning TA. Several paragraphs or sentences of piss-poor prose or moderate writing is followed by excellent writing, profundity, etc.
2. Differences of Style
...This often happens when a student buys a paper from a paper-mill site which, while on the same rough topic, is different enough so that the student had to customize it to fit the bill. Look especially for an introduction and conclusion that do not match the body of the paper in style, or coverage of one issue that differs in style quite a bit from the rest of the paper.
3. Citation Indicators
Scan your students’ endnotes and footnotes...Sometimes you’ll find that the page numbers they list have no relation to the page numbers of the articles in the anthology/reader you use, even if the rest of the bibliographic info is the same....Another warning sign is a particularly rich bibliography. Some freshman just happen to be well-motivated and genuinely interested in the topics and doing extra research, but most, of course, aren’t...
4. Content Indicators
...Often you’ll find a paper that roughly matches the essay assignment, but is off in certain key respects...Look for terminology that you didn’t use in the course and is unexplained in the student paper....If a paper seems eerily familiar, then it just might be because you read it earlier, and another student wrote it, or, like in several cases of mine, that you wrote it yourself. A good reason to require every student to email you a copy of their papers as well...
5. Warning signs from outside the paper itself.
Know your students. If one seems very dumb, and you can see that a certain paper is beyond them, even though it’s not very good, this of course is an indicator, though a very fallible one....if [their] second or third paper is much better than the first or second, you just might be a redneck, or, have a plagiarizer.
I have to admit, this is an issue I never had to deal with in the classroom. Then again, Steen never had to decide how much to count off for someone who makes an arithmetic mistake while calculating the components of an ANOVA table (one point if it's a small error, many points if the student ended up with negative sums of squares and didn't realize their mistake).
(Via the hopelessly honest Jane Galt).
Posted by kswygert at May 11, 2004 12:27 PM