Dead Giveaways
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What to watch for when you suspect an essay isn't from the
student's own head.
The emergence of Internet sites (www, ftp, news-groups, or IRC) for the
purpose of essay exchange has led to what some students see as a very
easy way out of school work. In reality, unless they are prepared to do
a great deal of work to cover-up its origins, most essays from Internet
sources will give themselves away and land the poor student into much
more trouble than they could imagine.
As an instructor, watch for these signs...
- Essay refers to or cites the lectures of a mystery instructor (from another institution, no doubt).
- Essay contains a reference to its origin (e.g. "This essay is from www.essays.com - join today!") on the last page. It is very common for students to miss this.
- Essay is grade-school quality. The vast majority of essays available on the net have not been written by rocket-scientists.
- Essay is way off topic. Many of this type have oddly placed "on-topic" paragraphs that the student inserts themselves to bring it more in line with the required subject.
- Strange/poor layout. Some students paste the essay into their word processor and hit "print" right away. As a result, none of the original author's format-instructions are retained. Page numbers, headings, spacing, and page breaks are all out of whack.
- The ultimate sign of sloth... The essay has been printed from the student's internet browser. Very Very sad.
- The references are all from books not available in your University, or are all from another country.
- This one works a little better on recycled papers than it
does on Internet papers, at least in some cases, but a good sign of a
plagiarised paper is that all the references in the bibliography are at
least five or ten years old. I recall one case when I was in graduate
school (in 1993) that had no references from after 1978; the paper also
referred to "President Carter" in the -present tense-
...Stephen Schmidt (schmidsj@union.edu) Union College - If an essay/composition does not require a bibliography, it
is a "give away" if the student's composition/essay is beyond or does
not reflect the student's grade level, OR, it has no or very few
English--spelling,syntax,etc.-- errors contained within it.
... from Plagiarized.com user, Jauhara Care.
Parents might also - and there is of course an issue of privacy here - check their Internet Browser's bookmarks. If many essay exchange or cheating sites are bookmarked, it could be a sign that someone in the household is making use of them. Keep in mind however that the word "cheat" can mean many things on the Internet and you shouldn't automatically suspect that your computer is being used for essay exchange or other such activities. The difficult thing for parents with the Internet is that it is not as easy to monitor as television is (many families have both the TV and the computer in the family room to ease supervision). Those sites may be bookmarked - but that is not necessarily a "smoking gun" in Internet terms. Best course of action - ask your family who bookmarked it and why. If it was done for "innocent reasons" then there's no problem. If it was done because someone was actually making use of the material, then you'll still get the "innocent reason" story (you're a parent, you know the drill) - but your having asked about will have indicated that you are keeping track, and that you care about what they see and do on the net.
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