possible plagiarism

[Andrew Wachtel]

I have discovered one sure-fire method of figuring out whether a paper was
plagiarized or not, and it requires no searching at all.  It does require
talking to the student whom you suspect of plagiarism, however.

The theory is simple, people who plagiarize haven't thought much about the
works they are supposed to be writing about, but people who have done their
own work have.  All you have to do is ask the student to answer a couple of
questions that are obvious extensions to the paper you received.  If the
student is unable to do so, you will have all the evidence you need (at
least all the evidence you need to get the student in question to admit the
plagiarism)

Andrew Wachtel

>Dear SEELANGers,
>
>I'm afraid I can't help with the case in question, but last year I
>encountered several instances of plagiarism in courses in my department,
>some internet-related and some not, and some of what I learned may be
>useful for other instructors:
>
>1) I'd be very careful about mentioning even a suspicion of plagiarism to
>a student if I couldn't prove it by producing the source. A faculty
>colleague in another department here was certain that a paper was
>plagiarized, told the student, and issued a grade of incomplete while
>searching for the source. When I heard about this (from the dean) it was
>still pending, but the university said that if the student denied the
>accusation and the faculty member couldn't find the source, however
>certain he might be from the style or content, the decision would have to
>go in the student's favor. This may not be true at all universities, but
>if your university won't back you up unless you can produce a source, you
>might want to be careful about accusations.
>
>2) Tracking down Internet plagiarism is easy; if the student can find the
>paper on the internet, so can you. (Even some of the sites that charge for
>papers give the first few sentences as samples.) Go to one of the search
>or metasearch sites that supports boolean searching (the kind where you
>can specify multiple keywords and retrieve only documents that contain all
>of them), pick several telling keywords from the paper, and fire away. It
>took me less than a minute (literally) to catch each of two internet
>plagiarists last year. You can find a partial list of search and
>metasearch sites by visiting my home page (see below) and connecting to
>the "serious links" subpage. I've had good luck with Altavista.
>
>3) Non-internet plagiarism is tougher, although I caught several of these
>last year, some from books and some from encyclopedias. To narrow the
>search, look for anachronisms (I recieved a paper about Chagall that wrote
>about him in the present tense, as if he were still alive, which helps
>restrict the books I had to check) and thematic clues (very general
>biographical overviews are often encyclopedic, specialized ones are often
>forwards to monographs or collections, close readings are often monographs
>or articles).
>
>4) Colleagues can be a big help in tracking down sources for plagiarism,
>especially in survey courses, where the instructor may not be sufficiently
>experienced with all topics to recognize plagiarism sources quickly.
>
>Good luck,
>
>David
>________________________________________________________________________
>
>Professor David J. Birnbaum     email: djbpitt+ at pitt.edu
>Department of Slavic Languages  url:   http://clover.slavic.pitt.edu/~djb/
>1417 Cathedral of Learning      voice: 1-412-624-5712
>University of Pittsburgh        fax:   1-412-624-9714
>Pittsburgh, PA 15260 USA