Proving Plagiarism--A moving target

It's 12 o'clock and you get to the last essay of the bunch. As soon as you begin to read it, your heart sinks. Suddenly the nearly failing student who didn't do any rough work all week has written a B essay. It would be so easy to just mark it and let it go. But we just can't. On goes Google. . .

We always hope that our lessons about identifying plagiarism, and our lessons about how to cite sources will avoid this sticky issue, but that's wishful thinking, I'm afraid. At one point or another during marking, we all come across a phrase or a sentence or a paragraph or even a whole paper that we suspect is not the student's own ideas or words. Click here to see some of the ways teachers in my department use to prove plagiarism.

Here are the links to the two plagiarism detection software programs that our department recommends:
Doc Cop and Turnitin.

We always try to err on the side of student. But once we've proved that a student has plagiarized, we deal with each student individually. She may not have intended to plagiarize or to have helped another student plagiarize. But in the cases where she has knowingly plagiarized, most often we assign a zero for the assignment and a vice-principal is notified.

No matter how thorougly we teach about the types of plagiarism, no matter how carefully we plan our assignments to lessen plagiarize, or no matter how diligently we handle suspected cases of plagiarism, it's hard to keep one step ahead of the technology. We certainly will not catch every instance of plagiarism, but at least we are making a fuss about it. After that, it's a student's own conscience that directs her.

Welcome, fellow Honours Specialists

Well, it's taken me twenty summers to be ready to take this course. And every summer has taught me different things. One summer I set my watch (back when people still wore watches) to 00:00:00 so that every time I glanced at my wrist I'd remember to live in the moment--that was my New Age era. Another summer I rested in a hospital bed in my living room after a split-second of bad luck on Highway 7. Over a number of summers, chasing whatever my latest passion, I've taken courses in philosophy, neuropsychology, novel-writing, medicinal herbs, how to train your German Shepherd. One summer I helped my mom as she died. Most summers I help myself live.


So this is this summer. Just creating this blog has already made me think about how I can do my Writer's Craft class better. And I've already emailed my colleagues (we are all middle-aged to old, and serious sharers) about how we could use a Course Blog to share material with our new incoming young teachers instead of our Course Shelf (yes, I mean a shelf in the English office).

Here's to whatever this summer's course of learning brings us all!