How do you catch plagiarism?

Technology makes researching easier. Unfortunately, it does the same for cheating. I’m sure many of you can attest to the sinking feeling you get when grading a paper and noticing a sudden change in font or writing style. Those are telltale signs that you are reading something cut-and-pasted – one drag of the mouse, one quick click -- from a website. And then there is a rush of mixed sensations as you abort the attempt to have your eyes draped in wool: indignation, disappointment, anger, and, probably, uncertainty about what to do next.

You smell smoke but are yet to find the fire. Chances are, sometimes, through no fault of your own, you do not even smell the smoke. And others time you just cannot locate the fire. It is an unfortunate truth that detecting and proving plagiarism is complicated work, but the integrity of our program requires that we do so vigilantly.

There is a nice tool in Blackboard that can help: Turnitin.com. This is an anti-plagiarism software program that will check a submitted paper against a vast database of web materials and prior student work. The paper is collected through a specially created link. This automatically submits the paper to Turnitin.com and generates a report which highlights “matches” and assesses the percent of the paper that is not unique. It will catch word-for-word matches and also instances where wording is slightly altered.

Use of Turnitin.com is mandatory for Business Department courses. Those teaching others should strongly consider implementing it.

In a prior post, I explained how to set up an Assignment link in Blackboard. Setting up a Turnitin.com assignment link is similar. To assist you, our ever-resourceful Blackboard Director, Paul Vitagliano, has created a video tutorial and a step guide for setting up and managing a Turnitin.com assignment. Please review and share your questions or experiences by posting a “comment” to this post.

While Turnitin.com is a nice tool, it is not foolproof. There are international web services that will research and write a customized paper for students using the specific guidelines of the instructor. I’ve seen these papers and they are very good in a very bad way. That’s another post for another day.