Tuesday, November 17, 2009

This makes my head hurt...

I'm only half way through a stack of 30 essays and I already have two cases of egregious, take it straight off the internet and change a few words plagiarism. And they will fail the class for this. What pisses me off the most is that it takes me an hour to determine that there's plagiarism and then find it online so I have the ammo I need when I confront them.

Sigh. Tired sigh.

Why do they do this?? It's SO obvious...

4 comments:

This Ro(a)mantic Life said...

My head hurts for you too. Why must students resort to these non-solutions to the challenges of a paper ...

Good Enough Woman said...

Drives. Me. Crazy.

My sympathies.

Prof. de Breeze said...

You need turnitin.com. It will find the plagiarism for you and allow you to print out a report comparing the paper to its "source(s)". We've had it for about five years now, and instances of plagiarism have dropped off considerably.

CattyinQueens said...

Turnitin isn't perfect--I often find more on Google still--but it definitely helps. I've found that students have gotten slightly better at dodging it by changing words around; I found one this semester that Turnitin flagged as a <1% match, and I almost didn't look into it, since sometimes it finds that level of similarity with a common phrase.

Still, yeah--I just wrote something to this effect. It's not the cheating that sucks so bad, it's the time we spend dealing with it!