• Define and explain plagiarism to your students, including your policies about it. Include the Connecticut College Honor Code in your discussions.
• Don't assume that students understand the concept of intellectual property and documentation of material.
• Discuss how to document sources, both traditional and electronic.
• Provide an opportunity for your students to learn to do research.
• Establish deadlines throughout the semester for submitting topics, working bibliographies, outlines and rough drafts.
• Ask students to include copies of all sources with the final draft or ask for an annotated bibliography.
• Devise an exercise whereby the students must reflect on some aspect of their paper. Possibly an in-class essay on what they learned from writing the paper or an exam question relating the paper to some aspect of the course.

Detecting Online Plagiarism

• Note any unusual formatting or any formatting which does not match your requirements.
• Does the paper "sound" like your student? Is there any word usage that would be unlikely?
• Are there quotations that have no footnote or bibliographic reference?
• Has part of the assignment been left unadressed?
• Does part of the paper seem to be inserted or added on?
• Is the bibliography in the format that you requested?
• Are the references out of date?

Online Service for Detecting Plagiarism

Plagiarism.org
"the online resource for educators concerned with the growing problem of Internet plagiarism"

Plagiarism Resource Center at the University of Virginia
"The goal of this web site is to help reduce the impact of plagiarism on education and educational institutions. At present, it distributes free
software to detect plagiarism and provides links to other resources. This site’s author is Lou Bloomfield, Professor of Physics, University of
Virginia "

Turn It In
"the world's most widely recognized and trusted resource for helping prevent Internet plagiarism"

Eve 2.2
"Your best defense against online plagiarism". Free 15 day trial.

Search Engines
Exact phrase searching in some of the larger Internet search engines (i.e. google, fastweb) may yield the source of a suspicious paper. Select a four to six word phrase from the paper and enclose it in quotes to search the exact phrase.

What You're Up Against - Some Internet Paper Sites

12000papers.com
Buy Papers.com
College Term Papers
Collegiate Care
Evil House of Cheat
Genius Papers
Paper Masters
School Sucks
Term Paper Sites

Internet Paper Mills
Maintained by staff at the Kimbel Library at Coastal Carolina University. A listing of over 225 Internet term paper sites.

Other Resources

The Center for Academic Integrity (Duke University)
Cut & Paste Plagiarism: Preventing, Detecting and Tracking Online Plagiarism (Illinois State University)
Detecting and Preventing Plagiarism (Dalhousie University)
Plagiarism in Colleges in the USA (Discusses plagiarism from a legal perspective including copyright, trademark, fraud, pertinent statutes and court cases).
Chronicle of Higher Education Article "Forget About Policing Plagiarism. Just Teach" (Nov. 16, 2001)
Plagiarism (Created by Sharon Stroeger, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Some of the content for this page was derived from a workshop for faculty at Swarthmore College presented by Pam Harris.
Questions or comments can be addressed to Kathy Gehring. Last updated 9/30/02