Plagarism of Essays!

Feb 19, 2007
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My teachers in my high school always threaten us not to plagerize from those essay websites. Thy claim that they can "always find out".

I am definately NOT the person to do that, I cant risk it at all.

I am curious. Other than using their gut and Google (with quotations), what other tools do they have?
 

potato28

Diamond Member
Jun 27, 2005
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There are teacher specific utilities that most of us never hear about. Some will do what you said, but mostly teachers can just pick it out by the spacing, punctuation, font, size,etc. Unless you've plagerised every assignment, the teacher will also know the style of your writing.
 

IronWing

No Lifer
Jul 20, 2001
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34,163
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Students who plagiarize tend to be kind of dumb and do things like forget to change verb tenses in ripped off material so their grammar doesn't flow. Also they tend to use words well beyond their normally displayed vocabulary.
 

Cattlegod

Diamond Member
May 22, 2001
8,687
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There are websites out there that have purchased all of the essays you talk about, and then scan tons of essays from all over the world and scan the internet. Schools then pay a fee to the website and submit papers. The website adds the submitted papers to its database for future scans and then compares it to its database to see if it is a copy.

At least, that is how I would guess it works.
 

shoRunner

Platinum Member
Nov 8, 2004
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one of my teachers used some software that compared the text to a database of known works and highlighted any exact quotes, worked pretty well for what I saw.
 

Leros

Lifer
Jul 11, 2004
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All of our programming work in the college of engineering and the college of computer science is compared using Moss.
 

nageov3t

Lifer
Feb 18, 2004
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and there's always that one student who plagiarizes something the professor himself actually wrote and published :p
 

OneOfTheseDays

Diamond Member
Jan 15, 2000
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turnitin.com is something they've used a lot at my college. it's a service that runs your paper against a huge database to check for possible instances of plagiarism.
 

Mo0o

Lifer
Jul 31, 2001
24,227
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High schoolers generally write horrendous papers so it's really easy to tell when they've ripped off someone's PhD dissertation.

not to mention teachers read a lot of work from the same students so they get an idea of their writing level, preferred syntax/word choice etc etc
 

pcnerd37

Senior member
Sep 20, 2004
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Originally posted by: Sudheer Anne
turnitin.com is something they've used a lot at my college. it's a service that runs your paper against a huge database to check for possible instances of plagiarism.

That is what my highschool started to use for a little bit, until some students rebelled and threatened legal action unless they stopped using the service. They stopped using it the second they realized the students were fully prepaired to go to court over the use of the program.
 

Leros

Lifer
Jul 11, 2004
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And don't forget they have records of old papers, other class's papers, and other schools papers to check against. So don't try to copying your friends paper from a different class.
 

Fenixgoon

Lifer
Jun 30, 2003
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Originally posted by: pcnerd37
Originally posted by: Sudheer Anne
turnitin.com is something they've used a lot at my college. it's a service that runs your paper against a huge database to check for possible instances of plagiarism.

That is what my highschool started to use for a little bit, until some students rebelled and threatened legal action unless they stopped using the service. They stopped using it the second they realized the students were fully prepaired to go to court over the use of the program.

what could the students sue for?:confused:
 

Imported

Lifer
Sep 2, 2000
14,679
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Originally posted by: Fenixgoon
Originally posted by: pcnerd37
Originally posted by: Sudheer Anne
turnitin.com is something they've used a lot at my college. it's a service that runs your paper against a huge database to check for possible instances of plagiarism.

That is what my highschool started to use for a little bit, until some students rebelled and threatened legal action unless they stopped using the service. They stopped using it the second they realized the students were fully prepaired to go to court over the use of the program.

what could the students sue for?:confused:

Using their essays without the author's consent? I believe essays submitted to turnitin.com are added to the database.
 

Kadarin

Lifer
Nov 23, 2001
44,296
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IIRC I remember one story about a student getting busted for plagiarizing his own paper. That is, he turned in a paper for one class, then rewrote it for a different class at a different time, but it had enough in common to hit.
 

Leros

Lifer
Jul 11, 2004
21,867
7
81
Originally posted by: Imported
Originally posted by: Fenixgoon
Originally posted by: pcnerd37
Originally posted by: Sudheer Anne
turnitin.com is something they've used a lot at my college. it's a service that runs your paper against a huge database to check for possible instances of plagiarism.

That is what my highschool started to use for a little bit, until some students rebelled and threatened legal action unless they stopped using the service. They stopped using it the second they realized the students were fully prepaired to go to court over the use of the program.

what could the students sue for?:confused:

Using their essays without the author's consent? I believe essays submitted to turnitin.com are added to the database.

Every school I have been to says that once you turn in material, it becomes property of the school and is no longer yours.
 

Special K

Diamond Member
Jun 18, 2000
7,098
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Someone posted on here awhile back that they formed an essay out of random words and turnitin reported it was 10% likely to have been plagerized :confused:
 

sourceninja

Diamond Member
Mar 8, 2005
8,805
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I made a good deal of cash in high school selling the chemistry answers to the next year's students.
 

Imported

Lifer
Sep 2, 2000
14,679
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Originally posted by: Leros
Originally posted by: Imported
Originally posted by: Fenixgoon
Originally posted by: pcnerd37
Originally posted by: Sudheer Anne
turnitin.com is something they've used a lot at my college. it's a service that runs your paper against a huge database to check for possible instances of plagiarism.

That is what my highschool started to use for a little bit, until some students rebelled and threatened legal action unless they stopped using the service. They stopped using it the second they realized the students were fully prepaired to go to court over the use of the program.

what could the students sue for?:confused:

Using their essays without the author's consent? I believe essays submitted to turnitin.com are added to the database.

Every school I have been to says that once you turn in material, it becomes property of the school and is no longer yours.

Then I'm not sure. I don't remember seeing anything like that while in school. Then again, I didn't pay attention to much of the small details in my English and writing classes.