How I Caught a Plagiarizer in Under Two Minutes

1. Delight quickly turns to dismay as term paper seems too good to be true.
2. Select jargon filled phrase from text on first page
3. Conduct Google search for phrase (Google is a nifty search engine)
4. First search result turns up online journal article, the first two pages of which were cut and pasted by the student into his paper.

This will probably never work as well for me again nor does is solve the term-paper-for-sale problem, but it's a quick way to test one's suspicions.

David R. Karp
Assistant Professor of Sociology
Skidmore College

 

Skidmore College	Writing Center	Scribner Library