For some good thoughts on plagiarized college papers, see Jonathan Malesic on Plagiarism: "How Dumb Do They Think We Are? over at the Chronicle of Higher Education. I must agree that I also sense the utter contempt he sees expressed in some plagiarism. I also sense it quite frequently when reading e-mail spam or seeing TV commercials. Just how stupid do they think we are? Malesic is right also, however, in that plagiarism does not only come from contempt. He writes:

Students can't entirely be blamed for the narrow-mindedness they come to college with, but they absolutely can be blamed for persisting in it in the face of their colleges' best efforts to expand their horizons. Plagiarism is, therefore, not only dishonest; it is also a sign of students' shamefully entrenched satisfaction with their limitations.

It is a failure of imagination which the decision to get an education should be a sign of overcoming.

Actually, the brains needed to detect plagiarism come with experience. Looking back at my first teaching experiences several years ago, before turnitin.com, I am sure that many cases of cheating must have escaped me. Indeed, even then, I caught some cases using the same simple tools of observation Malesic describes in the opening of his article, supported by google searches. I have generally relied too heavily on turnitin.com, however.

There was an exception about a year ago. A student turned in a paper without citations and heavily riddled with extensive uncited quotes from various internet sites. Turnitin.com found those. Instead of busting the student, I opted to give him a second chance. His next submission turned up nothing on turnitin.com save for a few short statistically common phrases and the three sources in his bibliography. But I saw that I did indeed have the skills needed to detect cheating, the kinds of skills the student likely had never really considered.

• The paper lacked a real "point" (common in student writing), but read like an excerpt of something else that did (a good clue).
• The writing was perfect in terms of grammar, syntax, etc. - unlike the student's other work.
• The footnoted sources had titles, places and dates of publication which seemed unlikely to have actually been the sources for the material they were attached to. Thus, a Soviet military book from the 1960s was the citation for information on Russia that a Soviet author would hardly have been allowed to print.

Since I smelled a rat, but turnitin.com had turned up blank, I tried googling some of the sentences from the paper. Nothing (predictably, since turnitin.com also checks the internet). Then I found two of the three sources cited in Amazon.com and checked the tables of contents to see if the page numbers cited were in chapters that could reasonably assumed to have to do with the content attributed. In several cases, it looked very suspicious. I was now pretty sure that the student had faked the footnotes. He had just found three book titles online and scattered them throughout the paper as footnotes with made-up page numbers. I couldn't take that to court without actually finding the books, and they were not available here in Tübingen. If I could only find the text itself, I wouldn't need inter-library loan.

I wrote the student an e-mail explaining my suspicions and asked him to explain the situation. Hardly had I sent the e-mail, it occurred to me to simply check my private library. I have a sizeable collection of Russian history books. I picked a popular history of Russia off the shelf and looked up the chapter that seemed appropriate to the student's paper, the Russian Civil War.

There it was. A whole sub-chapter of about five book pages with one interruption. The student had realized after his first submission that turnitin.com would find anything he got from the internet, so he scanned or typed a whole section of a print source, interspersed his phony footnotes, and submitted it. I quickly wrote the student another mail explaining that the situation had now changed and that I would submit a grade of "F" for him for the assignment and, hence, the course. I never got an answer.

An interesting footnote to this story is that that particular section of that particular Russian history book is now part of the turnitin.com system. The next student who tries the same trick with the same section of text will be caught much more quickly.