I created a Google document to demonstrate how you can spot some instances of plagiarism in student documents.
Detecting Plagiarism
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4 thoughts on “Detecting Plagiarism”
I saw your post on Twitter about changing the color and shared it with some of our teachers. That is a great Google docs tip although like what you said it’s not fool proof since it didn’t seem to work for all of them (not sure if it was a browser issue).
This is definitely not fool proof and will only work on students who are not being deliberate about covering their tracks. When I copy and paste from a website I will remove the formatting and use format painter to ensure it conforms to my formatting.
If you hold down shift while you’re pasting into a doc, it will pick up the same formatting as wherever your cursor happens to be in the document, and disregard the formatting of the source. I use this often when I’m copying from a presentation I’ve made into a handout.
This is definitely not a foolproof method. Control Shift V strips the formatting, and there are other ways to strip the formatting. My experience is a lot of students are not clever enough to cover their tracks very well. This is only a first line of defense, certainly not an end all be all.