Okay, so…many students have no idea how to cite. Turns out there are machines that connect to each other and allow us to search for and share information exactly like that. It’s trivial to search for plagiarism rules and principles online. More to the point–are you genuinely asking me to believe that there are students out there who know about Turnitin but have somehow never heard of plagiarism? Because if they’ve heard of it, they can google it. Sheesh.
All the other stuff about hacking and cheating has nothing to do with a student plagiarizing in his or her own paper.
And no. Do not wear a belt with suspenders. Wear pants that fit.
My kids learned about citing and plagiarism in history classes in high school - not in English where they didn’t write research papers. I don’t understand why if this is such a rampant problem in colleges they don’t teach this stuff. Most colleges do have some version of Freshman English or expository writing. Back when I was at Harvard they did some testing during freshman orientation - which seems to me an ideal time to go over the basics and steer students to the Writing Centers (which most schools also have) that can help kids who haven’t been exposed to this stuff in high school.
Many students coming into college don’t know how to cite in MLA, APA, and Chicago style. My kids have used all three depending on their professor’s preference and the country in which they studied. Problems arose in group papers where my kid gets stuck redoing someone’s citations and re-verifying their sources because sources were improperly cited. The plagiarism checker comes in handy when identifying someone in my kid’s group lifted almost everything from the web and that section needs to be entirely rewritten and properly cited. I am less than thrilled when my kid is tied to a group paper.
@awcntdb but none of that negates what I said, that a plagiarism-dectector will often not pick up the kinds of “accidental plagiarism” you yourself descibed. So sending it through some online detector will not help the honest student trying to check him/herself who doesn’t know the rules. It will just give a false sense of confidence.
And yes, we spend a lot of time teaching these skills in comp classes. There is no excuse for a student not knowing them.