Detecting Plagiarism

Resources: University Library and Plagiarism Checker

 Retrieve “Lab Courses Go Virtual” by Thomas F. Edgar, from Gale PowerSearch. Copy and paste the article into a Microsoft® Word document. Save it to your desktop.

 Imagine you are an instructor who received the article above as an assignment. The student claims to have written the article, but you know it was plagiarized.                                            

Submit your Microsoft® Word copy of the article to the Plagiarism Checker and view the results. Note: You will not be penalized for plagiarism for submitting this test paper.

 Post a 200- to 300-word response describing the results and what course of action you would take toward the student if you were the instructor.

 ·         Describe the following to the student:

 o    Why plagiarism is dishonest.

o    What other types of behavior constitute academic dishonesty.

 ·         Incorporate the lessons you learned in the previous weeks of this course about online tone and writing to appropriate audiences.

I submitted the paper titled “Lab Courses Go Virtual” to the Plagiarism Checker, and after waiting for the result, found it had a 99% Similarity Index, meaning that the majority of the paper was copies from other sources. There was a 99% match from an Internet article dates 11/16/2008. If I were an Instructor that had this paper turned in and I suspected Plagiarism and therefore submitted it to a checker and got these results I would address the student as follows:

As I was reading your paper recently turned in, I suspected that you may have copied some if not all. I submitted your paper titled “Lab Courses Go Virtual” to a Plagiarism Checker and found that indeed it was 99% similar to an article previously posted via the Internet. It is the student’s responsibility to check each paper carefully to ensure that all direct quotations and ideas that are not original are correctly cited and referenced. Plagiarism is one of many...