A professor gives some sound advice on how not to be mind-numbingly stupid about plagiarizing text for reports and take-home exams:
8. Edit > Paste Special > Unformatted Text
This is my Number 1 piece of advice, even if it is numbered eight. When you copy things from the web into Word, ignoring #3 above, don’t just “Edit > Paste” it into your document. When I am reading a document in black, Times New Roman, 12pt, and it suddenly changes to blue, Helvetica, 10pt (yes, really), I’m going to guess that something odd may be going on. This seems to happen in about 1% of student work turned in, and periodically makes me feel like becoming a hermit.
Words to live by.
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Also, it would help if you remembered to scrub the metadata. Working in a law firm, I’ve been enlightened as to how much is actually trapped by Word when you copy/paste between documents.
Heh. Yeah.
And if submitting an electronic copy, saving all tracked changes before sending in is probably a good idea, too.
I’m not sure why #8 is his top recommendation. I sometimes see that problem, but much more frequently, I catch what he calls #4: “Don’t rite too good.” That comes in two forms, one involving grammar and style, and the other involving content. In both cases, there’s usually a dramatic difference between one part of a paper and another. It’s my believe that students are often so poorly attuned to quality writing or thought that they cannot tell the difference between their own writing and much better writing.
I don’t allow my students to turn in electronic documents, but maybe I should if I could get a look at the metadata. Of course if the metadata is easy to spoof, then that won’t be that useful.
Hey thanks for the advice, i have a question i have a membership with some website that i can buy an essay from it, do you think it is possible that the teacher find the essay from the internet or caught me ?!
In the four years since the original article, my understanding is that teachers have gotten a lot better at this AND there are an increasing number of tools available to help them detect this sort of plagiarism. There have also been some pretty embarrassing reports about how shoddy the work of some essay mills is. I’d seriously recommend not making use of that sort of thing, both from an academic stand point (what’s the point?) and from a cost/risk standpoint.
Tom,
I am taking online classes and searches for a topic often turn up the sites that sell answers to the exact assignments I am working on. I brought this to my first instructor’s attention, and was assured that they all know about these sites and will respond accordingly if plagiarism is detected (in our case, that means expulsion).
Also, I fear that you may have misinterpreted the author’s (and ***Dave’s) intent in presenting this information. You may want to reread it with an eye for sarcasm.
What Avo says.