Copyright & Plagiarism - Thing #10

The staff members at our school are very concerned about plagiarism; therefore, my second year as an LMS at Como, the English Department and I collaborated and came up with a list of possible consequences for plagiarism. I created a webpage that discusses plagiarism and points out how to avoid it. I noticed that Purdue's Owl was referenced under Thing #10. I, too, included it on an MLA citation page I created so that students can have a guide in citing correctly. I think it's one of the best sites around for looking up how to cite. (By the way,thank you to Leslie E. for having her intern create the original guide sheets several years ago. My former EA retyped them and now anyone can access them, even at home.) Also, because staff members care about the legalities of using various media, I added a Copyright and Fair Use webpage. Until recently it was relatively easy and free to type a segment from a student's paper into the Google search bar, put quotes around it, and voila, up came the source. It's not possible to do that anymore, and my guess is it's because the online paper writing warehouses have put some kind of block up that makes it impossible to track papers to them. Schools need to decide if they want to spend huge bucks to buy online plagiarism-detection tools such as Turnitin.com, CopyCatch and the Essay Verification Engine. Using the plagiarism proof assignment ideas listed under Thing #10 might be a cheaper, and in the end, more fruitful way to go.