How Professors Detect Plagiarism

Home » About Plagiarism » How Professors Detect Plagiarism

Date: January 4, 2019

College students have been working harder on their assignments and research papers than ever, and it is not just educationally – cheating is almost everywhere on the campus.

A lot of students have admitted that they have been cheating or at least have once cheated during their academic career. In order to fight the growing plagiarism issue, college and university professors have realized that they need to be more creative to detect for plagiarism in submitted papers.

How Students Do Cheating

How professors detect plagiarism is something every student would like to figure out. Before looking into that, let’s first understand how students cheat. Gone are the days when students used to only cheat by passing the papers around among friends and class fellows.

Internet, where has brought so many changes in our lives, it has also changed the way students used to share research papers with each other. Sharing of papers is now easier – even among students who live in different regions of country who have never met even.

Now, students can just go online to number of websites that are working to help students share their homework. These websites are free databases and platforms students can find and retrieve research papers on almost every subject.

How Professors Checked For Plagiarism

The Professors and their assistants were once limited to their brains while checking for plagiarism. They used to read the paper thoroughly and remember it well. If a student had changed just a number of words every few lines, chances were high that they won’t be caught.

Since teaching assistants professors used to read far more than a few papers every semester, this was almost impossible for them to pay a lot of attention to plagiarism and there were good chances that students would be able to get away even with a little cheating.

How A Plagiarism Checker Works

While Internet has made it easier to cheat, it has also introduced the plagiarism detecting tools. Professors can hire a person or a company to find plagiarism for them, helping ease their workload. Teachers and Professors can add submitted work to a server. The work can then be checked online with a plagiarism checking tool.

A plagiarism checker needs to work with a huge database to work effectively.

The tools check against the works published in books, journals and magazines, academic, medical and legal databases, as well as documents and texts published online in message boards and blogs. After the database is scanned, the person or company working with the collects a report from the plagiarism detector and sends the report to professor.

A great plagiarism checker

must be able to differentiate an unintentional one and an intentional copy. Some tools even offer a setting to expose if a student has used an already utilized paper and just changed some words in it with the use of a thesaurus. A few plagiarism detecting tools are available for the foreign language classes too. Common languages like German, Spanish, Italian and French can be found.

It is necessary to do some research on various services available online and find one that is effective and affordable. Plagiarism is a problem growing day by day, but it should not be with the use of good plagiarism detectors.