How Do Professors Check For Plagiarism in Essays and Term Papers?

How do professors check for plagiarism in essays and dissertations?

With the expansion of the internet and access to information, the opportunities for students to plagiarize are forever increasing. There is just so much information available on that big wide web nowadays that anyone can find almost anything they need on the internet, and that includes entire essays on examination or coursework titles. Practically, all a student needs to do in this day and age is type the key words or indeed their entire essay question into a web-based search engine, and at the click of a button they can locate a pre-written essay that responds beautifully to the assignment question they have been set.

It all sounds like a bit of a nightmare for parents who are trying to ensure that their children learn how to research and write strong academic papers, and of course it causes chaos for teachers who are finding it harder and harder to judge whether or not someone's written essay response is their own work or whether it has been stolen from some other source on the internet.

So how do teachers and academic professors get over this concern? How can they identify when a student's dissertation, coursework, thesis or essay is their own work and when it has been copied from some other source? Easy - via the internet!

Yes, whilst the internet might be a fantastic resource for any student looking to plagiarize information in order to create the perfect essay response, it is also the place to head to if you are a teacher seeking clarification as to who owns a specific idea, sentence or paragraph. Teachers and professors need to check that both a student's ideas and their words are their own - and the internet can help them in this quest.

There are a number of different plagiarism checkers available online. These easy to use pieces of software enable teachers to input in sentences from their student's essays and to find out if an identical or similar sentence exists anywhere else on the World Wide Web. So, how do these software programmes work?
It is really all very simple.

- Teachers and professors enter one or more sentence(s) from their student's essay paper into a search box

- They then click a 'search' button

- The chosen software checker will make some initial assessments about the text entered. For example it will automatically eliminate any sentences that are less than 6 words in length.

- The software will then link teachers across to a search engine website where all instances of the sentence input into the search box appears on websites. These sites can then be checked and if it is obvious that the student has copied content from these websites, appropriate action can be taken.

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