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What is Plagiarism? Many people think of plagiarism as copying another's work, or borrowing someone else's original ideas. But terms like "copying" and "borrowing" can disguise the seriousness of the offense: According to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, to "plagiarize" means to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own to use (another's production) without crediting the source to commit literary theft to present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source. In other words, plagiarism is an act of fraud. It involves both stealing someone else's work and lying about it afterward. But can words and ideas really be stolen? According to U.S. law, the answer is yes. The expression of original ideas is considered intellectual property, and is protected by copyright laws, just like original inventions. Almost all forms of expression fall under copyright protection as long as they are recorded in some way (such as a book or a computer file). All of the following are considered plagiarism: turning in someone else's work as your own copying words or ideas from someone else without giving credit failing to put a quotation in quotation marks giving incorrect information about the source of a quotation changing words but copying the sentence structure of a source without giving credit copying so many words or ideas from a source that it makes up the majority of your work whether you give credit or not (see our fair use section) http://www.plagiarism.org/plag_article_what_is_plagiarism.html Plagiarism can be avoided, however, by citing sources. Simply acknowledge material has been borrowed, and providing your audience with the information necessary, that is usually enough to prevent plagiarism. See our section on citation for more

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Copied verbatim. Nice. What do we call dupes from other sites without credit? Oh, yeah, plagiarism

Sites such as the Internet Paper Mill and Term Papers will start to have to list EssayWritingChicks.com

Now we should be able to hide from these guys.
Plagiarism.com
Plagiarism.org
Wordcheck
Integriguard
Eve

I think that these types of systems are a necessary evil for educators. I watched way to many "students" turn in papers that were not there own work and had been ordered from paper writing services or collected over the years in Fraternity filing cabinets. People do this because there is 0% chance of getting caught in a large class at a large university.

Your arguement that a cs professor does not need to read the code of the assignments, just diff the results is like an history professor reading only your final paragraph. its not the results/conculsion that counts, its the logic and methods you used to arrived there that counts.

I don't know if this is the case everywhere, but my high school has taken a very strong stance against plagiarism. We're required to give major papers in on paper as well as in electronic form, so that our teachers can easily run a check with plagiarism.org. The consequences for plagiarism basically reduce to: first offense - 0 for the term, second offense - 0 for the course.

I never really had any desire to rip off other people's work anyway, since I feel that I can write better than the people who give their papers away for free over the internet, but having such punishment is actually a comforting incentive to do one's own work.

My high school AP English teacher runs all of our typed papers (we have to give her an electronic copy) through plagiarism.org. This website will (for a fee) compare documents/essays/term papers/etc. to its huge established database of papers found in books and online. In addition, I believe that it adds new papers that are run through it to the overall database, so it builds itself up, and intra-class cheating can be caught.

This threat is probably an effective deterrent to plagiarism, as the penalties in our (public) school are fairly harsh for decent students (removal from honors society, 0 on the assignment, disciplinary action). It seems that the professor could have used this, and had access to an even larger accumulative database.

I have spent some time checking out www.plagiarism.org. Their turnitin.com site pretty much automates the task from the instructor's point of view, the surprising thing is the cost of the service -- actually reasonable. I think that the fact that the students have to submit their work through the site might reduce plagiarism significantly even if the software doesn't do a thing.