on Wednesday we spent the class in the writing center mimicking instructors in search of plagiarism. i think either my group did a pretty good job at concealment or perhaps my first attempt at plagiarism spotting did not go so well. when Scot and the other instructors came in to speak about plagiarism, they made it seem so easy to detect and find the source. i definitely had a hard time and found nothing for about half an hour.

at first i was searching entire sentences with quotations as Scot had suggested. that returned very few results if any at all; in any case none which proved plagiarism. then i figured i'd shorten the sentences to phrases and sometimes even just words. this improved my search results slightly, but now i was getting too much material. my final trick was to keep the longer phrases but take out the quotation marks, and was finally able to find a few sources.

i can now see the ethics behind plagiarism from the grading instructor's point of view. we looked at only a couple papers, whereas a TA porobably looks at 60+ papers. imagine taking my struggles in searching for plagiarism and multiplying that by 60+. i can see now why some instructors get mad at students for plagiarizing, on top of the fact that it is just plain wrong.