The time has come to mark final year student projects. I am sitting in front of the comoputer at home ready to manually google the reports I am reading. As we demand hard copy submissions (why, I am not sure, it must be lost in the mists of time) we cannot easily use Turnitin or other software tools.

The student report I am reading is clearly not the work of a single author, style wanders from paragraph to paragraph. i have detected 2 pages lifted from science and another journal, this report is already doomed but I will read to the end.

It used to be easier, students just lifted complete reports from open web pages. they are getting better at hiding things. A give away in engineering is over precision in SI units that convert to round numbers of traditional/imperial units. this is a sure sign of something ripped off from a US industrial source.

It is very depressing that students resort to such desperate measures when so much is riding on their report. A poor report gets some marks and normally a pass if you have turned up in the lab and done some work. if you are detected plagiarising you get zero.