Plagiarism is usually fairly easy to spot in a small class with students you work with daily. Students suddenly write–and sound–much different than they have in the past, or interject insights and ideas that sound nothing like you’ve ever heard or seen from them. But for larger classes–or for new students–it’s not always that obvious and can be easy to miss.

Whether students are simply failing to properly cite a source, or are outright buying papers from essay mills, plagiarism can erode learning, destroy credibility, and severely disrupt a student’s educational experience. Below are 10 signs to look keep an eye out for before sending the paper off to the digital plagiarism checker.

10 Signs Of Plagiarism Every Teacher Should Know

1. Sudden changes in diction。Perhaps the most reliable tip-off of all is an unexpected shift of register. Put simply, if the writing suddenly changes within a few sentences or paragraphs, that may not be their writing. This can be more subtle than some of the factors below, but when grading, you should already be reading closely enough to notice this.
2. More than one font。这更像是gimme。注意字体类型，大小，颜色和样式的变化（斜体，粗体或下划线），以及可疑格式，尤其是从一种设置到另一种设置的变化（单一与双重空间，边距等）。这些错误可能还有其他完全合理的原因，因此这几乎不是窃的既定证明，但这应该是一个危险信号。
3. Uncalled for hyperlinks在相同的行中，可以从在线源复制并粘贴纸张（或部分）的信号是HTML链接的存在，如果提交是硬拷贝，显然您将无法遵循。这些通常是下划线和蓝色的，或黑白印刷纸中的深灰色。同样，这里可能没有犯规比赛，但这可能是某件事的迹象。
4. Odd intrusions of first-person or shifts in tense。Logically, first-person interjections would seem to be a sign that someonedidwrite something, wouldn’t they? Always look carefully here. Do they sound like something this student would say? A student was once caught submitting an essay on steroid abuse that included the phrase, “In my many years as a physician … “
5. Outdated information。If you come across a passage that says something like, “our current president, Bill Clinton,” or “Soviet scientists assert that,” you might be reading a plagiarized paper. Granted, this may also simply be a sign of poor researching skills or plain ignorance, but it’s sure redolent of lazy academic thievery.
6. Apparent quotes with quotation marks。This is not only a sign of plagiarism, it’s one key definition of it. It should be made very clear to students that improper citation by itself constitutes plagiarism, and though it’s typically of the accidental kind, in practice that does not necessarily mitigate the consequences. Again, if they sound like someone else’s words, they very well might be, so investigate.
7. Incorrect or mixed citation systems。不同的学科具有不同的引用来源的方法。您应该向学生清楚地表明，无论您希望他们使用MLA，APA，Turabian，芝加哥风格还是适合您的主题的任何系统，并充分指导他们如何使用它。最重要的是一致性。如果引用样式改变了，您可能会看窃材料。
8. Missing references。These can either be footnotes or endnotes that don’t exist, or random notes with no referent in the text. Just like a mismatched or confused citation style, these loose ends can reveal chunks of text lifted directly from source material. Again, incorrect or absent citations are an academic offense in themselves, but they may also point to something more systematic and deliberate.
9. A paper that doesn’t really fit the assignment.It’s a good policy to give students as specific a prompt as possible for written assignments. This makes it much harder to simply steal (or buy, there are sites for that!) a paper by another writer. If you do give a fairly particular briefing for an assignment, and then get a submission that’s just slightly askew from what you asked for, like a square peg in a round hole, it may be that the student secured a paper from another source, figured “Hey, close enough,” and turned it in.
10. 登上搜索引擎。Finally, we come to the technological solutions for diagnosing plagiarism. The simplest and most readily available resource is Google: paste a sentence or phrase that seems iffy and see if you get any hits. More precisely tailored tools include Turnitin, Plagium, Plagscan, iThenticate, and many more. It’s amazing how often it fails to occur to students that their teachers could do this. It really adds insult to injury: if they’re going to cheat, they should at least do it出色地, instead of assuming you’re an idiot who won’t notice. For their own good and your own integrity, don’t let them get away with it.This is a based on a cross-post fromBestCollegesOnline.com; image attribution flickr user usmissiongeneva