1 There's a cool website I go to for that... not that anyone would want to plagiarize me or anthing. www.copyscape.com I think they use the Google engine. It's good for websites especially.

2 I am just wondering why a professor would want to fail so many people, and then seemingly be proud of it. I sure hope the offense is more than one sentence long

3 another way to do it on Google is to do a sentence like this works+with+words+for+a+song+and+lyrics+too then it will find First that exact phrase then all site with those words spread thru out.

4 Chris writes, I am just wondering why a professor would want to fail so many people, and then seemingly be proud of it. I sure hope the offense is more than one sentence longI'm a high school English teacher. Let me offer a response to this rather myopic post on behalf of the blogmaster. Teachers don't want to fail their students; we want them to succeed. But plagiarism is not the path to success. Teachers cannot expect that all their students have high standards of honesty regarding their work, and so to must, among other duties, review student work for plagiarism, for the good of the individual student and to maintain a climate of high expectation and fairness for the rest of the class. The teacher who catches plagiarists and metes out consequences is a conscientious educator; the one who does not either does not care for his students adequately, or, as is common today, is too far behind the technology curve to keep up with the cheaters. If cheaters do not experience negative consequences for their behavior, in ten years they will be cooking books at Enron, committing tax fraud, adultery, or some other public or personal form of cheating. Continued laxity about cheating in school (primary, secondary, and post-secondary) will ultimately weaken the fabric of our society in several places. That a teacher or professor might seem proud to have caught a plagiarist signals not a self-satisfied pettiness, but a professionalism; the same that a policeman might feel at having stopped a speeder, or a lifeguard at having stopped children from running across a wet and slippery pool deck. Instead of impugning them, we should admire educators who hold their students to a high standard. The length of the plagiarized material is a distinction of extent, not of kind. Whether slipping in a good turn of phrase in a paper to lend it style and not giving credit to the source out of laziness, or buying whole term papers on-line, the lapse in honesty is the same. Different consequence? Of course. No consequence? Unthinkable. I just caught a student who plagiarized his whole quarter project by typing a suspect sentence into a search engine. When confronted, he admitted to it, and is now applying himself to his second quarter project knowing that he can't get away with such a breach of the social contract. This time, he may actually learn something from the honest labor. I'm confident he learned something from the plagiarism (it just wasn't the learning I'd assigned). He knows I'll be looking at his work a bit more carefully this time. That sense of accountability will produce a higher quality product. A habit of producing a high quality product will make him more competitive in school and career, and I might venture to say, a better citizen in the bargain. My screed is done. Professor, may your tribe increase. And to all my teachers who expected me to do my own honest work, caught me when I didn't, and made me feel disappointed in myself when I was caught, thank you.