Check out this homework assignment and tell me if you think it was written by an intermediate English learner. Of course it wasn't!
The search term "promotes murder for murder" turns up one Google result: http://www.academon.com/lib/paper/2164.html.
An exact match. If you find yourself facing an obviously plagiarised paper, and cases of plagiarism are usually easy to spot in ESL classes, put a distinct sounding phrase in quotes and do a google search. Note that the quotes are very important. The term promotes murder for murder without quotes returns lots of pages. With quotes returns only one.
Posted by James Trotta at December 22, 2003 8:31 AMI've been doing this kind of thing for a while. It's pretty easy to find original sources on the web this way. It works with AltaVista, too.
Posted by: Required Name at December 22, 2003 4:14 PMI do this also, and if I'm not sure I will usually type in 1 or 2 sentences with quotes. It's amazing what you can find. This past semester I had a student take selected paragraphs out of a 10 page essay to make her own 5 paragraph essay.
FAIL
Posted by: sean at January 13, 2004 12:43 AMESL blog is one of many Blogs for learning English & teaching English. Translation services information.