Check with your school to see if it subscribes to a plagiarism detection software program such as Turnitin, iThenticate or SafeAssign (integrated into the Blackboard learning system and only available to subscriber institutions). Such software programs allow you to upload a digital copy of a student paper or will allow you to input suspect sections of a the paper, and will search their databases and the Internet for close textual matches. You may then compare the student paper against the sources provided by the software to determine if the student has, in fact, plagiarized.
If your school does not subscribe to a plagiarism detection software program, a simple Internet search will turn up a variety of free software programs that check for plagiarism. Grammarly, Copyspace and WCopyfind are some free software programs that can assist teachers in uncovering plagiarism. While some of these programs operate in the same way as the paid subscription sites, others, such as WCopyfind, ask teachers to submit a student paper along with a link to a suspect source in order to determine if a student has plagiarized.
Rather than using software to detect plagiarism, you may be able to uncover instances of an infraction by simply inputting suspect words and phrases into an Internet search engine like Yahoo! or Google. Type in the title of the student paper in quotes, and if the student has directly copied the paper from a website or downloaded it from a paper mill site, a full or partial copy of the text should emerge in your search results. You can also type in suspect words and phrases in quotes to uncover sources from which a student has cut and pasted information into a paper.
If you notice that a student has written one paper in a radically different style than previous papers, or that a student's grammar, spelling and vocabulary have improved dramatically from one paper to the next, you should check available Internet or electronic resources against the paper to see if the student has plagiarized. Students may also leave other signs in their work that they have taken part or all of a paper from a source, such as: forgetting to change the gender of pronouns so that they match the writer's gender, printing directly from a website (which leaves a web address at the top or bottom of the page), leaving out citations for plagiarized sources, or making reference to material (charts, graphs, tables) that is not included in the paper.