grinnellns,
I simply mean that it should not matter how you catch a plagiarised piece, and don't understand why some methods like using Google can be criticized.
I wrote long time ago here that assignments properly conceived by a teacher should not have ready answers on Internet. But, if teachers plagiarise their own assignments year after year, that finds answers on the Internet very fast.
Okay, thanks. The sentence seemed very confusing.
I'm in favor of researched writing assignments, though I design them for freshmen and sophomores in such a way as to teach the use of one specific kind of source at a time. I think that finding, reading and understanding, and then making use of information is an important skill. For upper-level students, I guide them toward participating in the on-going conversation about a work, which involves reading a number of secondary sources on a particular issue so that the student gets a glimmer of the issues involved. I do have colleagues who have given up completely: using in-class writing exclusively or only permitting students to use sources chosen for them. I feel that my classes are small enough, however, that I don't need to take that course.
Class discussion is particularly enhanced when my students are reading secondary sources in preparation for writing papers; sometimes it produces delightful results, such as the group who tried to persuade a colleague of the narrative similarities between Chaucer and the Black Arts Movement (I'm not really convinced, but that kind of intellectual exploration is exactly what we'd like to see our undergraduates embrace).
I find turnitin.com and google, along with several other tools, useful in preventing certain kinds of plagiarism (basically, buying or borrowing papers, or cutting-and-pasting from the internet). As long as you understand how the tools work and use them with discretion, they can be quite valuable.
