Marty Norden writes: >Hello, all. One of my undergraduate students recently submitted a paper >on Jean Vigo's _Zero for Conduct_, and I fear that parts of it may have >been plagiarized. Out of interest, what makes you think that? The prose you quote reads to me like an absolutely typical (if anything slightly below average) undergrad essay - basically a regurgitation of some basic factual information gleaned by skimming two or three textbooks. I find it especially interesting that the writer has no discernable locus standi - (s)he is simply offering an factual overview of the film, its director and the controversies arising thereof. Therefore if it is ripped off from anything published, it will be an 'encyclopedia of film' type reference book, or a textbook. I doubt very much if this sort of text could have been lifted from a monograph or critical essay. Would I be right in guessing that your suspicions have been raised because this is unlike that particular student's prose style? If so then I think it is far more likely that (s)he ripped off another student's essay than any published material. When I was teaching undergrads as a PhD student, I came up against three cases of plagiarism (plus another which I suspected but could never prove). All of them were detectable because of two essays in the same batch being uncannily similar. The students thought they'd get away with it because two separate tutors were marking them. They did not realise that we all held a meeting after each marking session to compare notes... L ------------------------------------ Leo Enticknap Projection and Sound Engineer City Screen Cinemas Ltd., London, UK [log in to unmask] ---- Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the University of Alabama: http://www.tcf.ua.edu