But I won't get caught!
Possibly.
But consider this:
- Many universities now use plagiarism detection software. Indiana University currently licenses a commercial product, Turnitin. Many professors require students to submit their written work through Turnitin. Other similar tools are available, some even free.
- Google. Need we say more?
Try this to see what anyone can do who suspects plagiarism:
Copy and paste the blue text below, directly quoted from Frick (2020, p. 701), into Google, or click here:
"Human teachers are essential to education. It is vital that teachers and students form affective bonds. This is the most important relationship in education systems that must be nurtured, no matter how technology might evolve."
This is what many instructors do if they suspect plagiarism when reading a student's writing. Something does not look quite right. There is a change or unevenness in writing style or tone. So the instructor types or copies and pastes a line or two of a suspected passage into Google, and presto! If the text has been plagiarized from a published source, there is often a link found on the first page or two of search results which points to the original source.
By the way, in order to avoid plagiarism ourselves, we should provide the bibliographic reference for the source of the quote above (text in blue):
Frick, T. W. (2020). Education systems and technology in 1990, 2020, and beyond. TechTrends, 64, 693-703. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-020-00527-y (PDF).