Penn State has a contract with an on-line plagiarism service - Turnitin.com - which allows faculty to check whether papers etc were plagiarised from other sources; it compares text with an impressive range of other sources.
Interestingly, the information to faculty about the service comes with a firm admonition to not share the access to the facility with anyone other than other faculty, instructors and TAs.
The University finds it necessary to remind faculty not to cheat on the cheating service.
The concern is not just depriving the service of licensed income, but to prevent students from checking whether their plagiarised papers are "clean" and not detectable by the service as plagiarised...
It has often been observed that most students who cheat would do better to put the same level of effort into just studying the material, but the thought that someone would not just copy material wholsale from the Web, but then take the time to run it through an integrity checker to make sure it wasn't detected as such is slighly mindboggling.
I infer, btw, that integrity checkers are adaptive, ie they learn from input material and expand their database each time - hence if students did get access to launder their plagiarised papers, they'd make it harder for subsequent generations of students to cheat.
At some point, a short enough a paper on narrow enough a topic will lead to all papers being detected as plagiarised, since there are only so many words and combinations of words that are legal in english. Might take a while longer though.
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did you try the "inauthentic paper detector" at indiana university?
Unfortunately, the link does not go through your spam filter. thus you have to google it.
You allude to a legitimate uswe of the checker for students: for a short paper about a popular subject - especially one that invites a well-worn famous quotation or two - you'd want to make sure you're not being mistakenly flagged as a plagiarist.
Yeah, use of the service is supposed to be tied tightly to instruction in proper use of citation - plagiarism is strictly unattributed use of other people's writing.
I fear such services are necessary, since "papers for sale" online services are common, but there are issues with both the use and the prevention of its use by students. One issue that is a major concern is when submission of student papers to this service violates the students' copyright of their own writing, in particular since the service is for-profit, outside the university community, and might include the writing in their database to preclude subsequent students copying that paper.
Technological cheating is becoming easier, and some legitimate uses enter gray ethical areas, but the countermeasures are not exactly pure either.