Back in September, I put a note on my philosophy papers page to potential plagiarists and their professors:

Hey, philosophy professors. If you've come to this page because you've found that a student has plagiarized one of the papers below, drop me a note, philarete at mindspring dot com. I'm curious as to how widely these papers are being plagiarized.

Hey, philosophy students. Don’t plagiarize these papers. For that matter, don’t plagiarize at all. It’s better to fail honestly than to cheat and get an A. Besides, you’ll probably get caught.

Today I received my first email from a philosophy professor confirming that a student has been caught plagiarizing my work. A undergrad at a California university plagiarized two of my papers, one on Bernard Williams on personal identity, and a shorter piece on the Lockean theory of personal identity.

I’m pleased that the professor told me that the student would have received an A, had he or she not been caught.

Ryan of the Dead Parrots notes the increasing use of anti-plagiarism software tools in academe (to fight the scourge of term-paper copying, something noted by Brock yesterday), the use of which apparently may be spreading to newsrooms to catch journalist-plagiarists (though obviously it won’t catch the Jayson Blairs of the world, who generally invented stories rather than copying them directly).

I have somewhat mixed feelings about these services. On the one hand, they do combat a real problem, and one that potentially damages the academic process. But, like Ryan, I wonder if requiring students to turn these papers in using these services (as a former colleague of mine is doing this semester) creates a presumption of guilt; funnily enough, I’d actually be more comfortable if I (the instructor) were the person submitting the papers to TurnItIn.com, rather than having my students do it. Maybe I’m weird that way.