If you receive a paper that you suspect contains plagiarism in some form, there are several
different steps that you can take. 

• Check for accuracy the sources that the student has listed in the Works Cited section
  of the paper. 
•  If the actual writing of the paper does not sound like the student’s work, there are
  various sources available through the Internet that you can use.  Among these are:

These sites will help you to understand what is and what is not plagiarism, and on some of the
sites, most notably Google and Turnitin.com, you can actually type in a suspect sentence from
the paper and possible copied sources will be displayed.

When conducting a search for possible sources on a site like Google, a good tactic is to
combine unusual words in a multi-word search. For example, if you find the words laundromat,
indubitable, and Renaissance in the suspected paper, you can type those words into the
“Search” field, and the search engine will locate documents that contain those three words
somewhere in their text. You can also put short, unusual phrases in quotation marks to search
for exact combinations of words as they appear in the suspect paper.

• Share the paper with another faculty member in your department.  Teachers who have
  taught the student in the past can be particularly helpful.
• Go to see the Head of the Honor Committee and discuss the situation with him or her.
• Discuss the situation with the student’s advisor.  Sometimes the advisor can approach
  his advisee more easily than the teacher.
• Directly approach the student and ask him or her about some of the problems you noted
  in the paper.  Ask to see sources that are quoted, and quiz him on facts in the paper.