Any suspicion of plagiarism or cheating is to be reported to the disciplinary officer of the Faculty of Education along with collaborating evidence. The Faculty's Instructor Guidelines [.pdf] provide information about how to deal with cheating and/or plagiarism. Instructors can also consult McGill's Academic Integrity website to review various strategies that instructors can implement to reduce these occurrences.
Some freely available tools are:
- Google - Searches up to 32 word segments against a very large corpus including web pages, academic articles and books.
- Dustball - Automates the process of google searching. Allows cutting and pasting or uploading of Word documents. Will find exact sentence matches but has difficulty with fuzzy searching of altered passages.
- WCopyFind - Compares up to 500 documents at a time for possible plagiarism. Reads word files, text files, and pdf. Useful for checking for plagiarism between students as well as for plagiarism from a known and defined corpus, such as the list of readings for a course.
- Sherlock - Compares a set of source code or plain text files. Useful for finding plagiarism in a set of computer programing assignments.