Since I find plagiarism time consumign to deal with I usually get around it with in-class exams. I give the students the exam questoins a week in advance and then they have to come in and write about them. The questions are structured to pull together things that would not be ordinarily paired in most available writing. For example, I had students compare class structure in Tocqueville's Ancien Regime to Mozart's Don Giovanni. There's not a whole lot of literature out there on that!
Nonetheless: some years ago a student complained about my exam technique. Some students would enter class before the exam and copy their notes onto the desk tops.
So now I make them change their desks before they write the exam. If half the ingenuity devoted to not-thinking was devoted to thinking, we would have a veritable renaissance in the universities.
-- Gregory P. Nowell Associate Professor Department of Political Science, Milne 100 State University of New York 135 Western Ave. Albany, New York 12222
Fax 518-442-5298