In my years of teaching, I have only accused four students of plagiarism. In all the cases, I brought the essays they had submitted and, using a bright yellow highlighter, made a direct comparison with another, uncited text. I was able to find the texts myself, but I certainly would have asked other people who were more familiar with a particular subject area if I couldn't track down a source; that is to say, I would both pursue it seriously, and also grant the student the benefit of the doubt. This seems appropriate for a religious community who jokes, "Well, those cows are brown, at least on this side."
I'm not posing an academic question about the nature of truth here (although I certainly recognize that it's not unconnected): this is about being a good Quaker and a good teacher.
Are there any circumstances under which you would accuse a student of plagiarism without having the text from which you think the student has plagiarized in hand?
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This is a bit to the side but have you tried Googling whole sentences from the suspicious paper. There's a good chance that plagiarized material is plagiarized from the Web and if so Google will find it.
As for giving people the benefit of the doubt, yes we should. But you can also compare the writing with other writing of the student. If they are unable to write as well as the paper they handed in as their own, then that's pretty good proof they didn't write it.
This is a difficult question. I did have a case like you described, and here is what I did. The suspicious passages referred to a way of discussing the topic that we had not gone over in class, and looked ahead to authors we had not reached yet in class. So what I did was flag those sections and I noted that there were no citations. I did not grade the paper, but pointed out that these passages were not cited and needed to be. I emphasized the importance of citing to all sources consulted, and re-iterated that if the wording was not the student's own, it needed to be enclosed in quotation marks (and cited). Not citing properly (even to paraphrased material) technically counts as plagiarism. I then asked the student to make corrections accordingly before I would consider grading the paper.
This pedagogical approach can be very effective, by making the assumption that the student didn't mean harm but was just sloppy or unclear about the standards for appropriate citation. Since I do require that all papers adhere to these standards, I was justified in refusing to grade the paper yet. But I gave the student a second chance. The student could see that I was serious, but was not put on the defensive by my being accusatory. I just noticed something about how the paper did not follow all of the guidelines that I had previously set. And the student was grateful for the second chance, probably aware that I could have sent it through the academic honor council instead, and the results may then have been very different.
I'm not sure that this kind of approach would always work, but I do think it can work a lot of the time. Whatever clues you in to there being something amiss can be probably be framed as: "this idea [or this wording] seems to come from some source you have not cited properly." Making the student go back and quote and cite properly without actually accusing them of intentional misdeed forces them to reckon with their own conscience if they did in fact deliberately plagiarize.
If they protest, I get suspicious, but I do hear them out. If I were to remain suspicious, I would then send it through our process (an academic honor council consisting of student members with a faculty advisor), and I would explain to the student why I believe that this is the fair way to handle the situation.
In cases where I do find the text that they copied, I do send it through the process right away.
I have to share one astonishing story I have heard. A colleague received a paper from a student, and he was at first very impressed by it. But as he read on, it finally dawned on him that the student in fact had heavily plagiarized an article he, the professor, had written and published! The really tragic part of the story is that the student didn't even realize that the article he copied from was written by his professor! Oops!
Thank you both for your comments!
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