Sure. And _your country_ then becomes a target for the long range _and_ the short range ones. I'd take my chances with the aircraft carrier, personally...

Internships are extremely valuable _once you know what you want to do_. They're less so when you're still feeling around (eg, freshman and sophmore years). People who have their BS probably fall into the former category, or at least I hope they do.

Your biological clock might not be ticking, but life seldom goes as people plan it will.

First, not a teacher. We're provided use of the application for checking our own work.

Second: the term "black box" would be appropriate if the output was a simple percentage of plagiarism with no explanation. By revealing _how_ that number was come to, the internal process of the box to derive it has been revealed (which is to say, it's comparing your work to a lot of other work in the app's DB). "Black box" is a purely colloquial term with no single formal definition - calling me out on using it is ludicrous.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_box

To provide a counter-argument, my wife has a BS in ME _and_ a MS in ME, which she got in rapid succession. Her work in graduate school is _extremely_ relevant to her current job, which she got shortly after finishing up school. Your generalization that intern/co-op experience isn't good enough is almost hilarious - you don't think employers care that you worked a few summers for a major aerospace or electronics firm? I rather think that they do, because those references can be _very_ helpful in determining the quality of an applicant.

Now, let me provide another bit of advice from personal experience: going back to a good school full-time once you've started working is extremely difficult at best for most people. I'm not saying it's not doable, but if you've got a spouse and possibly kids you need to help support, the option is difficult to exercise. _If you want a graduate degree, best to do it up front._ You may not have the chance later.

Personally, I didn't care to go for an MS in CS (or an MA in Economics), but I did wind up going part-time for an MBA. It is not a ton of fun to back to school at this stage of my life, useful and interesting as it may be.

The app I used not only told you what the plagiarized source was, but also gave you the passage that was plagiarized from. So your objection is irrelevant. In fact, I specifically addressed it in the post you're replying to.

These detectors are not black boxes at all.

Depends on the degree it's being done. Search the Internets for "plagiarism paraphrasing" - it should be enlightening.

I don't really get what you're saying. If the program is showing 35%+ of the paper as plagiarized, that's pretty much a preponderance of evidence right there. The program will tell you were the plagiarism is from, too, if it's anything like what I used.

Very true. My wife reviews proposals at her work from time to time, and she has gotten surprisingly good at detecting which ones are doing wholesale plagiarizing. I suspect she'd probably miss it if it was a sentence or two, but some of these idiots are doing whole pages of it.

The tools are fairly good, but, in my experience, they'll always report 3-7% or so of your paper as plagiarized, just because it's pretty difficult to write about _anything_ without unknowingly using previously written words. I would _hope_ that anyone who would pursue disciplinary action from such a tool's results would at least take a look to see if the sections being flagged are consequential.

I have no idea how good they are with catching paraphrasing, though... it strikes me that the semi-intelligent plagiarizers would be doing that more than a straight copy and paste. There's also the "acceptable vs unacceptable" distinction to be made.

Go there after dark. At the base I visit frequently, they've got rent-a-cops doing gate guard duty during the day (presumably backed by some sort of military rapid-reaction force), but they've got full-out military handling the duties at night.