Let's say that he was in the habit of cut-and-pasting his essays direct from websites. Let's also say that he thought this was "research", which makes him a bit of a twit, but not an unusual twit, unfortunately. Let's say that he would then pull the cut-and-pasted sections together and deliver his essays, which were, in fact, mostly not his writing.
This kind of plagiarism is very hard to spot unless you access the source material. It's entirely possible that it was only spotted when one of the people marking his essays stumbled across one of the websites he had used and recognised the turn of phrase - and that could have happened at any time. At that point, someone might have done some searching, rechecking, and discovered that all of his essays over the past three years were of that quality.
If the university made it clear from the very beginning that cut-and-pasting essays is not allowed*, because essays have to be written, and direct textual steals are not permitted, then they've done all they reasonably can do: you cannot search the internet on every phrase used in a student essay to make sure that the student hasn't been copying.
*Which I'm prepared to bet they did. I was told that, back when I was in uni, and that was 1988-1992.
no subject
Let's say that he was in the habit of cut-and-pasting his essays direct from websites. Let's also say that he thought this was "research", which makes him a bit of a twit, but not an unusual twit, unfortunately. Let's say that he would then pull the cut-and-pasted sections together and deliver his essays, which were, in fact, mostly not his writing.
This kind of plagiarism is very hard to spot unless you access the source material. It's entirely possible that it was only spotted when one of the people marking his essays stumbled across one of the websites he had used and recognised the turn of phrase - and that could have happened at any time. At that point, someone might have done some searching, rechecking, and discovered that all of his essays over the past three years were of that quality.
If the university made it clear from the very beginning that cut-and-pasting essays is not allowed*, because essays have to be written, and direct textual steals are not permitted, then they've done all they reasonably can do: you cannot search the internet on every phrase used in a student essay to make sure that the student hasn't been copying.
*Which I'm prepared to bet they did. I was told that, back when I was in uni, and that was 1988-1992.