I don’t like this idiom, the only reason being the rodent in it… yes, I am that girlie!!
Now and then, and as part of the continuous asssessment, I ask my students to write something at home to be marked later and very often and mainly when it is writing about a celebrity, a book or a film they nick from the Internet. Setting this task when I know pretty well they won’t be able to resist the temptation of copy-pasting from the Internet is a bit of a wicked of me ,to put it midly, but life is hard, isn’t it?
To smell a rat= you know instinctively that something is wrong or that someone is lying to you.
So when I start reading essays and some words trigger all my sirens, then this is the tool I use to catch you red-handed.
It’s called Plagium
