Internet Plagiarism Growing in Popularity

Type "term paper" on search engine and thousands of sites appear with papers for sale on subjects from Plato to Ellison.

But students who believe these papers, or other forms of plagiarism such as cutting and pasting, are untraceable and therefore unpunishable should think again.

From January 2000 through May 2002 there have been 93 charges filed for academic violations at UNC. Eighty-eight of those were found guilty. Of those the majority involved plagiarism.

Plagiarism cases represent the majority of academic cheating cases, said Student Attorney General Amanda Spillman.

Students reported for not citing borrowed phrases in a paper or those who use complete Internet papers are investigated the same way, she said. "We tend not to differentiate between a little plagiarism and a lot of plagiarism," Spillman said.

The majority of cases occur in classes with intensive writing requirements such as English, history and philosophy classes.

A professor might suspect plagiarism if a student seems to use uncited language that is inconsistent with the rest of the paper.

Some professors actively check papers for plagiarism; some only check the papers that arouse suspicion because of a dramatic change in writing style or a style that indicates a level of writing or understanding of the material that is far in advance of the student's prior work, said UNC assistant dean of students David Gilbert.

Sometimes professors might even recognize published academic work from one of their peers in a student's paper.

If professors suspect plagiarism they can sue search engines to try to find the source of the work in question, which can be a time-consuming process.

Turnitin.com is a plagiarism prevention system designed to detect unoriginal work automatically so teachers do not have to spend extra time policing schoolwork. The Web site says one of its goals is to stop plagiarism by offering educators the most advanced tool for plagiarism detection available anywhere.

So far, the Oakland-based company, created in 1996, has received positive reviews from educators across the country. The New York Times reported that some of the positive reactions from educators came seeing the service as a deterrent to potential cheaters.

The use of Turnitin.com as a deterrent is perhaps much more valuable than as a way to ferret out plagiarism, said Steven Hardinger, a chemistry lecturer at the University of California-Los Angeles. "We really hate to see plagiarists and hate to punish them, but we want them to know we're watching."

The system uses four steps to analyze a student's paper for possible plagiarism. A digital fingerprint is made of the paper, and then it is cross-referenced with the system's latest database. Web crawlers are then sent to scour the World Wide Web for more possible papers that have been copied.

Finally, an originality report is made with a determination of what was found to match reports on the Internet. The report lists documents that contain the same language found in the students work.

Students at UNC who are found guilty of plagiarism are normally suspended for a semester and receive an "F" for the course.

It is difficult to determine exactly how much plagiarism has increased due to the Internet. The availability of term papers on the Web certainly offers students more chances to cheat on term papers, if they are so inclined, but the Internet also available for professors to use as tool to catch cheaters.

The State & National Editor can be reached at stntdesk@unc.edu.