According to a recent study of college students and faculty, 44 percent of students consider "cut-and-paste" plagiarism using the Internet a trivial offense, and 38 percent of students have done it.
The study, conducted on 23 U.S. college campuses, was organized by Rutgers University management professor Donald McCabe. A survey of over 18,000 students, 2,600 faculty and 650 teaching assistants suggests that Internet plagiarism is becoming a bigger issue on college campuses.
McCabe explained reasons students cheat.
"A lot of students plagiarize because they are convinced nothing is wrong with it," McCabe said. "In fact, they think they've done good research."
"A lot of them waited too long to do the assignment and panicked or thought it was a stupid assignment," McCabe added.
Plagiarism is the most common academic violation at AU and half of these violations are Internet-related, according to Nathan Price, special assistant to Provost Neil Kerwin.
"Those violations range from students who copy portions of material and incorporate it into their papers without citations, to students who have bought and downloaded papers from paper mills," Price said.
"Paper mills" are Web sites that allow students to purchase or download term papers on any topic, Price said.
One, Cheathouse.com, advertises over 19,000 papers and over 75,000 members with access to them. This site offers weekly, monthly or annual access for a fee.
Another term paper Web site, Other People's Papers, allows users to search over 20,000 essays and the site requests term paper donations from users as well.
There were 85 AU students found responsible for academic violations in the 2001-2002 academic year. Of these students, 35 received an F in the course, five were suspended and four were dismissed from the University, said Price.
Some faculty members have resorted to plagiarism detection services to confirm whether a student is cheating. One of the most popular, Turnitin.com, offers software and training materials to faculty at universities and high schools.
"Our system detects unoriginal work," said Leslie Mayville, vice president of sales, marketing and training at Turnitin.com. "We search against three databases of content. The first one is the publicly accessible Internet. The second database is of published work. The third database consists of every student paper ever submitted, checking for collusion."
Mayville said the professor must decide if there was an academic violation.
"Ultimately, it is up to the professor to determine whether it is plagiarized," she said. "Sometimes students misquote and don't know how to cite."
Turnitin.com serves 2,500 educational institutions in over 51 countries, Mayville said.
However, Price said AU tried Turnitin.com in a pilot program but has many reservations about it.
"A subscription to the service would not be cost-effective," Price said. "Using other means like Google.com, we were able to identify suspected plagiarism at an almost equal success rate to Turnitin.com."
"Turnitin.com has a requirement that all papers be submitted whether there is suspected plagiarism or not," he said. "We have some pedagogical concerns about presuming that guilt before there was a real suspicion."
"Our faculty read closely the work of their students," Price said. "They know by experience when writing is not that student's own work."
McCabe also said he has reservations about plagiarism detection software.
"It does not create a dynamic of classroom trust," he said. "The best thing for professors to do is be more proactive and read papers seriously."
AU government professor Steven Taylor said he has never had to charge a student with Internet plagiarism.
"I don't let them use Internet sources and because of that I don't have to deal with it," Taylor said. He said he can tell when a student is cheating because "it's work that's not characteristic of their abilities."
Professor John Watson of the School of Communication said he has had students plagiarize, but he didn't think it was intentional.
"They didn't realize they had to attribute the information and they assumed because it was on the Internet they could use it," Watson said. "It was cut and paste."
Watson said he could detect the writing wasn't that of the student.
"Certain sections were brilliantly written and an alarm bell went off in my head," Watson said. "The Internet is like a huge encyclopedia. Because you can't copy from the encyclopedia doesn't mean you can do it with the Internet."
Junior Grant Smith said students can plagiarize effortlessly with the Internet. He called the Internet "a starting point for information."
"It's good for finding sources but not actually citing," Smith said. "It's more like a library or card catalog."
Senior Mary Martinez said she knows AU students who have used the Internet to plagiarize by cutting and pasting.
"They know what they're doing," Martinez said. "Sometimes people don't have time to finish their papers and the others just don't care."
Professors really emphasize AU's Academic Integrity Code, Martinez said. "It's, like, two pages in the syllabus and they stress it every time you write a paper."
Richard Garcia, director of the AU Student Advocacy Center said his organization has tried unsuccessfully to help students charged with academic integrity violations. SAC mostly handles judicial cases.
"We go through the motions, but our hands are pretty much tied," Garcia said. "With academic cases, it gets hard for our office. Decisions are made ... the dean and the provost rarely overturns these decisions"
