The Cat-and-Mouse Game of Plagiarism Detection

Colleges provide professors with new online tools to give them the upper hand

As student cheating incidents continue to make headlines, many colleges are beginning to equip all

of their professors with high-tech tools designed to detect plagiarism. Some professors say that checking papers for cheating may soon become a routine part of grading.

Plagiarism-detection software has been available for several years, but its use appears to be growing.

Georgetown University, Tulane University, the Rochester Institute of Technology, the University of California’s campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Los Angeles, and San Diego, and the University of Southern California are among the institutions that recently forged agreements to give all of their professors access to a service called Turnitin.com, which can scan student papers to see if material has been copied from the Internet or from other papers in the service’s database.

Other companies offering similar services or software say they’ve also seen an increase in sales in the past year.

Many professors were alarmed by an incident in April at the University of Virginia, when a professor used a computer program to check for plagiarism and turned up more than 100 suspicious cases. The professors say it highlights the need to take a harder line on cheating. If so many students appear to be cheating in a single course at a university known for its strict honor code, many wondered, could the situation be even worse elsewhere?

Several indicators point to widespread plagiarism on campuses. A 1999 study by the Center for Academic Integrity found that 69 percent of professors catch one or more instance of plagiarism each year. And officials at some colleges say that in recent years they have seen a sharp increase in students cutting and pasting material into papers from Web sites without attribution, or purchasing term papers from online term-paper mills.

“The era of cut-and-paste requires our vigilance,” says Scott E. Siddall, assistant provost for instructional resources at Denison University. “We must be more vigilant than we were in an era when all we had was photocopy machines. Students are being tempted to do this more often than they were two years ago.”

Professors say that some students do not even see cheating as a big deal. These students, the argument goes, have become so accustomed to downloading music and reading articles free on the Internet that they see it as acceptable to incorporate passages into their papers without attribution as well.

Donald L. McCabe, a professor of organization management at Rutgers University’s Newark campus, was a founder of the Center for Academic Integrity. He says such attitudes are particularly prevalent among the high-school students he surveyed this year.

“A typical attitude I hear from high-school students is, ‘If it’s on the Internet, it’s public knowledge, and I don’t have to cite it,’” says Mr. McCabe, who notes that many of these students will soon arrive at colleges. “I think the first thing is, students need to be trained in the proper citation of sources.”

For years, college officials have complained about online term-paper mills that sell or give away term papers on various subjects. In 1997, Boston University sued eight term-paper providers in seven states, accusing them of selling papers to students who intended to turn them in as their own. The suit was later thrown out by a judge, and the university is considering refiling its case.

Even though digital tools have made it easy for students to plagiarize term papers, some professors say that the same tools can make it easy to catch a cheat -- especially since some cheaters are lazy in their plagiarizing.

“It is pretty easy to find,” says Reuben Rudman, a professor of chemistry at Adelphi University. “If I have a paper I suspect has been copied without attribution, I select a characteristic, well-written, unique phrase and search for it using the well-known search engine Google. I have, in one egregious case, found the entire paper in a few seconds.”

Louis A. Bloomfield, the University of Virginia physics professor who discovered cheating in his course this spring, used a different approach to investigate suspicious papers. When one student in his popular introductory-physics course complained to him that several classmates were recycling papers from previous years, Mr. Bloomfield created a computer program that compares papers to each other, searching for extensive repetition. Mr. Bloomfield has required students for some time to submit papers electronically, not to help him detect cheating, but simply because he found it was more convenient for managing the large class, which routinely has hundreds of students per semester. So he had a database of papers from the past three semesters -- 1,850 in all.

“I was horrified at the idea” that students in the course were plagiarizing, he says. “It’s one thing to hear vague stories, but here was an accusation that it was in my class, and I felt obligated to look for it.”

The program found 122 suspect papers, though half of them are the originals from which a second was copied, he says. Following honor committee procedures, Mr. Bloomfield reported all the students involved -- some of whom had already graduated -- to the student honor committee.

Since then, the honor committee has been busy investigating the incidents. Honor-board investigators have already cleared some of the students of wrongdoing after finding that their papers had been copied without their knowledge, said Thomas Hall, chairman of the honor committee.

“The general trend that we’re seeing is that students who served as sources really were unaware that their papers were going to be used verbatim by other students,” says Mr. Hall, adding that some students passed along electronic copies of their papers to friends in the understanding that the papers would be used as models. “This is not a centralized cheating scheme, but rather the result of one-on-one interactions.”

Mr. Hall says that some of the accused students might choose to transfer from Virginia if they are brought to trial. The university’s honor code stipulates that any student found guilty of an honor violation be dismissed from the university. Most colleges are far more lenient.

Meanwhile, Mr. Bloomfield has made his plagiarism-detection software available free on the Web, and the computer program has already been downloaded more than 700 times. The professor is also helping to conduct an online survey of other professors about their attitudes toward, and experiences with, student cheating. Both the software and the survey are available online (http://plagiarism.phys.virginia.edu).

John Workman, an associate professor of marketing at Creighton University who is leading the survey effort, says that more than 100 professors have responded. “We are finding that there is a lot of pent-up frustration among faculty” about cheating, he says. “It’s a touchy subject that we never talk about. It’s almost like our dirty laundry.”

Mr. Workman would not discuss the survey responses, but he says that he and Mr. Bloomfield hope to publish an article and possibly a book about the results next year.

In addition to Mr. Bloomfield’s software, faculty menbers who suspect students of cheating can turn to any of several commercial programs or services. Among the most widely used is a service by Turnitin.com (formerly known as Plagiarism.org), which has been aggressively trying to get colleges to buy institution-wide subscriptions (at a cost of between $1,750 and $4,000 per year, depending on the size of the institution). Individual faculty members can also buy access to the service for $25 per year, or they can use a limited version of the service free.

Professors can either submit papers to the service one by one, or they can instruct their students to turn in their papers through the service’s Web site. The service then alerts professors if a paper has suspicious amounts of verbatim passages from other works, so that they can compare the two papers by hand.

John Barrie, the company’s president, says that of the papers that are submitted to the service, about 20 percent result in a match. A few of those matches, however, turn out to be legitimate citations.

The University of California at Davis recently decided to make the service standard on the campus after the number of cheating cases doubled over a period of six years -- increasing from 70 cases in 1994-95 to 142 in 1999-2000. The university has about 26,000 students.

Jeanne M. Wilson, director of student judicial affairs at Davis, says that some professors complained that they were spending more and more of their time searching the Web to detect plagiarism, and they wanted an easier way.

“There needed to be some ways for a faculty member to help keep an even playing field for students who are honest,” says Ms. Wilson. “We try to provide the tools and the resources so that, working together, we can provide a climate of integrity.”

Virtual universities are adopting the software as well. For example, Jones International University, has bought a license for all of its professors to use Turnitin.com and encourages them to use it in their courses. The institution recently sent an e-mail message to its students putting them on notice that their papers might be scanned for plagiarism.

“We are an online university, and there’s a concern about academic integrity and honesty,” says Beata Krupa, vice president of academic operations for the virtual university. She says that some people believe that virtual universities need to be even more vigilant about cheating than traditional institutions, since online professors never see students face to face. “I argue, however, that we actually have a lot of knowledge about how our students write.”

But some professors at other colleges say they are worried that routine plagiarism checks would breed an atmosphere of mistrust. Last year, the Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges brokered a deal with Turnitin.com that gave member colleges a discount on the service. But the group let the deal expire this year because of a lack of interest among the colleges, says Mr. Siddall, assistant provost at Denison and board chairman of the group. Member colleges were especially concerned because Turnitin.com encourages professors to have every student submit papers through the service, he adds.

“For the small liberal-arts college, where we focus on face-to-face attention, we know students very well and prefer to treat things on an individual basis,” he says.

And not all allegations of student cheating lead to convictions. Last year at Dartmouth College, 78 students in an introductory computer-science class were accused of cheating, but a university committee cleared all of the students after an investigation. The students were accused of sneaking a peek at the answer for an assignment that their professor had accidentally posted on a public part of the college’s Web site.

The committee found that though some students probably did cheat, they were unable to determine which students had done so and which had legitimately sought help from teaching assistants.

Some professors have even criticized Mr. Bloomfield of Virginia for violating the spirit of the honor code by checking all student papers in his class. Exams at the university are unproctored, for instance, since students are on their honor not to cheat.

Mr. Bloomfield defends his actions, however.

“The honor code is a wonderful ideal, but if you have no enforcement, it’s hard for students to stay honest,” he says. “I hope the students will learn a lot from this. ... It will strengthen the honor system, I hope, in the long run.”

Some students even welcome the extra scrutiny. “Plagiarism is a big deal,” says Sarah-Nell Walsh, who was not in Mr. Bloomfield’s course and graduated from the university in May. “We need to set the same standards in our schools as are set in society, and plagiarism would not be tolerated at the workplace or at higher institutions of learning.

“I am proud of Professor Bloomfield for catching those students,” she adds.

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