Content area
Full Text
The proliferation of Web pages and electronic publications makes plagiarism easier to accomplish and harder to recognize. Here are some tools to help you expose cybercheaters.
In academe, the consequences of plagiarism are clear: Using someone else's words or ideas without attribution is grounds for failed assignments, suspension, or expulsion. For some students, however, breaking the rules seems to be an irresistible challenge. And so the game goes: Students continually look for (and find) ways to cheat, and teachers remain on the alert for purloined paragraphs, pages, and even entire papers.
Plagiarized work used to be generated through frat house recycling efforts, purchased from local ghost writers, or simply copied from campus library reference materials-all clumsy efforts readily detectable by educators familiar with their course material. But the World Wide Web and other electronic resources have changed the game and left educators scrambling to keep abreast of plagiarists' new methods.
[USING ELECTRONIC MEDIA]
Before the world was linked by the Internet, hard-to-detect plagiarism required ingenuity and skill. But today, with the click of a mouse, even technologically inept students have access to vast information resources in cyberspace without having to leave the comfort of their dorm rooms.
A few words typed into a Web search engine can lead a student to hundreds, sometimes thousands, of relevant documents, making it easy to "cut and paste" a few paragraphs from here and a few more from there until the student has an entire paper-length collection. Or a student can find a research paper published in one of the hundreds of new journals that have gone online over the past few years, copy the entire text, turn it into a new document, and then offer it up as an original work without having to type anything but a cover page. Even recycling efforts and ghost writers have gone global, with Web sites offering professionally or student-written research papers for sale, some even with a money back guarantee against detection.
Facing the New Plagiarism Reality
I ran headlong into these new practices during the fall 1997 semester as my husband and I each taught an introductory information security concepts course for George Washington University. When students turned in their required research papers, we were initially surprised at how...