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Plagiarism has always been a problem and is often associated with younger students who don't fully understand the behaviors that constitute cheating, or who lack the ethical standards to refrain from committing it. Until recently most plagiarism was limited to print sources-encyclopedias, newspaper and periodical articles, and sometimes sections from books. With the advent of the Internet, and particularly the World Wide Web, opportunities for cheating have increased significantly, while the means for detecting it seem to have diminished.
Perhaps the most well-publicized sources of cheating have been the term paper mills that now proliferate on the Web. Among the earliest and most notorious is Kenneth A. Sahr's "School Sucks" (www.schoolsucks.com), which posts hundreds of term papers for students to download for free. Sahr insists that his aim is not to foster plaarism, and he warns students who visit his site that "your teachers, professors, and the media are always visiting School Sucks." His concern for academic honesty, however, is questionable when he adds: "Unlike the rest of the real world, the education system has no checks and balances. By forcing mediocre professors, who have been giving the same assignments since the Truman administration, to rethink their assignments-and maybe even add a bit of creativity to them, School Sucks IS education's check and balance."
Numerous other term paper mills exist in addition to Sahr's, and a site that boasts more than 9,500 papers, as well as hyperlinks to other mills, is "Evil House of Cheat" (www.CheatHouse.com). Cybercheating has become so popular that new genres of cheating have evolved. A site called "IvyEssays" (www.ivyessays.com) sells successful college admission essays to students. Efforts to hinder these sites have been launched on two fronts: Boston University has filed a lawsuit against eight term paper mills and several states have enacted laws prohibiting their activities.
Fair game and public domain Janis H. Bruwelheide is probably correct in her assessment of why the Internet is so inviting to students: "There also seems to persist in the minds of many researchers a belief that anything available over the Internet is fair game and public domain, free of both legal and ethical intellectual property considerations," Bruwelheide wrote in The Copy right Primer for Librarians and Educators (ALA Editions, 1995). Although students may...