Schools target students who think online plagiarism is OK
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By CHRISTINA STOLARZ The Detroit News - Published: March 21, 2006
Nate Potrzuski says he knows plagiarism "is like stealing." But it didn't stop the 16-year-old high school junior from using phrases from Web sites — without attributing them — for a research paper on Lance Armstrong last year.
"I needed it for my paper and I didn't feel like writing down where it was from," said Potrzuski. "I was just worried about the paper and getting it in."
Educators say Potrzuski's casual attitude toward plagiarism stems from a generation raised on the cut-and-paste anonymity of the Internet, a vast well of information and music that many teens consider fair game for everything from padding research papers to downloading songs.
To combat the problem, thousands of high schools in more than 80 countries have bought memberships from a plagiarism detection service — online software called Turnitin — in the past year to check whether their students are stealing sentences, and even entire paragraphs, from the Internet.
On average, Turnitin reviews more than 10,000 student papers nationally each day, of which 30 percent contain a significant amount of plagiarism, according to company statistics. Turnitin is used in some prestigious institutions, including the United States Military Academy at West Point and Rutgers University, but it is just one in a handful of online plagiarism detection services.
"The Internet has added new cheaters," said Don McCabe, founding president of the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University. But, also "it's helped those who are already cheating to do more. Once you've done it, it's easy to do it again."
A Duke University study of 18,000 high school students over the past five years found that 58 percent of students admitted to plagiarizing at least once in the previous year, whether it was rewording an idea without giving credit or copying from the Internet.
While technology has made life much more efficient, it has also made it difficult for teens to differentiate between right and wrong, said Kathleen Reeves, an Advanced Placement English teacher.
"It's in front of them all the time. It's easy to download papers," said Reeves, who has been with the district for 20 years. "I want to discourage that type of behavior. They're depriving themselves the pleasure of struggling through something and finding it. A quotation mark is the difference between a scholar and a plagiarist."
Reeves checks every student assignment written outside her classroom against an online service, mydropbox.com, to make sure they properly attribute their sources. Students can sign onto the detection services' Web sites to upload their assignments to their teachers' accounts.
High school English teacher Brian Read has cracked down on plagiarism in his classes because he doesn't want his students to set "themselves up for failure and dangerous situations in college." The 38-year-old teacher is trying to teach his students that there are several forms of plagiarism.
He said many of his students don't understand that it's considered plagiarism when small sections of documents are copied from the Internet; they only think it counts when the entire original paper is copied.
"I want them to pull ideas from other sources. I want them to read scholarly articles," Read said. "It's fine to borrow ideas, but say where they got them from."
Read has dished out $200 a year from his own pocket for the past three years to utilize Turnitin's services. His students submit their papers electronically, which are automatically compared against the system's databases. Read logs into his account to review the reports for each student paper that displays how much is original and how much is copied.
The detection services also pick up direct quotes which are cited by the students, so therefore, he said, teachers must go through each paper to check the flagged items.
Read caught about four or five students a semester when he started using Turnitin; now, he's found that none of his students plagiarize.
"It makes me think that students, for the most part, know when they're cheating and when they're not," he said.
Cynthia Burnstein, an English teacher, has found making assignments meaningful to kids effective. For example, she has her students interject their opinions in their papers to support research.
She only allows her ninth-grade students to use school computers to write papers, because she is there to help if they have questions and also because, she thinks, her presence cuts down on plagiarism.
High school student Valerie Carpani is pleased that teachers have technology at their disposal to cut down on plagiarism.
"Some students get away with copying it off the Internet and get a better grade than I can," said Carpani, a 16-year-old senior and student newspaper staff member. "For the students who put forth the effort to come up with a great idea for an essay … I think it's ridiculous."
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