To catch a thief

Bill Condon’s been sniffing out plagiarism a lot longer than the Internet’s been around.

Condon, director of writing programs at Washington State University, recalls a case from 25 years ago in which he tested a student about the contents of his own paper.

“He failed it,” Condon said.

But the advent of the Internet – and all that means for freedom of information – has created its own set of problems for instructors in colleges and high schools as they try to teach students about writing, research and scholarship. In a cut-and-paste world, many students simply don’t understand the rules about plagiarism, instructors say, and those who are intent on cheating find plenty of source material.

“Cutting and pasting from online sources – I believe there’s a notion students have that it’s public domain, it’s public property,” said Connie Wasem, director of composition at Spokane Falls Community College. “It’s so easy and readily accessible by everybody – point, click and there it is.”

A generation ago, a would-be plagiarist faced a more difficult task even finding something to copy. Today, a student studying the Lewis and Clark expedition can type “Lewis and Clark papers” into a search engine and get more than 1.3 million results – many of them Web sites offering to sell completed essays.

But instructors say that the Internet hasn’t necessarily given rise to more plagiarism – just to a different kind. And they say the same things that make it easy to cheat make it easy to catch cheaters.

“If they can Google it and call up a Web site, I can Google it and call up a Web site,” said Theresa Maloney, who oversees tutorial courses for students at WSU.

Punishments for plagiarism run the gamut, depending on the severity of the offense, and it’s difficult to pin down precisely how widespread the problem is. Donald McCabe, a Rutgers researcher, has conducted surveys of college students on 23 campuses; in 2004, 40 percent of students said they had plagiarized from the Internet.

In a survey of high schoolers from 2001, McCabe found that more than half of those students said they had done so – and that nearly as many didn’t even consider it cheating to copy down a sentence or sentences from the Internet.

“Students in a lot of cases aren’t even aware they have to cite something they found on the Web,” Condon said.

‘Far greater temptation’

Not all that many years ago, Elizabeth Rose could assign her high school students to read “The Great Gatsby” and write an essay on the book outside of class.

“I had to stop doing that,” said Rose, who’s taught for 34 years, the last 13 at University High in Spokane Valley. “Unfortunately, you can give fewer of the written assignments outside the class.”

Rose found the opportunities to cheat on such assignments are myriad. Many Web sites summarize the plots and major themes of classics like Gatsby – like Cliffs Notes, only available in much greater variety. Other sites post essays and criticism, of varying levels of quality, that students can appropriate if they wish. Finally, an unenterprising student could find whole-cloth essays about Gatsby online – some for sale, some for free.

“There’s certainly a far greater temptation because there is so much more access” to information, Rose said. Still, she said, “Are kids any worse than their parents or grandparents? Probably not.”

Web-savvy teachers can easily spot some fakes, but the wide range of options available to students has made it difficult for instructors to catch everything.

Jonathan Malesic, an assistant professor of theology at King’s College, in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., wrote a December essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education in which he decried both the frequency of plagiarism by his students – and the poor job they do of hiding it.

“Throughout the year, I saw plagiarized papers in nearly every stack I read,” he writes of his first year as an assistant professor. “At times, I started to think that maybe every paper was plagiarized. …

“What’s most astounding, though – and most insulting – is that students plagiarize in ways that are so easy to catch. They cut and paste without thinking to cover their tracks. They copy from the most obvious sources possible. They find and replace words and then do not proofread to ensure clarity.”

One of the ways that Rose and other instructors have adapted is to stop simply assigning basic out-of-class essays and making assignments un-plagiarizable in some way – requiring several drafts and revisions, making key portions of the assignment in-class work, and other strategies.

“A really good way to make sure students avoid plagiarism is to give them an assignment they just can’t plagiarize,” Maloney said.

Measure of learning

Instructors note that attitudes toward information and information ownership are changing. In future generations, raised on file-sharing software and wiki-style collaborations online, the rules for publications, copyright and other information management could well change, they say.

Also, the preoccupation with plagiarism is strongest in Western societies, they say – noting that many students in other countries have less strict and rigid ideas about copyright and the ownership of intellectual property.

Nevertheless, plagiarism isn’t likely to vanish as an issue in the schools, because there it’s less about the ownership of information than about a measure of learning.

“The reason we are worried about plagiarism in schools is it misrepresents what a student knows,” Maloney said. “I want to be able to judge exactly what the student is learning. That’s why plagiarism is always going to be important in school.”