Schools Fight Back Against Internet Plagiarism

To a student desperate to get a good grade, the Internet is not merely a source of research information, it is, "a 1.5 billion-page searchable, cut-and-pasteable encyclopedia."

That is the message from John Barrie, the developer of software used to catch online plagiarism. Barrie, who earned a doctorate in biophysics at the University of California, Berkeley, said students today see cheating as necessary for keeping up with fellow students in pursuit of academic goals.

"There are three factors that make cheating more prevalent today. The first is the unprecedented amount of information available on the Internet," said Barrie. "The second is, it is hard to catch people doing it. Third, there is such a competitive environment these days."

Students, and even parents in some cases, figure the end justifies the means, he said. The theory is, if one has to cheat to get into a prestigious high school, university or professional school, the important thing is to get there.

"There is a lot of, 'everybody's doing it, so even if you catch me, don't make an example out of me' attitude today," assessed Barrie. "You see it in doctors, law students, everyone."

Numerous studies back up Barrie's assertions. A survey by the Center for Academic Integrity found that almost 80 percent of college students admit cheating at least once. A study by US News and World Report found 90 percent of students believe cheaters either are never caught or never have been appropriately punished.

Surveys conducted by Barrie's company discovered 30 percent of UC Berkeley students were plagiarizing directly from the Internet.

Barrie said he "stumbled" into the field of anti-plagiarism software. "I had no intention of becoming a crusader for ethics," he joked. In college he studied how the brain encodes the sensory environment, or what we see, hear and smell, into the neural environment - memory and perception.

"It is quite a stretch to go from that to anti-plagiarism software," he said.

In the 1994-95 academic year, Barrie was a teaching assistant at UC Berkeley. He thought it would be "cool" to let students read other students' term papers. His logic - professional academics is all about peer review, but 95 percent of university students get no practice in reading and critiquing other students' work.

Barrie posted his students' papers to a class Web site, with authors' names stripped, and required each person to read at least two other papers and post anonymous reviews online. He wrote an article about the process for a Science magazine study in 1996. "It was about how the World Wide Web would extend the model of education in the future," he recalled.

The editors at Science noted that Barrie's article discussed only the positive effects the Internet might have on the future of education, so they asked him to predict some negative scenarios. He came up with two: if students put information on the Web, someone might take it, and if a professor accepts work from a student, it might not be from that person.

"In 1997, I was doing a follow-up to my study, and I read hundreds of articles about digital cheating and how widespread it was. No one had a solution to the problem," he said.

The next year, Barrie founded Turnitin.com, a company that purports to compare student papers not only to material available on the Internet, but also to a database of collected papers, literary works and other sources.

"The way it works is, an institution, which could be a high school, college or university, licenses the service. The professors tell the students to turn in a paper version of their paper to them, and a digital version of the paper to the professor's account with Turnitin.com," explained Barrie.

The company then checks the contents of the paper against its database by page, paragraph and even sentence, he said. The professor then gets an annotated version of the paper, and if any portion looks like it came from another source, it is color-coded and matched with either the address of the Web page where it came from, or the name of the book, if applicable.

"If a Harvard student plagiarizes from a Stanford student's paper, we give the Harvard professor information about the Stanford student's instructor, including the e-mail address so they can confer," said Barrie. "It works the same way for high school papers. It is like one teacher can walk across the hall and ask another teacher if a student turned in the same paper for two different classes."

Turnitin.com claims a lengthy list of big name schools throughout the United States, including Georgetown, Duke, Villanova, Rutgers and the U.S. Military Academy, West Point. Users outside the U.S. include The University of Western Ontario, Canada, the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, and the Manakau Institute of Technology in New Zealand.

According to Barrie, Turnitin.com has 20,000 registered clients around the world, including 25 percent of the community colleges in California.

One school that will make the Turnitin.com software available to all faculty members on its campus starting this fall is the University of California, Los Angeles.

John Sandbrook, the assistant provost for UCLA's College of Letters and Science - which includes 800 faculty members, 3,000 graduate students and 20,000 of UCLA's 24,000 undergraduates - told Newsbytes the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry began using the software last winter quarter. He said the faculty members that used it were quite laudatory.

"It was not part of a master plan, but the Chemistry Department served as a beta test. Sometimes that is the best way," said Sandbrook. "Unfortunately, they had a couple of cases of plagiarism they had to report to the Dean of Students office."

UCLA starts classes Sept. 25. Sandbrook said he is preparing the language for a notice to students regarding the software. The notice will be printed in the Daily Bruin, the campus newspaper.

The school already uses an "electronic gradebook," which allows professors to submit grades electronically to the registrar's office, rather than use paper. Students then can check their grades online in a secure fashion through the UCLA portal page, said Sandbrook.

"I want to kill two birds with one stone by giving notice of the guidebook and the new service," he said.

Sandbrook explained that the school will be careful about using the term "plagiarism service."

"The service does not make a value judgment. It does a search and prepares a report to the faculty member that says the paper is 10 percent, 30 percent or 80 percent duplicative of what is out there. Hopefully, it will say all papers are zero percent duplicative, but if there is duplicative text, it is up to the faculty member to decide if it is plagiarism. If so, then they refer it to the dean of students."

Sandbrook does not expect every faculty member on campus to use it, but he said there has been a lot of interest. The software will be available not only for all undergraduate departments, but also to the UCLA School of Law and the Anderson Graduate School of Management.

"Hopefully, we won't catch people because it will be a deterrent," said Sandbrook.

Steven Hardinger, a lecturer with the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, echoed Sandbrook's sentiments about the deterrent effect of the software.

"That is where it is most useful. It tells the students we are watching, and we have a tool to catch plagiarism," said Hardinger, who used the Turnitin.com software in his classes during the winter and spring quarters. "It also demonstrates the university has a clearly stated public policy on academic dishonesty. A combination of the deterrent and the stated penalty is effective.

According to Hardinger, student response was not positive, but it was not negative, either.

"It's not like they are saying, 'thank you for watching me,'" he said.

Hardinger said the software definitely served its purpose, and detected several instances of plagiarism that may or may not have been caught otherwise.

"One was so blatant, we would have caught it regardless. The student copied an entire Web site into a document and submitted it as a paper. It was done so poorly, it still had links in it, which showed up in blue on the printed version," he said.

Hardinger praised the Turnitin.com service as being easy to use both for himself and the students. He said when it came time for students to submit papers, he simply told them to turn it in to the Web site, and explained the purpose of the site is to look for plagiarism.

When it comes to cheating, Hardinger says he does not spend an hour giving a lecture on ethics, he simply tells his students not to do it because it is not worth the penalty.

"If a case of academic dishonesty is reported to the dean of students, just about anything can happen, up to expulsion from the university. Even if you are suspended for just one quarter, if an aspiring physician has a record of academic dishonesty on his or her transcript, that might be the end of a career. No legitimate medical school will take someone who cheated."