For all its benefits, the rise of technology in the classroom has made it far easier for students to cheat–and get away with it. In the prewired days, plagiarism meant painstakingly copying paragraphs out of the encyclopedia; today, kids can simply highlight the text, copy and insert–a far more antiseptic process. They can even purchase ready-made assignments from the hundreds of Web sites ready to make a buck selling term papers. The practice is rampant around the globe; last month in Australia, the University of Newcastle was criticized for covering up a scandal in which the grades of 15 students, who had copied from the Internet, were changed from failing to passing. According to a survey by the Josephson Institute for Ethics, 74 percent of U.S. high-school students cheated in 2002. (“And those are just the ones admitting it,” says the institute’s Terry Harrison.)
Fortunately, the same technology that makes it so easy for students to cheat is now aiding teachers in catching them. The most popular antiplagiarism service, Turnitin.com, compares a student’s term paper with everything on the Internet, as well as to Turnitin.com’s own database of papers. It even vets for synonym similarity, foiling the slickest alteration and amendment. Turnitin.com has clients in 51 countries; in Britain, nearly all 700 public universities–including Oxford and Cambridge–have signed up for the service.
Educators are trying to upgrade their in-class tactics as well. Experts say teachers should make it more difficult for students to “cut and paste” by changing assignments every year and requiring more analysis than description. And they shouldn’t assume that kids even know what plagiarism is, as many just aren’t taught how to source or reference properly. Students aren’t the only ones who need to work a little harder.
