Colleges' war against cheats goes high-tech

Computers used to fight rising Internet plagiarism

By TODD ACKERMAN
Copyright 2003 Houston Chronicle

Texas A&M University has always prized its honor code, but last year faculty and administrators learned that the majority of its students don't.

Seventy-five percent of respondents to a university survey admitted to having cheated in the past year. More than one in three said they had plagiarized papers from the Internet or elsewhere.

"The most disturbing thing was a general attitude on students' part that plagiarism isn't a big deal," said Marty Loudder, an A&M accounting professor and chairwoman of a task force formed to address the issue. "Many seem to have the attitude that if something's on the Internet, it's everybody's."

Last month, A&M began fighting back. Administrators purchased a subscription to Turnitin.com, a leading anti-plagiarism software program. The service, now used by roughly 1,500 U.S. universities (the University of Houston among them), scans student papers to see if material has been copied from the Internet or other papers in its database, which it claims number in the tens of millions.

It's all part of a cat-and-mouse game of plagiarism gone high-tech. Students who log on to such sites as Evil House of Cheat and schoolsucks.com for research papers now must contend with a variety of countermeasures being deployed to catch and prevent academic misconduct, from anti-plagiarism programs to software that prevents cheating on computer-based tests to thumbprint scanners and digital cameras to curb test-taker impersonations. Experts are divided on whether it's a good idea.

What is clear is that in this age of the Internet, that paradise for lazy researchers, plagiarism is on the increase. A recent national survey found 41 percent of students admitted to "cut-and-paste" plagiarism -- lifting chunks of material from different Internet sources without attributing it -- up from 10 percent in the late 1990s. Two of three students said the practice is not a serious issue.

Cheating is an age-old issue on college campuses, of course. But while educators have long lamented the decline of student ethics, they have historically done little to root out wrongdoing, thinking it's not worth the trouble or how they want to spend their time. Clearly, that's now changing.

"Professors tend to run the gamut from a see-no-evil, hear-no-evil type to those who run a police state," said Louis Bloomfield, a University of Virginia physics professor who developed his own plagiarism-detection software after a cheating incident in one of his classes. "But increasingly, professors are realizing that no one wants to play a game where cheaters prosper. If there's no consequence for misbehavior, some people aren't going to be ethical."

Bloomfield's incident involved students in one class turning in recycled papers. Forty-five were expelled after admitting guilt or being found guilty by the student-run honor council, and three others had their degrees revoked after graduation.

Such action is the exception on college campuses. Universities usually decline to reveal the number of cheating-related expulsions in a given year, but most say that it's rare for a student who cheated to be expelled, particularly for a single instance of plagiarism. More typically, professors tend to give plagiarized papers an F.

Turnitin.com's appeal is its massive database -- founder John Barrie says it includes 3 billion pages from the Internet, tens of millions of journal articles and millions of student papers -- and the speed with which it works. A paper submitted to it is returned complete with matches to other works in anywhere from a few seconds to a couple of minutes, depending on how long the paper is and how busy the server is.

The software works by transforming letters in papers into numbers. The resulting digital fingerprint is compared to more than a billion documents fingerprinted in a similar fashion. Almost all papers turn up some passages that match verbatim another source, so it is up to professors to determine what is plagiarism.

"What institutions like about Turnitin.com is that our database is so massive it serves as an extremely effective deterrent," said Barrie. "It says to students, `Don't cheat; it's a bad idea.' "

Indeed, many professors make the program available to students to educate them about the dangers of plagiarism and so they can catch their own inadvertent matches. Pierce Cantrell, an A&M professor of electrical engineering who purchased an individual Turnitin.com subscription after a plagiarism incident a few years ago, says he has students submit their papers to the program and hasn't had any problems since.

It doesn't come cheap. For a yearlong, institution-wide subscription, Turnitin.com charges schools 60 cents per student, which translates to around $10,000 for a university of UH's size and $16,000 for a university of A&M's. Individual faculty members can buy a year's access to the service for $100 for 100 papers.

Not everyone thinks plagiarism-detection services are a good idea. Arguing that that they breed an atmosphere of mistrust, many experts argue that universities should spend more time promoting integrity than policing cheating.

Such universities are often those with academic honor codes -- such as Rice University -- where students are allowed to take tests at home or in class without proctors. Duke University's Center for Academic Integrity, a proponent of the philosophy, cites studies as showing serious cheating at schools with such codes is one-third to one-half lower than the level on campuses that don't have honor codes.

"I think routinely screening all papers submitted in classes would dilute the trust students feel is placed in them," said Rice Provost Eugene Levy. "Do we think encouraging high integrity by projecting an expectation of it fosters high integrity? Of course."

Still, much of the concern about plagiarism comes from students, who complain to professors about others' cheating because they feel it puts them at a disadvantage. The Virginia case that resulted in 45 expulsions and three revoked degrees, for instance, came about because of such a complaint.

The sentiment is voiced by A&M student body president Matt Josefy. He says Turnitin.com is too new a tool for students to have an opinion on it but that most want to see a solution to the cheating problem. He said he hopes the software program ultimately will be unnecessary because of a change in student attitudes.

A&M officials hope so, too. The software program is part of an effort to bring renewed attention to the school's honor code, which requires any cheating to be reported to the honor council and second instances to result in expulsion. Some professors are adding the line "I pledge my sacred honor that I neither received nor gave any assistance" for students to sign at the top of exams, an affirmation similar to one used at A&M in 1887.

Such professors know no detection-system is foolproof. Brigham Young University professor Wilfried Decoo, the author of Crisis on Campus: Confronting Academic Misconduct, says there are tricks to elude detection programs, such as writing papers in a word document and then using the thesaurus function to change every few words. He suggested that professors make essay questions personal, such as comparing the research topic to the student's own experience, so it is harder to plagiarize.

"Remember, if someone really wants to plagiarize, they'll find a way," said Decoo. "Some students are like hackers. Some will always succeed in eluding firewalls."