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New web search tools effective at reducing plagiarism

Pesky plagiarists

Plagiarism is alive and well on campuses across the country, but Internet search tools such as Turn It In are successfully reducing its frequency.

2006-05-15
By Robb Murray, Free Press staff writer [published in The Free Press, Mankato, MN, 5/9/2006]

MANKATO — Never underestimate what a college student will try to get away with.

In Melanie Frappier's philosophy class last semester, two students submitted oddly similar research papers. The Minnesota State University professor quickly determined what had happened — and what hadn't happened.

The first paper, submitted by a young man, was original work, well thought out and reasoned. The second, submitted by the young man's girlfriend, was not. The young woman, it appears, had replaced a few words with synonyms, left the majority intact and handed it in as her own.

"Every session I find at least one person who has plagiarized," Frappier says. "This semester, a student in my class submitted a paper that a student in my class submitted last semester.

Plagiarism. It is alive and well and living on campuses all over the country. Some of it, of course, is blatant theft and, when noticed, results in major sanctions. But most of it happens in English composition or philosophy classes and results in automatic Fs, lowered grades or orders from professors to redo the work.

And while the Internet has made it a lot easier to cut and paste someone else's writing and pass it off as your own, that same tool is quite useful in catching the students who cheat. Some professors use Google to check student work. Others, meanwhile, use online services such as Turn It In, which matches student work against a database of scholarly work and other student papers to determine a sort of plagiarism quotient.

Sometimes, though, plagiarism is nothing more than a student who doesn't know it's not acceptable to borrow someone else's work without citing it properly. All of this is happening when honesty with the written word has seen better days.

Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan's semi-autobiographical tale was a juicy one. "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life," a hot title in the popular "chick-lit" genre, garnered Viswanathan a two-book deal worth $500,000.

But shrewd readers figured out several passages seemed oddly familiar. Student journalists dug into and uncovered striking similarities between "Opal" and the writings of another chick-lit author, Megan McCafferty. By last count, up to 40 passages had been "borrowed."

This is a far cry from borrowing a paragraph from a source for a five-page English paper. But the act comes from a young woman raised in a day and age when borrowing is just another step in the creative process.

Scott Olson, Minnesota State University's vice president for academic affairs, says the concept of sampling is ubiquitous and fully accepted in music, film and television. That idea's migration to writing, Olson says, shouldn't be a big surprise to anyone.

"I think a lot of the students that do it," Olson says, "don't actually know what we mean by plagiarism."

Many high schoolers, when they come to college, haven't exactly been held to the rigors of academic honesty expected in the college world. It's OK, many figure, to grab a piece of information here or a quote there, slap it down and make their point.

Google, in fact, has made this endeavor much easier. Plug in a research paper topic, pull up a page, highlight the text and drop it right onto your Microsoft Word document. It's quite simple.

But it's also quite simple to catch the cheaters.

Research by Google, for all its ease and efficiency, is a double-edged sword. It's just as easy for professors to plug in that same research paper phrase and check to see whether the student's work is really their own.

At Gustavus Adolphus College, where classes are typically smaller than at MSU, Alisa Rosenthal says it's easy to spot potential plagiarists. After reading a student's writing for a few weeks, she says, she begins to get a feel for what their writing sounds like. And when the verbiage drifts toward an unexplainable proficiency, her gut tells her to check it out.

"Every time I've checked," she says, "I've been right." Rosenthal uses Google, and says that method has worked well for her.

At MSU, however, Frappier says she has too many students to check them all with Google. So she relies on a professional service.

The service is called TurnItIn.com, and the university pays about $8,800 each year to use it. Turn It In offers a massive database of scholarly work and student papers. Professors who use the service have students submit their papers directly to a Turn It In site. Papers are compared against the database and checked for borrowed work.

Frappier says it's a big time saver for her. Rather than check the originality of every student's work, Turn It In checks it for her. This semester, in fact, Turn It In flagged a student paper that had borrowed half of its content from a Web site. That student, she says, was given a chance to redo the assignment.

"It's been very successful," Frappier says.

Turn It In isn't universally appreciated, however. Eric Eliason of Gustavus says he tried it several years ago and wasn't impressed with what he found.

"I didn't discover anything I couldn't discover some other way," he said.

Besides, like Rosenthal, Eliason says experience allows him to spot when a student is turning in work that's not their own.

"If you'd been to a graduate program, you'd refer to certain things" that you wouldn't have explored at the undergrad level, he says. "I would love to say it's because I know Mary's writing so well, but really it's that I know undergrads."

Education, professors say, is the key. At both Gustavus and MSU, students are told in no uncertain terms plagiarism is not accepted. At MSU, the academic honesty policy is given to them in writing.

The policy states: "Plagiarism includes but is not limited to: submitting the work of others as your own; submitting others' work as your own with only minor changes; submitting others' work as your own without adequate footnotes, quotations, and other reference forms; multiple submission of the same work, written or oral, for more than one course without both instructor's permission, or making minor revisions on work which has received credit and submitting it again as new work."

Even with that policy given to each student in writing, Olson says more could be done. He says they need to make sure instructors are putting academic honesty information on all course syllabi. Also, he says they need to work more with area high schools so that when incoming freshmen get there, they have a pretty good idea what is acceptable and what is not.

Within the realm of discipline, he says, there's some variance on the severity of infractions. For example, a graduate student who submits a completely plagiarized master's thesis would likely be removed from the program. A first-year student who borrows a quote, however, should see minor sanctions but be reminded of the academic honesty policy and the reasons for having it.

Not all students, though, treat plagiarism the same. Rosenthal says before coming to Gustavus, she taught at Rollins College, a private liberal arts college in Florida. Plagiarism, she said, was much more common there and appeared to be part of the culture. College officials, she says, were trying to combat it.

The student mindset at Gustavus, she says, is far different.

"My sense is that they would be embarrassed if their friends found out," she says.

Eliason says even though plagiarism happens, it's not a huge problem at Gustavus.

"We might see some lifted phrases," he says, "but the instances of out-and-out malicious fraud are mercifully few."

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