by John Bear
Daily Lobo
Plagiarists beware. There's a new sheriff in town - its name is plagiarism.org.
According to the quarterly journal Psychological Record, almost 40 percent of college undergraduates admit to plagiarizing written material. The Center for Academic Integrity reports 80 percent of students cheat at least once.
Professors face the task of exposing cheaters and their devious methods.
Those dark days are over, at least according to plagiarism.org.
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The Web site boasts its "plagiarism prevention system makes it easy to identify students who do submit unoriginal work, and also acts as a powerful deterrent to stop plagiarism before it starts."
The site states it offers a sophisticated search engine - for a fee - that enables professors to submit students' work to be compared to a database containing billions of pages of previously written work.
Sophomore Ian Markum said he thought the plagiarism detection service was a good idea.
"It keeps people from cheating," he said. "You have to think for yourself. You can't pay someone to do your work for you."
He said an English teacher last semester told him about the service.
"It was kind of like, 'We'll catch you if you cheat. So don't cheat,'" he said.
Teaching assistant John Bess said he had heard of such sites but did not use them.
"I pay attention to my students' style and voice," he said. "You can tell. Something will stand out if they've taken something and not cited it."
He said a warning sign of plagiarism is students who do not participate in class but hand in essays with stellar passages lashed together with a few awkward sentences.
"The level of analysis won't match the level of participation," he said.
Work does not need to be copied word for word for the program to detect plagiarized writing. Plagiarism.org claims its two main programs, iThenticate and Turnitin, are capable of detecting academic dishonesty even if the culprit is sneaky enough to change some of the words and phrasing.
Graduate student Andi Lako said he had not heard of plagiarism.org, but he likes the idea.
"People are paying for education, not to get out of it," he said. "They are here to get educated, not to steal other people's ideas."
English major Shawna Wright added students often fail to recognize they are plagiarizing material.
"Most people think that it's just copying word for word," she said. "They don't understand that it can be other things."
Wright said plagiarism can include, but is not limited to, using synonyms and taking someone else's ideas and putting them into your own words without giving them credit. She said she liked the idea of the site because teachers do not have time to catch plagiarists.
Professor Michelle Kells said she had heard of similar mechanisms, but she did not feel the need to use them.
"If you are engaging with your students at each phase of the writing and research process, then you will know your students' work," she said.
Wright said the worst part about plagiarism is its perpetrators are only cheating themselves.
"People who use plagiarism can't develop their own ideas and become individuals," she said. "That's how you become a good writer."
