It's 11 p.m., and you're just getting started on a research paper due tomorrow. You sit down at the computer and prepare to search the Internet for information and data that you can work into your paper. But wouldn't it be easier to just cut and paste paragraphs from websites or even to download an entire paper?
But, University officials say that although the number of cases brought before the Undergraduate Judicial Board last semester involving academic dishonesty rose to 26, 90 percent of which involved the Internet, there remains no conclusive evidence that students are actually cheating more.
Instead, some believe that professors' awareness of plagiarism is improving and that they are using better methods of detection--an awareness that is growing nationally.
"It's very hard to say that more students are cheating," said Kacie Wallace, associate dean of students for judicial affairs. "There's a greater awareness among students and faculty, and obviously more cases are being referred. [The increase] could be a factor of people knowing where to refer it, [plagiarism] happening more often, [or that] more people are aware of [plagiarism]. It's unfair to attribute [the increase] solely to [plagiarism] happening more."
A recent study by David Neumann and Patrick Scanlon, professors at the Rochester Institute of Technology, shows that far more students believe their peers are cheating than actually report cheating themselves.
For example, students said 50.4 percent of their peers copied text from the Internet without citation often or very frequently, but only 8 percent admitted that behavior themselves.
"I hope [the belief more students are cheating] doesn't cause a hysteria," Scanlon said. "Some professors are convinced that all students are cheaters, and I'm not convinced that's the case. I'm not convinced that the Internet is luring people to cheat, but clearly it's making it easier."
Scanlon added that instances of cheating might increase without more students cheating.
"The Internet isn't creating cheaters, but it's making it a lot easier for people already in the business of doing it," Scanlon said. "This means there might be more instances of plagiarism without more people doing it."
Undergraduate plagiarism gained prominence as a national issue in 2001 when 148 physics students at the University of Virginia were suspected of cheating on their term papers.
Louis Bloomfield, the Virginia professor who taught the class and has since developed his own plagiarism-detection program, noted that while outright plagiarism was the problem in his class, students simply do not realize that what they are doing is wrong in most cases.
"Students aren't taught what is plagiarism," Bloomfield said. "When students recognize something as plagiarism they really disapprove, but not all can recognize what it is. It's a failure of the academic system--students can't distinguish between the proper use of academic research and plagiarism."
In order to better educate students about proper methods of citation and use of others' research, Duke requires Writing 20--which includes class time spent learning various research methods and methods of citation--of all first-year students.
Freshman Lauren Deysher said her writing professor incorporated the library's resources into the class and showed students where to find guidelines about the proper methods of citation.
"Writing 20 did help us," she said. "The professor was very clear that you had to cite information, and if you didn't there would be consequences. It made you more careful about what you were copying."
In addition to improving efforts to educate the community about plagiarism, technology to catch cheaters has similarly improved.
If a professor finds a suspicious phrase--one that does not seem to fit with the rest of the paper or the student's writing style--he or she can simply type the phrase into an Internet search engine like google.com and see if the phrase appears anywhere else on the web.
Duke also has a license with Turnitin.com, to which professors can submit students' papers to compare with a database of papers on the site. The site compares each submitted paper against its database and prints out a report indicating the paper's degree of similarity to others in on the site.
At Duke, professors cannot automatically submit a paper they suspect may be plagiarized. Instead, professors must submit any suspicious papers to Wallace, who then runs it through Turnitin.com. Wallace said roughly 10 professors requested the use of Turnitin.com this year, a figure on par with the number of requests last year, when the license was purchased.
"We haven't seen a dramatic increase in requests," she said. "We don't have professors just automatically submit papers. We didn't want to purchase [Turnitin.com] in a way that every faculty member would automatically submit every student's paper."
Not all experts are convinced that detection methods are the best use of professors' resources.
"Turnitin.com helps to deter plagiarism if students know you're using it," said Donald McCabe, a professor at Rutgers University who has conducted extensive research about plagiarism. "It discourages students in some cases, while encouraging others to change words more while still plagiarizing. For a lot of students, we're much better off promoting integrity than policing dishonesty."
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