Cyber cheating: UUP panel discusses use and abuse of Internet by students

Plagiarism is not a new concept, but the avenues of the Internet seem to have opened more routes to literary theft than the Interstate highway did for travelers. Web sites that sell students completed research papers are proliferating and becoming a serious concern among University faculty.

Deflecting and detecting plagiarism was one of the online learning topics addressed by a panel of faculty and technology gurus during the union’s 2001 Fall Delegate Assembly (DA). Phillip Smith, UUP’s statewide vice president for academics, said the panel was created because faculty are interested in evolving technology issues, and the union has many members who are experts in this field.

Plagiarism is garnering heavy attention on campuses and among education newspaper reporters.

“One of my colleagues came to me and said that 25 percent of students in just one class have pulled papers off the Internet,” said panelist Thomas Judd, a UUPer and a professor of history at SUNY Oswego. “There are online paper mills where students can get a term paper for a fee, and they can ask that papers be written at a certain level.” B students, for instance, do not want to hand in an A paper; that would be too obvious.

The panelists, who included traditional and online faculty members, spoke to a standing-room-only crowd at the academic issues session of the DA. Participants were provided with a resource booklet put together by UUP’s Research Department, including a plethora of articles that have been written recently in academic and mainstream press about the rise of plagiarism. Recent articles from The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education and Educause explore the rise in term paper mills and lax attitudes among students about what constitutes plagiarism. Some consider the Internet general public information. All of the articles serve as alarms to wake up faculty to the large numbers of students being caught cheating across the country.

Of note in the UUP booklet is information about how faculty can catch plagiarists by using the same technology accessed by students. Faculty can plug key words contained in the paper into an Internet search engine, or a meta-search engine, in order to be led to the source information for the paper in question. Unique phrases will help narrow the search.

Faculty can also use a number of new Web sites that will check papers; some charge a fee. These programs use techniques to compare the paper with a database of papers collected from term paper mills and other sources. Examples are Turnitin.com and EVE2, an essay verification engine.

Some colleges, like SUNY Oneonta, are purchasing anti-plagiarism software. James Greenberg, a UUP member and director of the Teaching, Learning and Technology Center at Oneonta, said the software checks papers to see if all or part has been taken from another document. For a school the size of Oneonta — 5,000 students — the cost is $3,310 per year, Greenberg said.

There are also preemptive ideas faculty can use to combat plagiarism. Following the panel discussion, Judd listed a simple primer of ideas faculty might follow. First, he said, faculty need to clearly define plagiarism to every student in every class. Some students think if information is not copyrighted, it is OK to use. Some think it is not actually plagiarism if they simply fail to cite their sources. Some consider anything on the Internet public information.

Judd also suggests that faculty make assignments very specific to the course. A paper on, say, Thomas Edison, would be easy to find on Internet paper mills because it is a broad topic. In a class on Europe since 1945, Judd recently assigned a paper asking students to examine the position of President George W. Bush on issues in conflict with positions taken by the European Union. Missile defense would be one example.

He also thinks faculty should require an annotated bibliography; this forces the student to describe what the source book is about. The strongest deterrent to plagiarism, Judd said, is to make the assignment a process, so that the student has to hand in a sequence of paperwork over a period of time. The order would be: topic, thesis statement, bibliography, outline, rough draft and final copy.

Judd said the timing of the UUP panel discussion was just right. “Everyone is really concerned about plagiarism,” he said. “Even the student newspaper here had an article on it this week!”

Panelist Vincent Aceto, a professor of information science at SUNY Albany, suggested that students can also be schooled in how to use the Internet in a healthy way. While the Internet offers places for one-stop-cheating, it also offers some credible research resources. Faculty can introduce students to reliable search engines, such as google.com, rather than the more commonly used yahoo.com, which is actually a directory, he said.

Aceto, a UUP member, also suggested that when faculty assign a research paper, they invite a librarian to help guide students through the process. He reminded the UUP delegates that all materials in a library have been assessed and approved, unlike the Internet, where often anything goes.

Janet Nepkie, chair of UUP’s newly renamed Technology and Intellectual Property Issues Committee and a professor of music at Oneonta, said: “It has never been this easy to plagiarize a paper and to remain potentially undetected.”

She did issue a word of caution about using software to screen papers for plagiarism. Some companies require that the screened papers be added to their database and Nepkie worries this may violate students’ copyright or privacy rights.

— Liza Frenette