Using someone else's term paper and claiming it as your own is not new for
college students. Before the advent of the Internet, papers were locally
produced and sold. Then posters advertised term paper services on real cork and
wood bulletin boards. When 800 phone numbers appeared, the term paper business
could expand across the country. But it wasn't until the Internet got under way
that the term paper business really took off.
Today
Now hundreds of sites offer term papers and even masters and doctoral
dissertations. The student can get a paper on almost any subject and get it for
immediate download. Papers can be downloaded for free, or for exchanging one of
yours for one of theirs (one imagines a plagiarized paper endlessly cycling
through the Internet), or so much per page for custom work, typically around
$10 a page. Many states have outlawed this practice but sites get around the
law by stating that they offer papers for research purposes only and they
require the student to sign a waver stating that she won't submit the paper as
her own.
What's wrong with any of this?
The faculty feels that many students think that ideals like honesty and
integrity have little to do with the "real" world or their reasons
for going to college. Teachers are concerned that students who plagiarize don't
develop their abilities to analyze or synthesize information and present it
clearly and effectively.
The faculty fights back
Teachers use several methods to curb plagiarism. One technique is to create
interim projects which link to the main term paper. Another is to assign a
topic that is impossible to find on the Internet, for example, the history, or
psychology, of anthropology of the very class they are taking. Even a paper
from the previous semester won't work because each class is unique. A third
method is to require the student to write three different beginnings to her
paper.
There are some sophisticated technical resources that faculty use to spot
Internet papers. The first is a program sold by Glatt Plagiarism Services. It
removes every fifth word in a student's paper and then the student fills in the
blanks. This is based on an old technique developed in the fifties. It is quite
reliable but cumbersome and slow. A better option is to use the Internet
itself. For example an on line service called "ithenticate" compares
submitted papers to a huge data base. Eve 2 Essay Verification is a search
engine that claims to find 80% to 90% of plagiarized material. Word Check
Systems is another search engine. As the number of sites on the Internet
explodes, these engines will need to get more and more powerful, but right now
student beware.