EVANSTON, Ill. (U-WIRE) — Northwestern University students often stretch themselves into as many activities and classes as possible, and the constant grind of term papers and analytical essays only worsens the stress.
Students could choose to invest the research, time and thought into producing an original composition, or they could fall for the easy solution that is the latest craze for short-cutting college students — Internet plagiarism.
Recently a number of Web sites with papers available for download at the click of a mouse have sprouted up throughout the World Wide Web. These sites offer papers on subject matters ranging from poet John Donne to DNA, and many are free. Those that charge money for the papers require only the use of a credit card before the paper is quickly and confidentially e-mailed to the desperate student. One Web site, www.cheathouse.com, boasts of 9,500 essays in 44 different categories, with 5 million “customers” served.
NU’s Principles Regarding Academic Integrity define plagiarism as “submitting material that in part or whole is not entirely one’s own work without attributing those same portions to their correct source.”
Any student caught plagiarizing is referred to the academic dean, who then decides what course of action to take. Punishments range from lowering the student’s assignment grade to expelling the offender from the university.
But in this new war of technology, professors are not unarmed. To combat the recent wave of Internet plagiarism, companies aimed at plagiarism detection are catching the interest of colleges nationwide. Services such as www.turnitin.com have students electronically submit their papers directly to the Web site, which uses a database to scan each paper for signs of plagiarism. Professors are notified of any suspicious papers. The service varies by school, costing about 50 cents per student per academic year, but some universities are willing to pay in order to better guard against violations of academic integrity.
NU does not yet subscribe to the service, but some people would support the implementation of such a resource.
“It would be great for teaching assistants and professors to be able to investigate a student’s work if they have any questions about it, because the last thing anyone wants to do is falsely accuse,” said Dana Bilsky, an English teaching assistant.
In May, a professor at the University of Virginia accused 122 students of plagiarism in his introductory physics class after he set up a computer detection program and compared papers submitted during the last five terms.
Even without complex computer programs, professors can still find cases of plagiarism by using a search engine to find matching sets of consecutive words in papers under suspicion.
Some indications of possible plagiarism are overly technical vocabulary or simply a change from a student’s normal writing style. Suspicion is also raised when a student uses phrases or terms in his or her paper that were not used in class.
“In a writing-intensive course, it doesn’t take long before you know a student’s writing style,” Bilsky said. “When you see aberrations, you naturally ask questions.”
Most students cite either moral hesitations or the fear of being caught as their main reasons for not wanting to cheat, though many acknowledge that they have seen some form of cheating at Northwestern.
“It’s proof of one’s lack of creativity,” Weinberg freshman Jason Konik said. “I’ve seen many people do it, and shamelessly at that. Granted, cheating is easier than actually thinking, but I couldn’t do it because I wouldn’t be satisfied with my work.”
— The Daily Northwestern’s Web site can be found at www.dailynorthwestern.com.