Redefining Research, Plagiarism

Suppose you were rambling around the Internet and stumbled across a Web site devoted to the works of Euripides, the ancient Greek dramatist. Maybe you’d think this was the obscure hangout of, like, professors or something, exchanging ideas about things written on scrolls.

Well, you would be wrong. You would find typical yet tightly wound college students--burdened with homework, pressed for time--cheating their hearts out with ingenuous amorality. You’d find scholars like Jeremy, whose last name is being withheld to spare him a scowl from his instructor, in deep research.

“SAVE MY LIFE!!!” he yowls across the yawning void of cyberspace, his pathetic plea posted on an electronic bulletin board like a message stuffed in a bottle. “Send me a 1,000 word essay on morality in ‘Medea’ now!! I WILL DO ANYTHING FOR IT. I need it by Sunday.”

And somebody does indeed respond. “Malika21” offers a report on “Medea”--Euripides’ most heavily assigned play--that she assembled from the Internet a semester earlier. The students disappear into the privacy of e-mail, leaving onlookers only to wonder what sort of transaction was taking place in the name of a passing grade.

This sort of exchange is standard dialogue in the Euripides Lecture Hall, which bills itself as a sort of literary cafe set up for intellectual discourse on the works of an ancient dead guy. Instead, it has become a veritable souk of suspect scholarship, swapped back and forth among students like a campus cold virus.

Using the Internet to conjure up the evening’s homework isn’t a novel thing to do any more. To some students, it isn’t even cheating. It has simply evolved into an institution, a pillar of education, a big study group and an endless archive of cut-and-paste essay components.

To a generation coming of age in the opening years of an untamed new era, the ability to easily scoop a little flotsam from the vast oceans of the Internet doesn’t seem nearly as nefarious as pilfering a passage from a library book. Many students seem to almost reflexively embrace a philosophy rooted in the subculture of computer hackers: That all information is, or should be, free for the taking.

The flow of information is so rich and tempting that even many instructors are pinching one another’s syllabuses and lesson plans, says Donald L. McCabe, a Rutgers University professor who studies cheating.

“A lot of faculties don’t even bother to try and stop it,” he says.

McCabe has conducted studies indicating that nearly 70% of students cheated in college, with plagiarism the most frequent offense. Yet McCabe says he failed to catch on to the Internet’s impact, a realization that sank in when, in 1995, he got scores of questionnaires returned from students who had scrawled comments such as: “You should ask about the Internet. That’s where the plagiarism is.”

McCabe will rectify that this spring, when he embarks on another study at 12 universities under the auspices of the Center for Academic Integrity, an ethics consortium based at Duke University. As a prelude to composing questionnaires, he interviewed focus groups of college-bound high school seniors last summer.

“The scary thing was that cheating was no big deal,” he says. “The Internet was just the new way to cheat.”

Jeanne Wilson, director of student judicial affairs at UC Davis, believes the Internet’s vast trove of material has lulled some students into a sense that anything there is fair game, like the buffet table at somebody else’s wedding.

“Whether it’s high-tech or low-tech, it’s still plagiarism if [the original authors] have not been given proper credit,” she says. “It totally defeats the purpose of homework.”

Which is, of course, the whole point.

Line Between Research, Cheating Often Blurred

So much stuff is so endlessly recycled and abundantly accessible that some students are no longer sure what sprang from their cyber-stained brains. Jennifer Lynn Patrick, a classical civilizations student at Ohio University, considers cheating a “major cop-out,” and says she wouldn’t think of passing off someone else’s work as her own.

Yet she breezed into Euripides’ Web site recently, inquiring about whether anybody had any thoughts about the relationship between the suicides of two Euripidean characters. Is that wrong? She’s not sure. But she was miffed when nobody responded.

“The line between researching and cheating is, to me, a very thin one,” says Patrick, 22. “I am constantly terrified that what I am doing with my thesis is not researching but [inadvertently] copying someone else’s stuff.”

Much of the ire of educators is aimed at Web-based commercial operations, such as the Evil House of Cheat or Schoolsucks.com, which offer everything from custom papers that cost hundreds of dollars to mediocre work that won’t raise either eyebrows or grade point averages, but perhaps will earn a passing grade.

“When I first got on the Net, there were only three or four others. Now, I understand there are 180 term paper sites. Quite a few free ones, too,” says Michael von Plato, head of A-1 Termpapers in West Chester, Pa.

Von Plato says selling off-the-rack research is protected by the 1st Amendment. “We’re not selling anything on how to poison the water supply or build an atomic bomb,” he says. “We’re selling papers about Hamlet’s relationship with his mother.”

His business was among eight sued by Boston University in a case watched closely by colleges. A federal judge threw it out in December, ruling that the school couldn’t allege that term-paper peddling was tantamount to organized-crime racketeering. BU spokesman Kevin Carleton says lawyers are revamping the suit for state court.

Massachusetts, along with California, is among 17 states that have laws against selling term papers, though enforcement ranges from spotty to nonexistent. Only Texas has a law that makes specific reference to the Internet, even though studies show more than 90% of students have access to it.

UC Davis posts on its Web site case histories of people caught cheating, like sticking the head of an enemy on a stake as a warning to others. Fifty students were suspended last year, Wilson says, about 5% of the total caught in some form of academic misconduct. She didn’t know how many used the Internet to cheat.

Other schools are less vigilant. A 1996 survey found that more than 90% of universities reported less than 20 instances each of academic misconduct a year--a sign more of terrible enforcement than incidence of cheating, Wilson says.

The forces of ethics lost one of their most implacable crusaders last year. Anthony Krier, a reference librarian at Franklin Pierce College in Rindge, N.H., spent years monitoring the explosion of Internet cheat sites, and acted as a clearinghouse for professors who suspected plagiarism. When the requests for his sleuthing reached an overwhelming 4,000, however, he says he had to quit.

“Nobody teaches ethics any more,” says Krier, who says the topic depresses him. “College diplomas have turned into a commodity.”

But as the Euripides site shows, students don’t need term paper factories to find prefab reports. They only need each other.

Not-So-Faithful, Faithful Converge

The site is only a tiny part of a lavish virtual community known as the Jolly Roger, which was created by Elliott McGucken, a physics professor at Elon College in Burlington, N.C. An aspiring writer himself, he built a richly detailed maze of discussion boards and chat rooms devoted to the classic works of Western culture.

McGucken envisioned the site purely as a gathering place for literature lovers, not corner-cutting college kids, and he’s been forced to create some password-protected parallel rooms for the true aficionados.

Yet he’s stoic about the invasion of the term-paper trollers. On one hand, the trafficking at least shows that teachers are still assigning the Western works he holds dear.

On the other? “Not everyone is reading them,” he laments.

Euripides is one of the giants of ancient Greek culture. “Medea,” his most famous play, is about an enchantress who helps Jason find the Golden Fleece, becomes his lover, then kills their kids when he fools around.

Despite this intriguingly lurid plot, many translations are punishing to read. Some cyber-surfing students show no evidence of having glanced at the play, let alone made it to class much. “I need help!!!” bleats one. “What are the main themes in ‘Medea’ and how do I go about writing an essay about them!”

Another student obviously gave the topic some thought, but didn’t want to do the heavy lifting on his hypothesis.

“I want to write about how you can’t really get much historical info from this play, but that you can get some idea about the political structure, since Euripides was obviously a male Susan B. Anthony radical type propagandist,” he writes. “Please e-mail me an essay on this stuff if you have one around, and if I get it by 3 a.m., I’ll send you a $100 bill if I use it. Thanks.”

This student, who asked to be identified only as Joey, said in an interview that he was on a scholarship at a prestigious Jesuit university, where he was studying history, because that was a good springboard to law school. The difference between research and cheating, he says, is “getting caught.”

He says the key to passing off a pieced-together term paper is concocting a bogus but authoritative-sounding bibliography. “The Romans copied the Greeks, so why shouldn’t we copy the geeks? Everybody does it,” Joey says.

Still, nobody sent him a report on “Medea” in time for his deadline.

“I wrote the damn thing myself that night and earned a fat B minus,” he says.

Rutgers’ McCabe says students seem to cheat most often on things that matter less to their livelihoods, which is why a premed scholar is perhaps more likely to fake his way through a Euripides essay than a spleen removal exam.

Yet students aren’t the only guilty parties. McCabe says many instructors use exams supplied by textbook companies without credit. Sally Cole, head of the Center for Academic Integrity, says professors aren’t always scrupulous about citing lecture sources.

And Duke University, the headquarters of the center, for years used a plagiarism code that turned out to have been an uncredited copy of some other code, says David Hoekema, a philosophy professor at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich.

Hoekema, who uncovered what Duke said was an honest oversight while researching a book about campus morality, doesn’t blame the Internet for increasing cheating--just simplifying it. “It’s easier to find material that your professor might not find,” he says.

The Internet has raised to an art form an old technique: reading what’s been written about a work rather than reading the thing itself. Before he graduated last year, Sean Cowley had to write a paper about “Ulysses,” the challenging novel by James Joyce. But Cowley didn’t read the book, because he didn’t have to.

“I went on the Internet. I synthesized everything I found into a general concept,” says Cowley, 23, a graduate of the State University of New York near Rochester. “I just got the chapter synopses and spun it out. I used a lot of information that wasn’t mine just to get by.”

Cowley, now an English teacher at Nogales High School in La Puente, says the Internet is a fine research tool for his students--if they credit their sources and draw their own conclusions. “I see the Internet as sort of like an encyclopedia,” he says.

Some students say they are more apt to regurgitate found material if the teacher failed to engage their interest. Last year, Malika Carter had a boring class and a boring assignment to slog through: what else--”Medea.” She found a fully annotated text on the Internet and used it to whip up a report. She got a B.

Carter, a student at Cleveland’s Cuyahoga Community College, has a 3.2 GPA and her eye on a scholarship to a local four-year college. She wants to be an English teacher, and doesn’t think fusing together Internet matter compromises her education at all. If she had to, she says, she could pop out a “Medea” report in no time.

Which is what she did when she stopped by the Euripides page and saw the plaintive cry of Jeremy, the desperate student. She had her old “Medea” report on her computer, and she e-mailed it to him. His effusive thanks was payment enough.

“A couple of clicks and that was it,” she says.

Times researcher John Beckham contributed to this story.