Online Firm Targets Term Paper Plagiarists

A new Internet site that checks material for originality is catching term paper cheaters in a Web of deceit.

The site, Plagiarism.org, checks material against millions of pages online, identifying pseudo-scholars with the click of a mouse.

“It’s a very effective way of searching the more than 800 million documents out on the Internet,” said John Barrie, the UC Berkeley doctoral candidate who came up with the idea.

Barrie’s entry into the detection of cybercheating began as a teaching assistant when he decided to give his students the real-world experience of peer review by having them post their work online for classmates to assess.

The project was a striking success. But soon came rumors that the papers involved were getting a second life, appearing in other classes under different names.

Enlisting the help of eight colleagues, Barrie began working on a way to catch the copycats.

Last spring, the system got a test run on the papers of 320 students in a Berkeley neurobiology class.

Interestingly, although the students had been warned that their papers would be checked for originality, 45 (14%) turned in papers that were less than original.

“They either thought we didn’t have the technology to catch them or they had been getting away with it for such a long time that whatever we did wasn’t going to change that,” Barrie said.

Berkeley has contracted to use the service next spring. It is also being tested at other schools.

Professors who sign up for the service individually pay $20 for a class of 30, and 50 cents for each additional paper. The charge is $1 per paper for campuswide deals.

Plagiarism.org works by registering the class and having students turn in papers electronically. Papers are checked against Web material using the top 20 search engines and are compared to a database of other manuscripts.

The program highlights phrases of eight words or more that match material in the databases.