Professor Fights Web Plagiarists With Web

Paul Chwelos teaches information systems at UC Irvine’s Graduate School of Management, so he knows better than anyone the power of the Internet. And not just the way it’s affecting businesses, but the way it affects his students.

“It certainly gives them the ability to do better research, but it makes it easier to cheat,” he said. “I think it’s naive to think the Internet has given such access to information and that it doesn’t increase cheating as well.”

So Chwelos last month joined a growing number of professors who are using the Internet to fight back. He ran his MBA students’ term papers through a Web site that scans millions of Internet pages and a backlog of college papers to test for plagiarism. Some day, programs such as plagiarism.org, the one Chwelos used, could be as much a fact of college life as bad dorm food.

“I think it’s going to be the wave of the future,” said Jeanne Wilson, director of Student Judicial Affairs at UC Davis and president of the Center for Academic Integrity. “If students think we don’t enforce our standards, then the unintended message that we convey is that we aren’t serious about those standards, and if they’re not important to us, why should they be important to students?”

The great threat of the Web to academic integrity is how easy plagiarism becomes. By going online, students can point and click their way through technical journals, corporate white papers and work students throughout the world have posted on the Web, seamlessly cutting and pasting what they need into a term paper, if not copying the entire piece.

Term-paper mills also become easier to use. No longer do students have to wade through a catalog to order the paper and wait until it comes in the mail or even walk into a shop. Term paper companies on the Web give their work away, relying on advertising for their profits. A student goes to a site such as Schoolsucks.com, downloads the paper, and, instead of a dizzying two nights writing on no sleep, it’s party time.

“The thing is that it can be done in complete secrecy,” said Lawrence Hinman, director of the Values Institute at the University of San Diego, “so it’s not like asking someone for a term paper or anything like that. You can do it alone in your room at 2 a.m. and have a finished paper for your 7:30 class the next morning.”

Educators See Web of Deceit Expanding

No one is sure how much plagiarizing goes on, but professors and administrators say it is on the rise, and they blame it on the Internet. At UC Berkeley, reported cases of academic dishonesty have increased 112% since 1995, and about 35% of those have been linked to plagiarism.

A neurobiology professor there told his 320 students in advance that he would submit their papers to plagiarism.org. He still found that 45 of them had not used original work. “That is so bare-bones egotistical to think it wouldn’t be caught,” said Doug Zuidema, the assistant director of the Berkeley student conduct office. “That probably more than anything shows the extent academic integrity at the student level is at a challengeable level.”

Although it is not alone, plagiarism.org has received the most interest in the academic world as an anti-cheating device. The company is the brainchild of John Barrie, a doctoral student in biophysics at Berkeley.

About five years ago, when the World Wide Web was just starting to streak from computer geek tool to everyday utility, Barrie set up Web sites for the classes where he was a teaching assistant. Besides posting notes and interactive assignments, he placed the students’ papers on the Web.

The first year, he received positive feedback from the students. The second year the feedback was quite different: This time, students told him, people were taking papers off the site and submitting them as their own work in other classes. Others were selling the papers.

“I was blindsided,” Barrie said. ‘I had no idea that was going to occur.”

Fighting Fire With a Firewall

He gathered a team of friends and, using their scientific expertise, created plagiarism.org. First, Barrie and his partners created a huge data bank that includes the inventory from the free term-paper mills. Once a teacher submits a student paper to plagiarism.org for checking, it too is scooped into the database. That makes it tougher for a New York University student to pass off the paper his friend wrote for a class at Cal State Fullerton--as long as both schools use plagiarism.org.

In addition, plagiarism.org has developed a Web crawler that searches the Internet for phrases that match those in the paper.

The service costs $20 a course, and Barrie doesn’t see it as much of a moneymaker. The bucks, he says, are in using the technology to scour the Web for pirated music and videos, and Barrie has been talking to Silicon Valley venture capitalists.

The service has attracted a growing number of users. UC Davis is trying it on six English classes. St. Mary’s College, a Catholic liberal arts school in Northern California, is using it for a four-semester required great books program. In West Virginia, the University of Charleston is going to use a similar service, IntegriGuard, to make sure students aren’t passing around their freshman English papers.

If plagiarism.org continues to pan out at UC Berkeley, the school hopes to sign a contract making it available to every professor on campus and even students. Zuidema sees it “as an advanced form of spell-check. We’d like to see it used as a tool that allows students to check their own work and works as a strong preventive measure, so students who are thinking of taking the easy way out . . . know they can be caught.”

Donald L. McCabe, a national plagiarism expert at Rutgers University in New Jersey, said the problem will worsen as current high school and middle school students who can’t remember a world without the Internet go to college.

“The biggest issue is the students don’t know what’s public information,” he said. “Their attitude is ‘It’s on the Internet, so it’s public information, and we don’t have to cite it.’ ” McCabe feels more efforts need to go into teaching students not to cheat, rather than catching them afterward. He has found that schools with strong honor codes have lower incidents of cheating.

Hinman says another solution is for professors to require students to turn in an outline, then a bibliography and then a rough draft before their final paper, although he admitted this might be tough for teachers of large lecture classes.

Administrators and professors said the honest students feel plagiarism.org protects their hard work. Sean Dyer, a student in Chwelos’ class, said he didn’t hear any opposition. “I think people were more careful, especially using even small phrases or even words from sources they had picked,” he said. “They made sure they had changed every single word or included quotation marks.”

One dissenting opinion has come from the student newspaper at Stanford, which has an honor code. An editorial last month said it would “harm the relationship between students and teachers” and that clever students could easily modify work to outsmart plagiarism.org’s search algorithm.

An English professor at UCI has joined Chwelos as the campus pioneers in the use of plagiarism.org. Like the UC Berkeley professor, Chwelos told his students at the beginning the semester to be prepared for having their papers checked for plagiarism. Unlike the UC Berkeley professor, when he got the papers back, no one had plagiarized.

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This story has been edited to reflect a correction to the original published text. The University of Charleston is in West Virginia, not Virginia.

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