Plagiarism on the Internet

Internet plagiarism poses
growing concern for Iowa educators

February 23, 2004

DES MOINES, Iowa--The Internet has made a wealth of information available to anybody with access to a computer, granting Iowa students new opportunities for research as well as new opportunities to cheat.

As the Internet has become more commonplace, educators in Iowa and across the country have growing concerns about students plagiarizing work from the Internet.

Ann Hanigan-Kotz, an English teacher at Waukee High School who has been teaching for 16 years, recently attended a conference of the National Council of Teachers of English in San Francisco.

"I went to a specific section on cheating and there were around 60 English teachers from across the United States in that one session enraged about the amount of cheating that's going on in high schools and the fact that it's all coming off of the Internet now," Hanigan-Kotz said.

Creston High School English teacher Lois Rose, who has been teaching for 23 years, said the Internet has made the problem of plagiarism more prevalent.

"It's more tempting because the information is so much more accessible and they can draw from a number of different sources," Rose said. "It takes time to look up a book, and it's easier to use a search engine to access information."

Web sites such as schoolsucks.com, a1-termpaper.com and cheathouse.com offer free essays. Other Web sites offer essays for sale. Students can download an entire paper and hand it in as their own. Another method of plagiarism is to cut and paste information from multiple sources into an essay and turn it in.

"Students like to copy and paste," Heidi Durbin, an English teacher at Grinnell High School who has been teaching for 13 years, said. "They seem to think that a lot of copying and pasting makes it their own stuff."

Teachers can often spot plagiarism because they are already familiar with their student's writing skills. A sudden change in writing style is reason for suspicion, Hanigan-Kotz said. But teachers must prove students have plagiarized before accusing or penalizing them.

While the Internet is the tool that many students use to plagiarize, it is also the tool many teachers use to catch plagiarizers. There are a number of free Web sites designed to search for key phrases from potentially plagiarized documents.

There are also companies that offer subscription services to educational institutions interested in paying to end Internet plagiarism within the institution. Hanigan-Kotz said Waukee High School has looked into one such service, offered by a company named Turn It In.

"What happens is that the students will write a paper and then they have to submit it electronically to the company," Hanigan-Kotz said. "The company runs it through their search engines then sends a report back to me. If any student has written anything that can be found someplace else, the paper will have highlighted passages of what it is that is not their own work. They search not only all the Internet sites, but they also keep track of all the papers that have been submitted from your school and everybody else's schools that are involved."

Hanigan-Kotz said the service would cost Waukee High School about $800 per year.

"It would be a very good thing, but I also on the other end think about how many books $800 would buy," Hanigan-Kotz said.

Sue Astley, who has been a professor of psychology at Cornell College for 22 years, said that despite the free tools available to catch plagiarizers, it is still difficult. Astley said she has often suspected plagiarism, but has been unable to find the source.

Many teachers combat the problem of plagiarism by making it difficult for students to plagiarize in the first place. Hanigan-Kotz and Durbin both said they try to make their essay assignments unique and specific. This makes it almost impossible for students to get on the Internet and find a paper meeting all of the expectations. Rose and Astley both have their students turn in material that shows the process the student used to write the paper.

"I have them do developmental work before I have them hand in the paper, so I see their progress along the way," Astley said. "I mostly do it just because it's a better way to teach the students how to write, but a good side effect is that I think it minimizes plagiarism."

Durbin, Astley, Hanigan-Kotz and Rose all said the benefits the Internet offers to education far outweigh the harm. However, Hanigan-Kotz said the worries about plagiarism caused by the Internet can be nerve-wracking.

"It is getting frustrating," Hanigan-Kotz said. "I'm getting tired of trying to be smarter than they are. I tell them all the time...I know stuff and have seen stuff from students that you at this point in time haven't even thought of."