Plagiarism has always existed, some say since the birth of formal education. But the Internet has made the temptation to steal words much harder to resist.
Faculty say some students create entire papers using a patchwork of paragraphs from different sources without giving the original author credit for the words or ideas.
Some students cut corners with research papers because they feel the pressure to earn top grades; other students do it to keep up with their classmates.
Still others do not see the crime in lifting a few lines of someone else's work.
In a 2000-01 survey, more than half of 4,500 high school students said they had used sentences from Internet sources without citing them, according to Rutgers University professor Donald McCabe. Of those students, about a third said they cheated because they "didn't study" or they were "lazy."
Whatever the motivation, if students are plagiarizing, they are not learning, said Dimitri Keriotis, an English professor at Modesto Junior College in California.
"I hate to feel that I'm a writing cop, but at the same time, the student (who plagiarizes) should not be graded equally as someone who has done original work," he said.
Faculty now have access to anti-plagiarism technology that they hope will deter students from taking the risk — a risk that could result in failing grades, or, in extreme cases, expulsion.
Modesto Junior College and California State University, Stanislaus, have started training faculty to use Turnitin.com, a computer program that matches material in student papers to articles, books and information on Web sites. Some professors have students submit their papers to Turnitin.com before handing them in to be graded.
Turnitin.com software is keen enough to detect the origins of passages, even if some of the words have been changed. Of the 10,000 papers submitted to Turnitin.com from around the world every day, about 30 percent have some degree of plagiarism.
More than arming instructors with a tool to catch cheaters, it gives students a chance to check their work before they submit it for a grade, faculty said.
John Barrie, who founded Turnitin, said, "As a society, we had better be concerned that we could be exposing ourselves to a whole generation of students who have a shaky ethical foundation and who don't have the critical thinking skills to succeed."
In January, the Georgia Institute of Technology began investigating 186 cases of students accused of recycling assignments in two computer programming classes. Last year the University of Virginia had 157 cases of plagiarism from one physics class.
Most — if not all — schools and universities have policies or honor codes prohibiting plagiarism and cheating, but it is professors and teachers who usually determine the discipline.
Not all students understand the severity of plagiarizing.
One student who admitted to plagiarizing filed a petition to get his failing grade reversed, said Wilma McLeod, Modesto Junior College vice president of student services. McLeod plans to stand behind the professor, but that's not always the case at every school.
In Kansas, high school teacher Christine Pelton came under fire from parents for failing 28 students for an assignment in which they copied from the Internet. Turnitin.com exposed the cheating.
But the school board succumbed to parental pressure, and Pelton resigned.
Not all plagiarism involves copying from published sources. Sometimes work is traded or sold among students.
The business of selling and recycling term papers is hardly new. Before the Internet, term papers were sold through ads in student publications. Some fraternities and sororities keep files of recycled term papers.
In the past five years, the online cheating industry has grown and made it very simple to find and buy papers.
"The proliferation of term paper mills is incredible," said Laura Boyer, a Stanislaus State reference librarian. "There are literally hundreds. They are getting very specific. Here we are talking about plagiarism, and there's a site that has term papers on ethics."
But another irony of online cheating is that most of what is on the Internet is not worth buying or stealing, said Stanislaus State English professor Renny Christopher.
In searching cheat sites, most papers that Christopher found had stale ideas and poor grammar, she said. She found a paper on Ernest Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea," but the paper listed the author as "John Hemingway."
"This is a paper not worth grading," she said.
Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service