At a time when the proliferation of online sources has made plagiarism easier than ever before, one Dartmouth professor has turned to the internet himself to deter potential cheaters.
Allan Stam, who teaches international relations in the government department, plans to use a free online service -- turnitin.com -- to check student papers for plagiarized material.
Papers can be uploaded to the website, which will within 24 hours return an edited copy indicating how closely written sections correspond with information found throughout the internet and in an extensive database of submitted materials.
"It's really pretty astonishing," said Stam, who will be using the service to check all papers he receives during the term.
Despite the effectiveness of the website, which can match even individual phrases from papers with their sources, Stam said he is not motivated by any particular suspicion of students' honesty.
"If I just wanted to catch people, I wouldn't have said anything about it," he said, adding that he had informed his students of his plans to use the website on the first day of classes.
Instead, Stam said, the service is intended "to deter people who might be tempted through stress or time constraints" to plagiarize, and also to help prevent inadvertent plagiarism, which he said "almost every student" has done at least once during his or her academic career.
Stam will hardly be the first professor to use turniton.com in his classes. Other teachers across the country have turned to that and other similar websites to detect plagiarism among their own students.
John Barrie, the founder of turnitin.com, told the School Library Journal that he has been interviewed by newspapers at least thirty timess, and that there has been a sharp increase in demand for his product. Barrie claims that over 1,200 high schools around the world are currently using turnitin.com.
Barrie also claims that 70 percent of his reported cheating incidents are Internet-based. Another 25 percent came from "swapped" papers, such as a friend lending a paper to another friend. The last five percent came from other sources, such as papers purchased from online cheating services.
The greatest impact of these new copyright infringement detection programs was felt last year at the University of Virginia when a program designed by UVA physics professor Lou Bloomfield triggered the biggest plagiarism investigation in the university's history.
Over 120 students or recent graduates were under suspicion of plagiarism in Bloomfield's popular introductory class.
Bloomfield's program caught duplicated phrases by scanning papers for shared phrases of at least six words. When Bloomfield later checked the papers by hand, he found that some of the term papers had been entirely copied from someone else.
Professor Ronald Green, who heads the College's Ethics Institute, said that sites such as turnitin.com have troubling implications for student-faculty relationships.
While he agreed that the use of the service would be justified "where there's good reason to suspect a student's honesty," Green contended that using the website to check papers indiscriminately impinges upon the mutual trust that underlies the College's honor code.
"It strikes me as sending out a generalized message of distrust that does not encourage respect for student integrity," he said. "The service should only be used as a backup to a professor's own judgment."
Some professors, who similarly believe a fair amount of plagiarism takes place regularly, said they personally agree with using such sites.
"Once a quarter, there is a paper that is astonishingly well-written," said David Kang, also a professor in the government department. "At times, it's pretty clear that the writing is different from the student's previous work, but I've generally just not pursued it because I had no idea how to actually show that."
Kang, who is aware of sites such as turnitin.com, decided against using them, however.
"I feel that I get to know my students well enough that unless the plagiarism is egregious, I'm not going to follow it up," he said.
Stam maintained that the ease of finding online material -- which can be copied and pasted with little cost in time, would take hours for a professor to locate -- has increased the incentive for students to plagiarize, especially in classes with large enrollments.
"I have a general sense that in any college classroom over 10 students there is a reasonable likelihood that they will take things off the web" or use fraternity files, Stam said.
In fact, one of the motivations for Stam's use of the service came in Spring term 2000, when dozens of students in Professor Rex Dwyer's computer science course were accused of cheating. The resulting crisis -- which ended only when the College intervened and dropped all charges -- was due to the fact that the cheating itself was "impossible to prove," according to Stam, who arrived at Dartmouth the following autumn.
Much of the cheating that did take place "was probably inadvertent," he said, hoping that turnitin.com would provide professors with the additional tools necessary to distinguish deliberate plagiarism from the lesser crime of mere carelessness or negligence in citing sources.
Students who spoke to The Dartmouth generally agreed that professors are within their rights to use such websites.
Frank Reynolds '02, a government major, said such websites "are completely valid ... it's a useful way to find out where people are getting ideas from."
"If other students are able to use [turnitin.com] beforehand then I don't see it as involving any mistrust," said Tom Denniston '02, a government major and a student in one of Stam's seminar courses. "I think it's reasonable unless there's a danger that you're somehow going to accuse people falsely."
But Green argued that false identifications of plagiarism are precisely what such services are likely to return.
"This kind of machine-aided test can be very misleading and can create false positives and concerns that are inappropriate," he said. "The fundamental rule should be teaching students to do their own work, and trusting others in the academic community to do so."
For his part, Stam said he encouraged members of his class to use the website themselves, providing them with an opportunity to be doubly certain no citations are omitted.
"I think the likelihood of anyone being found cheating ... will be very low," he said. "If it all works out, no papers will come back indicating that anything has been written without attribution."
