http://www.azstarnet.com/public/dnews/LA0594.html

Web of deceit
New site nabs students who plagiarize from Internet

Friday, 26 November 1999

The Associated Press
John Barrie

BERKELEY, Calif. (AP) - If your idea of working on a college term paper is
point-click-download, John Barrie could be your worst nightmare.
Barrie's new Internet site, www.plagiarism.org, checks submitted material
against millions of online pages, separating the real students from the
pseudo-scholars with the click of a mouse.
His service offers professors an Internet retaliation to sites that deliver
students pre-written papers for a fee.
At plagiarism.org, papers turned in electronically are checked against Web
material using the top 20 search engines and compared with a database of
other manuscripts, including papers from every university licensing the
service.
``It's a very effective way of searching the more than 800 million documents
out on the Internet,'' said Barrie, a doctoral candidate at the University
of California at Berkeley.
The system is intended to detect not only a student who submits a
word-for-word copy of someone else's work, but also students who turn in a
paper composed of bits and pieces of familiar texts.
According to research by Rutgers University Associate Provost Donald McCabe,
incidents of academic dishonesty have increased modestly at U.S. colleges in
the 1990s.
At Northwestern University, ``plagiarism is our most prevalent form of
academic dishonesty,'' said Stephen Fisher, associate provost for
undergraduate education. ``Students rely on unsigned sources on the
Internet. It's a risk to use Internet sources.''
Barrie's entry into the field of cybercheating began when he decided as a
teaching assistant to give his students the real-world experience of peer
review by having them post their work online for classmates to critique.
The project was a striking success. But soon came disturbing rumors that the
papers involved were getting a second life, appearing in other classes under
new 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
300 students in a Berkeley neurobiology class.
Although the students had been warned that their papers would be checked for
originality, 45 - or 15 percent - 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 this spring. It is also being
tested at a number of other schools, and negotiations are under way for a
pilot program in Britain, Barrie said.
Professors who sign up for the service individually pay $20 for the first 30
papers and 50 cents for each additional paper. The charge is $1 per paper
for participating schools.


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