Web Site Helps Colleges, Schools Ensnare Plagiarists

By making research a matter of a mouse click, the World Wide Web also made plagiarism as easy as cutting and pasting.

But the Web also makes it easier to snare plagiarists, as some Florida colleges, universities and schools are letting their students know.

The University of Central Florida ran more than 19,000 student papers through an online copy-checker during the spring semester alone. The University of Florida in Gainesville signed up in March for the same for-profit service, called TurnItIn.com.

Boca Raton-based Florida Atlantic University will start offering the service to all its professors this summer, after using it in some English and writing classes for a few years. Several Florida community colleges and a group of Florida high-school international baccalaureate programs also have bought licenses to use TurnItIn, according to the company.

Created by University of California researchers, TurnItIn isn't the only online anti-plagiarism service, but university administrators and academic-technology experts say it's seen as a leader. According to company co-founder John Barrie, about 2,500 colleges and universities and 4,000 high schools use it. The service compares students' submissions with Web pages, published material and the company's archive of previous student papers, to the discomfort of some students and educators. Within 24 hours, the service highlights places in which even eight words of the submission match another source, Barrie said.

The company cautions that the reports shouldn't be considered proof of plagiarism, only as just cause for scrutinizing citations. A report might highlight, for instance, a properly footnoted quotation.

Supporters say such services prevent cheaters from prospering and deter others from plagiarizing in the first place.

Surveys have found as many as many of 40 percent of students admit to copying from the Internet without citing sources, according to the Center for Academic Integrity, a group of colleges and schools that contemplates ways to combat cheating.

At UCF, student-rights office director Patricia MacKown says TurnItIn.com helped turn up plagiarism even in the work of a doctoral candidate _ and three undergraduates who simultaneously turned in the same paper to the same class. But some educators say the technology creates a climate of suspicion on campus. "It doesn't promote an environment of trust," says Duke University's Diane Waryold, who runs the Center for Academic Integrity.

Some institutions and students also are unsettled by TurnItIn's practice of expanding its basis for comparisons by keeping an electronic version of every paper it is asked to check _ stripped of personal identifiers, the company says.

TurnItIn's lawyers say the practice doesn't violate academic privacy or intellectual-property laws, pointing to federal copyright laws allowing "fair use" that doesn't diminish a work's marketability. Their argument hasn't been tested in a court.