Essay Cheat

Palm Beach Post (Florida) June 17, 2007 Sunday FINAL EDITION PROFESSORS TAKE SEARCH FOR PLAGIARISM TO WEB By KIMBERLY MILLER Palm Beach Post Staff Writer A SECTION; Pg. 1A 1186 words Florida's public universities now spend more than $80,000 a year on catching cheaters using plagiarism-identifying Internet subscriptions. But in an age of essayists-for-hire Web sites such as Affordabletermpapers.com -- now open Sundays! -- professors say they value the online detection services as much as Sherlock Holmes values his magnifying glass. In fact, when Florida State University recently proposed canceling its annual $20,400 subscription to plagiarism detector Turnitin.com, professors led an uprising that cowed administrators into signing up for another year. "The ones who use it screamed very loudly when I suggested that it cost too much," said Susann Rudasill, FSU associate director for academic and professional programs. While Turnitin.com isn't new to the education scene, more and more suspicious faculty members are using it to screen papers that can be checked for cheating against all Internet content and every other term paper ever submitted to the service. Foiled are fraternities whose term paper archives have helped decades of members through Psychology 101. Siblings can no longer share their work. And essay services, such as Cheathouse.com, which charges $14.95 for a year's worth of reports, don't seem like such a bargain anymore. At Palm Beach Atlantic University, a private Christian school in West Palm Beach, one professor using Turnitin.com caught a student who handed in the same report he had written in high school. At Florida Atlantic University, history professor Ken Osgood gave an F to a student who had copied her paper on the Gulf of Tonkin resolution from Wikipedia.com. When he alerted the student via e-mail to Turnitin.com's findings, he never heard from her again. And what confounds professors the most is that despite repeated warnings and explanations of how Turnitin.com works, students still plagiarize. "A lot of them will try to get away with it. They have this sense of entitlement and will challenge you," Osgood said. "But this is the smoking gun. This offers indisputable evidence. This has no shades of gray in it." Florida's colleges and universities began signing up for online plagiarism detection services about three years ago, although some, such as Palm Beach Atlantic, are just now subscribing to a service. Turnitin.com is the most popular program in the state with public universities, with all but the University of South Florida paying the 85-cent-per-student fee to receive unlimited use of the product. USF uses an alternate service called Safe Assignment, which charged the school $10,525 this year. John Barrie, founder and CEO of Turnitin.com, says the program handles an average of 100,000 student papers every day. "Our system never fails," he boasts. Not that people aren't trying to crack it. Affordabletermpapers.com, which offers flexible payment plans for its $9.95 per-page charge, claims it fools plagiarism detection services because each paper is written individually upon request by an essayist employed by the service. In an emergency, these writers can churn out a paper in 90 minutes, but that will cost you $24.95 per page. Barrie, whose specialty at the University of California-Berkeley was pattern recognition, refutes the term-paper mill's claim that students won't get caught. "If you're going to deal with a company that will take your money to help you cheat, it's probably not beyond them to sell the paper to multiple students," Barrie said. Turnitin.com works like this: The student or teacher uploads the term paper directly into Turnitin.com's Web site, where the teacher has an account set up. Computers, using pattern-matching technology, compare the paper to a database of Internet information, books, magazines and other student papers. The teacher logs into his or her account and retrieves the paper along with an originality report that highlights areas of text that may have been copied. The report includes links to the copied Web sites or other reference sources. Of course, teachers still must use judgment when grading these papers because quotations, or cited sources, will show up as matching another document. "It doesn't take all the work away from you," said PBAU Professor Jenifer Elmore, who caught the student handing in his high school research paper. Students caught cheating face different disciplinary actions. At FAU, many professors may allow a student to rewrite a paper if it's found to be plagiarized. Professors also can send a complaint to the administration on the first offense, and it will go in the student's permanent record. On the second offense, the dean of the college reviews the case and will recommend suspension or expulsion. Before services such as Turnitin.com, professors relied on their memories, gut instincts and teaching assistants to sniff out cheaters. When FAU Professor Ken Osgood was an assistant at the University of California-Santa Barbara, he and other teaching assistants would work together to compare papers from different sections of one course. It was archaic, Osgood said, and took a lot of time. Now with Turnitin.com, Osgood can check papers from a class of 80 students in about four minutes. FAU pays about $15,855 a year for its subscription to Turnitin.com. "We're faced with a cultural phenomenon where learning is not taking place for its own sake," Osgood said. "Some students try to get through with as little thinking as possible." Marsha Shapiro Rose, an FAU sociology professor, said cheaters believe plagiarism falls under the "11th commandment" -- thou shall not get caught. "So many students become defensive, like, 'How dare you catch me,'" said Rose, who believes an increase in plagiarism reflects the ethics and morals that students see around them. "They see unethical practices every day in our government, in our president, in our public servants." And although Rose likes Turnitin.com, she said it can set up a tense relationship between teacher and student. Professors, she said, don't want to be policemen. "It can become adversarial, and that's not why most of us went into this business," Rose said. kimberly_miller@pbpost.com Catching the cheaters Florida's university professors use the plagiarism detection service Turnitin.com to check if research papers and essays are copied from the Internet. The international service, based in California, receives an average of 100,000 papers each day and costs schools 85 cents per student annually. Here's how it works: 1 Teachers or students electronically upload essays into the Turnitin.com system through its Web site. 2 Using pattern-matching technology, the company's servers search the Internet, other student papers that were previously submitted, and research materials, looking for similar or exact copies of text. 3 Teachers pull the essays off Turnitin.com's Web site with color-coded `originality reports' which show how much of the paper is copied from another source. Copied items, which may include legitimate quotes or cited articles, are linked to the Web site where the material was copied. 4 Teachers review the copied items and decide whether plagiarism occurred. Source: Turnitin.com June 20, 2007 ENGLISH NOTES: Ran all editions. Info box at end of text. Newspaper Copyright 2007 The Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc. All Rights Reserved